Old Legs Tour Angola 2024 – days 40 & 41 (to be honest, we aren’t sure anymore, could be 41 & 42…anyway, it’s a lot)

Like the waterholes teeming with game, this Park resort boasts every possible species of tourist – the well-heeled Swiss banker and his little family of Swatches, the German businessmen precisely turned out in safari camo, the Japanese clique of happy snappers, and the tall  Dutch trader sporting big teeth and designer bush jacket. Add a bunch of backpackers wearing worn-out T-shirts and board shorts, and a sprinkling of grubby Zimbos, unshaven, filthy and smelling like they’d just bathed in one of the waterholes, and you get a pretty good idea of Okaukuejo.  (Actually, Ali would have so bathed in the waterhole, had he not been stopped in his tracks by a single warning glance from Linda.  These Watermeyer kids, they never learn.)

Our campsite was jam-packed and although we had nice clean ablutions that we didn’t have to dig ourselves, electricity and a flat surface for the tents, it failed to deliver the authentic camping vibe. Too many people, lights, and dirt rather than sand or grass, to add to the layers of ingrained grime we have collected in the past 7 weeks – grime that will take more than piping hot water, scrubbing brush, and reddened skin to fully remove.

At the night before we had decided that the next day, whilst the rest would take Christoper and the white truck East through the park to the Von Lindequist gate, Linda and Adam would exit Etosha at the South gate (Anderson Gate) and drive the 350-odd km to Tsumeb to fix the bike trailer, whose spring has now fully collapsed.

 The drive from Etosha to Tsumeb was a journey back into civilization, a bit of a shock to the system after weeks of being in remote places where there is no traffic or people. A constant stream of 4x4s drove nose to tail heading toward Etosha. For most of these intrepid explorers, this is their “road less-travelled”, a stark contrast to the ones we have enjoyed these past 6 weeks, but they will be rewarded by the incredible spectacle of wildlife that only an extraordinary place like Etosha can deliver.

To fix something broken is Adam’s idea of heaven. For most of the tour, there have been a lot of “cooks in the kitchen”- all vying for the opportunity to wield a spanner, drill, or riveting gun. At last, it was Adam’s turn and in Tsumeb he found Frank and Xander, father and son owners of Executive Motors, who are also Landrover enthusiasts and therefore by definition, very good people.

A quick diagnosis confirmed that the problem was indeed the Toyota spring that had snapped under the pressure of leaving tar roads. The Disco spring had been left to deal with the horrendous tracks ever since and now, having delivered us safely to civilisation, had finally collapsed. Whilst we knew it could, if needed, carry on through to Harare, it seemed only right and proper to retire it for something newer.

Luckily Frank had loads of almost new springs and Adam enjoyed a great afternoon of jacking up the trailer, and removing tyres, old springs, and shocks on both sides so that by 5:30 that evening at the rendezvous point outside the Hungry Lion in Tsumeb, he and Linda pulled up in the white car with trailer looking as good as new and ready for another dozen tours along the worst roads Africa can offer.

Meantime the five game viewers had slipped out of Okaukuejo camp (to the relief of the other tourists ) and had been gifted with game viewing on steroids. It’s not clear who had the better day, with only poor Linda left out of the fun as she had been given the task of finding digs for the night on a very tight budget.  But, Lady Dakar always delivers, and Tsumeb, limited in choices as it is, was no challenge.

We had been offered a chance to stay in some old railway carriages, converted to classy bedroom suites, but Linda found us rooms at a nearby guest house instead, where all 9 of us were accommodated for the cost of a single person at the railways!  This time we had all the ingredients to make Old Legs sleep well, with no indecipherable babble in a multitude of languages from a gaggle of excited tourists to deal with.

We are still 2000km from home despite having been on the homeward run for 6 days already!  Lubango is  a long way from Harare, made even further by the road quality and the lower speeds that Christopher and the bike trailer impose on travel. Bad roads limit the convoy to about 30-40 km/hr on average, so to drive 300km a day is a tough 10-hour job even before pee stops, tea stops, and look-and-see stops.

As always, dinner is a time to plan for the next day and Ali proposed that he and Di take Christopher home via a more leisurely route and the rest of us take the two cars and bike trailer on a ‘faster track’ home.  Other than Ali and Di, we are all keen to get home now, and there is also the draw of Saturday’s clash of old rivals, Bokke Champs vs the runners-up to the World Cup, the rather faded All Blacks. We are determined to find DSTV for that game!

So it was duly agreed that Ali and Di would collect Christopher’s tyre that Adam had left at the shop, and the rest of us would head off via Grootfontein, Rundu, to Divundu at the Botswana border, on the panhandle end of the Okavango. 500km….ish.

Long drives are boring, more so in scrubby semi-desert, and the mind wanders. Inevitably, memories of the last time we were on the road between Rundu and Tsumeb came to mind and jumbled with recent experiences. Piccadilly Circus in Etosha for some reason morphed with Nelson’s Column and a vague recollection of an anecdote about Horatio Nelson, who, knowing he was to be immortalised in a statue to commemorate his epic triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar, did not feel very honoured as he could only fixate on the ignoble horror of a million pigeons crapping on his head!

And that in turn spurred the memory of Howard Thompson in the Namibia Tour, who, not gifted with the same foresight as Nelson, and in defiance of the warning given to him by Gary, pitched his stretcher under a tree, inhabited by a tree dassie.  Needless to say, his peaceful slumber was interrupted by the awful horror, stink and muck of being shat on sometime in the early hours of the following morning.  Like Nelson, his memory was also immortalised, slightly less impressively, with the DOD award.

No idea what causes these random thoughts to pop up on long, boring tar roads, but nothing whiles away the kilometres more effectively than bursting out laughing for no apparent reason.

It was a stretch to make it in one day, but we are not called the Old Legs for nothing,  and it was a foregone conclusion that we were going to attempt to cross the border from Namibia into Botswana before it closed at 6:00 pm.  So we pushed, arriving at the Namibian border at 5:55. The Namibians processed us in 3 minutes and our convoy swept into Botswana at exactly 5:59. Gary strategically parked directly behind the immigration officer’s car, blocking him in, and we were fully prepared to refuse to move unless they processed us.

Such deviousness was, however, unnecessary. Some sweet-talking and a few pitiful looks (and possibly, the stench of our unwashed bodies) melted the hearts of the Botswana officials and they too processed us within 5 minutes. This is by far the fastest we have ever crossed international borders and one can’t but help wonder why it shouldn’t always be so.

From here, darkness soon followed and we had our fingers crossed that Drotsjys Lodge (recommended by the immigration officers) would be a) affordable and b) available. Luckily, for camping, it was, and so, mission accomplished, we settled in for the night on the banks of the Okavango Delta, deep in a river line forest under massive trees that Gus will be super bleak to have missed out on.

Tomorrow we push on to Maun in the hope of finding DSTV before Saturday.

Until then,

Have Fun.  Do Good.  Do Epic.

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