Epic Adventure -- Day 137 -- 13/01/2013 -- Lüderitz

We woke up later this morning than we have done for the last few days, not setting an alarm we were up by 10:00am. As it was a Sunday, it turned out that almost everything was closed, but we managed to buy ingredients for a little picnic of sandwiches, drinks and some snacks at the local supermarket. Setting off for Agate beach, we drove on one of only three publicly accessible roads out of Lüderitz, but five metres on each side of the road was restricted land. We stopped along the way to game watch at a beautiful fresh water spot filled with flamingos, springbok, gemsbok and many other species of birds. The beach was very interesting, there were many braais dotted around the car park area and there wasn't any sand along the entire beachfront, instead it was made of millions of Agate stones, hence the name. A very odd site in a desert full of sand! 

Directly in front of us, a few kilometres out to sea was a massive diamond ship, part of the Namibian Minerals Corporation that suctions diamonds from between 10-20m below the seabed and gathers approximately 650,000 carats per year! The weather was gorgeous on the beach, albeit slightly windy. I had a fantastic time trying to find clear stones that could be diamonds, and gathered a small handful that I will continue to believe, however unlikely that might be, are my tiny stash of uncut diamonds :) 

We left the beach after lunch and drove along the permissible route to Diaz point, another tourist spot about 20kms away. There were many more flamingos along the route, a very beautiful and stark contrast to the sandy background. The desert scenery was so stunning, and made Dan and I angry that so much of this area is completely inaccessible to almost everyone in the world. We arrived at a deserted Diaz point, but we weren't sure if it was always this quiet or if that was a consequence of it being Sunday. The coffee shop was open however and a very old and slightly weird lady greeted us and mumbled something incoherent that we assumed had to be about ordering drinks, so we asked for tea and coffee which she got up to go get for us. 

The wind at the point was slightly chilly, so instead of taking a seat at one of the tables that were all in the shade, we settled on the floor in the courtyard to soak up the sun and talk to the Doberman and Jack Russell who were enjoying the rays. When our tea and coffee were ready, we asked if we would be allowed to enjoy it on the floor where we were already sitting, and the old woman was very happy to oblige! The dogs were really sweet and the lady told us all about Diaz point, most of which we didn't understand but she was really sweet so we smiled and nodded along anyway. I found a little trampoline obviously there for small children to play on, so obviously I started jumping on it too! The "weather rock" they had set up was hilarious, with a sign under it saying "if the rock is wet, it's raining" and "if the rock is moving, it's windy" etc. 

We set off for the last "tourist" spot listed on the map we took from our room, a ship wreckage 10kms away along the coast line. The drive was gorgeous and the dirt road was in great shape but I was still really happy to be in our Landy in what felt like the middle of nowhere! There were a few families on the ship wreckage beach enjoying lunch, and we didn't hang around for very long as it was getting really, really windy and the wreckage was now only a small rusted shell that has been mostly swallowed up by the sand. We had a beautiful drive through the dunes back to Lüderitz. We drove around the town when we got back to explore the parts we hadn't yet seen. We found our way up a hill near the B&B to a beautiful church lurched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The guard outside was happy to let us in, and it was worth the exploring as the stained glass work inside was gorgeous with the sun shining directly through the side windows and casting stunning colourful shadows on the floor. 

Back at the B&B, our afternoon turned into a Walking Dead vs the limited internet battle. When we got home we used some of our internet to load an episode of the Walking Dead, but right near the end it stopped buffering as we had run out of data. We hopped in the car to the petrol station which sold cards with preloaded data and went home to watch more of the Walking Dead. What we didn't realise is that we could have bought a more cost effective "data bundle", which we ended up going back for as we ran out of our latest R50 of data pretty quickly. We reloaded the same episode of the walking dead we were on and as I went to skip ahead to where we were before it reloaded the entire episode and had chewed up all of our data!!! SO frustrating! We decided we had had enough of buying data and driving around so we snuggled down in bed and watched some TV for the rest of the afternoon. I was glad to not be outside in the fierce wind, which can be extremely painful because of the sand, especially as we had both managed to get a little sunburnt from our days adventures.

Dinner was a fantastic affair as we were their only guests of the evening, so we all sat together at a larger table with a view of the kitchen and shared all the pizza together, as well as a bottle of wine and beers! He made a chicken, feta, mushroom and onion pizza, a salami, pepper and olive pizza and an Indian spiced chicken pizza, which were all amazingly delicious. We left some of the pizza because he was also making two large dessert pizzas to share, the same banana and almond one that I already loved, but he also made a new one that was equally delicious that had plums on it! We spent a fantastic evening getting to know our German hosts, and enjoying their fantastic hospitality and amazing pizzas. Despite their objections Dan paid for our dinner and they sent us on our way with many smiles and waves and the leftover pizza for our drive tomorrow, out of Lüderitz and Namibia, all the way to Springbok, South Africa! 

  

Epic Adventure -- Day 136 -- 12/01/2013 -- Kolmanskop & Lüderitz

We woke up at 8:00am this morning to make sure we had enough time to get ready and make it to Kolmanskop for the tour at 9:30am. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the Namib desert in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. In 1908 the worker Zacharias Lewala found a diamond while working in this area and showed it to his supervisor. After realizing that this area was rich in diamonds, lots of German miners settled in this area and soon after the German government declared a large area as a "Sperrgebiet", starting to exploit the diamond field. 

Driven by the enormous wealth of the first diamond miners, the residents built the village in the architectural style of a German town, with amenities and institutions including a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theater and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere,as well as the first tram in Africa. It had a railway link to Lüderitz.The town declined after World War I when the diamond-field slowly exhausted and was ultimately abandoned in 1954. Due to its location within the restricted area of the Namib desert, tourists need a permit to enter the town.

We arrived just after 9:00am and paid our fee to the guard at the gate and received two day passes. On the same road to the entrance to Kolmanskop is the security station for the miners at Elizabeth town, another abandoned mining town about 60kms away where they have recently dug a new mine. A large white building that straddles the road is where all of the cars and people into and out of that section of the spergebiet are X-rayed and searched for any concealed diamonds. We drove up into the Main Street of Kolmanskop and entered the main building which houses the coffee room, the museum, the ball room and the bowling alley. 

The tour only started at 9:30am, so we sat down for some drinks. While Dan was enjoying his coffee I went next door into the small Museum. In the museum I learned the fascinating tale of Fairytale Valley. The valley was discovered by a worker and his employer who are on their way back to Kolmanskop after scouting the diamonds. They realised that the area had chosen to set up camp was literally shimmering with diamonds in the firelight, they could pick them up by the spadeful. I would have loved that, I'm fascinated by diamonds, what girl isn't ;)

  

At 9:30am we lined up outside the entrance to the Ball room and were invited in by a lovely young guy who clearly knew his stuff. He explained that the Ball room used to be filled almost every weekend with some extravagant party and usually they had a pianist, at which point he walked over to the piano that was still in the corner and began playing and singing for us! We next went to the kitchen which still has the vintage stoves, sinks and most of the appliances. We were taken to the local shop that sold all of the grocers and toiletries to the towns people, usually brought in by boat from South Africa! One lady who shopped there was so rich in fact that she used to pay for her items in diamonds. A fascinating building we were shown around was the ice factory where fresh water had to be shipped in specifically to make ice and each of the houses in town would get a block each day to cool their fridge. That block would also be part of their rationed water for the day as fresh water was obviously scarce in the desert.

There were many different places to look around once our official tour had ended, one of our favourites being the managers house which had been dug completely out of the sand that had once engulfed it, and had also been renovated back to its former glory and was a beautiful building. We wandered around at our own slow pace and explored parts of buildings we probably shouldn't have gone into but they provided such amazing photographs it was importable to resist. I'm absolutely fascinated with the decay that time, wind and sand have caused to these buildings, and imagining what they may once have looked like. The views from the houses over the sand dunes were simply stunning, but did highlight how very isolated Kolmaskop is from literally anything else!  

Just as we were exploring one of our last houses Dan was out on the top floor porch and was shouted to by a security guard that it was time to leave, so he obviously didn't allow me to step out onto the porch but shepherded me straight out of the house. He really doesn't like to break rules! We left just after 1pm and drew money on our way back to the B&B. As we were having such a great time in Lüderitz, Dan went upstairs to tell our host that we would be staying an extra day, and also asked her to book a table for us at our Pizzeria that evening. The afternoon became super windy so we used some of our internet allotment and watched two episodes of The Walking Dead.

We drove over to the Pizzeria for 7pm, and Dan ordered a Regina pizza with ham and mushrooms and I ordered a Hawaiian. We also ordered a bottle of red wine to share and Dan ordered a beer to start. After the delicious pizzas that we totally annihilated, we ordered another banana, honey and almond dessert pizza and by this point we were the only people remaining in the restaurant so Betha and her husband came over and joined us! We spent ages chatting to them and learned that they retired from their jobs in Germany and purchased a vintage 45foot sailboat and had an amazing adventure sailing it down the coast of Africa before settling in Lüderitz. They used to live on a farm in Namibia when they were much younger, and knew that once they had retired that they wanted to come back and live here, but what an amazing way to get here! They took months to make the trip and brought their two German shepherds along on the journey. After an amazing evening with fabulous company and delicious food we bid them farewell and promised to be back again tomorrow!

Faro, Portugal 03/07/2013 - 15/07/2013

I was so excited to be finally seeing Dan that I actually didn't mind waking up at 6:00am to make sure I caught my 7:00am train from Redruth to Bristol airport. Jessica had very kindly agreed to drive me to the train station so we were both up at sparrows fart. The train journey and the plane ride were both uneventful, but after eight hours of travelling I was so happy to finally arrive in Faro. It took me a while to locate the owner of the apartment we were renting as the Ryanair flight had arrived a little early, and Helena wasn't there yet. After waiting for about 20 minutes I spotted someone rushing into the arrivals hall and took a guess that it was her and I was correct! I paid her the remainder of the cost for the rental and then received a lovely surprise, she was going to drive me over to the apartment! 

It is such a lovely lovely place, much bigger than I had anticipated even though its large in the photographs. We have our own kitchen with every amenity we could possibly need, and a large balcony with its own braai where I know we will be spending a lot of time. After Helena had explained everything I needed to know about the flat and about Faro, she left me alone to unpack. Dan only arrives tomorrow morning with the timing of our flights, but I'm excited to see him so the wait isn't a problem! After unpacking my suitcase neatly into the cupboard and turning on the silent air conditioner, I took the newly empty suitcase and headed off to the large supermarket about 2kms away to buy some supplies. 

I was a little overwhelmed by the selection in the supermarket and because nothing at all was in English. I bought a yummy looking pizza for my dinner and some fruit, which all looked and smelt great having been grown in a country with sunshine! It's amazing how used to the tasteless rubbish in UK supermarkets I have become. I bought some staples like bread, ham and butter, and was actually really proud of myself for figuring out which of the milks on sale was whole milk. As everything was in Portuguese and unhelpfully not similar enough to English for me to figure it out, I went by the calorie count! The packages didn't have the 2% etc I'm used to in the UK, but as whole milk still has all the fat (which really isn't much anyway!) it therefore has the highest calorie count, which is what I chose.

The walk home was really hot and I was so grateful to have turned on the air conditioner when I finally stumbled in! Being starving at this point because I hadn't had any lunch, I tried to turn on the oven to make my pizza, but it wouldn't work!! I did exactly as Helena had described but, when Dan figured it out the next day, you had to turn the timer on for the oven to work. I ended up making the pizza in the microwave. Now, I know you are all thinking, what, a microwave?! But there was a pizza button on it, which lead me to believe that this particular microwave could cook pizza. That was a lie. Microwaves turn a perfectly good pizza into a combination of rubber, plastic, cardboard and sawdust all at the same time, an amazing feat if you ask me. Pizza button my ass. I ended up having ham on toast and chatting to Dan on Skype before he left for the airport. 

His flight arrived at 10:20am the next morning, and I woke up at 8:30am so I would have enough time to walk the 3kms or so to the main bus station to catch the bus to the airport. I arrived with plenty of time to spare and picked a great spot to be able to see Dan when he came through the gates, and I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually at 11:30am, I got a call from Dan's cell, the airline had lost his luggage in Lisbon! I was so engrossed with trying to find the address of our apartment to text to him so they would know where to send his bag that I didn't see him coming till he was right in front of me, so much for being excited and waving from a distance! We took a taxi home because I didn't want to figure out the busses, and we rang the airline from there to give them our address. 

As Dan's bag would only be arriving at the flat at 8 that evening we ventured out down the road to the little supermarket just up the road that I hadn't yet been to, to find something for lunch and dinner. Wine is very cheap in Portugal so needless to say we bought a few more bottles, along with some incredibly cheap Parma ham, some cheese recommendations from a lady we had to mime our requests too and steak, potatoes and mushrooms for dinner. Dan got the fire going for a braai on the balcony. We snacked on the Parma ham and cheeses until dinner time, which was probably a good thing as the potatoes and mushrooms were lovely but the steak wasn't anything special at all, and neither of us was hungry enough to finish it. We washed it all down with more wine and Häagen-Dazs dulce du leche, my favourite ice cream! 

The next morning we set off to explore Faro's old town. We took a shortcut pointed out to me by Helena that went straight through the city's local park, a lovely little green oasis near the middle of a city that has quite a few concrete apartments blocks and is conspicuously lacking in green spaces. On our way through we discovered what was to become our favourite spot in the whole of Faro, a tiny little cafe in the gardens. It comprised of just one small circular room with two windows, and tables, chairs and umbrellas surrounding it, all out in the open. As we walked up to our cafe on the first day I noticed a man drinking freshly squeezed orange juice which is one of my favourite things, so I asked Dan to order it for me. The little man that owns the cafe didn't speak any English, and Dan doesn't speak any Portuguese, but they managed to muddle through the order of an espresso and an orange juice, which came to just €2! Dan's espresso was only €0.50!

We then walked into the walked old town to explore. Strangely, half of the houses seem to be abandoned, but not recently as the building decay and vegetation growth leads us to believe they must have been closed up for at least 50-100 years. Unfortunately most of the buildings are shut up and locked tightly, and there isn't any chance to explore them. I find abandoned buildings absolutely fascinating, and was really quite disappointed at our inability to investigate any of the houses. Most of them are really grand with massive gardens, and from the snippets we have managed to see inside, they all used to be amazing. I wonder what happened here that left so many places deserted, none of which are for sale either. 

We explored the streets of the old town, trying to find somewhere for lunch. Two places looked interesting but we carried on investigating till somewhere interesting caught our eye. We walked round the outside of the city wall next to the sea. Along the coast of Faro is The Ria Formosa lagoon, most of which is a national park and home to hundreds of different migrating birds. An artificial inlet was created in 1952 so that the city could have its own harbour. We passed the entrance to the harbour which is underneath the railway tracks and because of the height limitation all of the boats in the harbour are all really small speed boats. Just next to the harbour we found a cafe that we decided to eat at. We shared a delicious meaty pizza and Dan had a beer whilst I enjoyed a vodka and fresh passion fruit cocktail. After lunch we headed back to the apartment and enjoyed a bottle of wine on the balcony. We went back to the little supermarket to get more cheese and Parma ham and ate that for our dinner as we had had such a big lunch. Another wonderful evening was spent on the balcony enjoying wine and watching the sunset!

A friend of mine from junior school in Selebi Phikwe, Botswana, whom I hadn't seen since I was about 9 happened to be in Portugal up in Lisbon. I contacted her via Facebook and arranged for her to come and stay with us for a night in Faro, we did have a spare bedroom after all! Dan and I woke up leisurely on Saturday morning and grabbed an espresso and orange juice at our little cafe before navigating our way to the train station across town to collect Cara-Lee. Even though I haven't seen her in about 15 years, it was just like old times meeting up with her again! I introduced her to Dan and we set off for the cafe at the harbour to grab some lunch. Two pizzas, a few drinks and a long catch up later we all shared out Cara-Lee's bags and walked to the large supermarket I had visited on my first day.

We decided on salmon for dinner on the braai, so picked that up along with loads of fresh fruit and mixers for the Tanquaray Gin Dan had brought from the States. We passed a long and enjoyable afternoon chatting in the sun, listening to music and drinking many different fruit and gin cocktail concoctions. I can't remember them all but I know we had an apple and pear and mango and pineapple which were both lovely, especially as it was so hot. Dan got the braai going and for diner that night we had salmon in butter and lemon juice, baby potatoes and asparagus. Cara-Lee's train back to Lisbon the next morning was quite early so we went to bed at a reasonable time, after a few more drinks on the balcony. 

We got up just after 8:00am and were out the door before 9:00am. We wanted to stop by our little man for coffee on the way but he was closed, probably because it was so early on a Sunday morning. As we had just gone back to the flat to relax and drink yesterday, we took Cara-Lee through the beautiful park and walked through the old town, to show her a little of Faro before she left. We got to the train station with time to spare and had drinks from their cafe at a little table outside before waving Cara-Lee off. Not knowing what to do next, Dan and I walked along the train station where the walls were adorned with the most amazing graffiti! Along one wall Dan found a hole in the brickwork and ducked through. Inside we found yet another abandoned building, an absolutely massive abandoned factory of some kind. We had a little snoop around but didn't spend too long inside because the roof looked a bit unstable, one wall was leaning at a funny angle, and we could see obvious signs that people had lived there, or may still be living there.

With no further plans for the day we decided to head to the one cinema in Faro to watch a movie. The cinema was in a large shopping centre 2 miles away. On the way there we found an outdoor gym similar to the one we saw in Cape Town, a brilliant idea in such a sunny country to get people exercising outside. We looked around a few shops at shoes for Dan before making our way to the cinema. I really wanted to watch Now You See Me as well as World War Z, and Dan wanted to watch the latter more, so we ended up getting tickets to see World War Z at 2:00pm. The shopping centre had a few choices of places to eat, but Dan chose McDonald's because he was really hungry, not a good choice when in a foreign country with loads of food choices available! I wanted to try a really great looking burger but the place was really weird and didn't give you a bread roll with the burger, so I ate a McDonald's too :D

Armed with some sweeties and a drink, we went in to watch the movie, and both thoroughly enjoyed it! For once, a zombie movie with a believable storyline, and loads of really great action scenes! We took a taxi home from the shopping centre because it was really quite hot, and we both didn't feel like walking the 4kms home. Another evening of relaxation on the balcony with a bottle of wine ensued! Because I had wanted to see Now You See Me so much, and we were given vouchers for €1.5 off each of our tickets plus 25% off the ticket price because it was Monday, we decided that was how we were going to spend our day. After walking to our little cafe in the park and enjoying a couple of orange juices and espressos each, we walked the rest of the way to the shopping centre. We got there a little earlier than it opened, so we shared lunch in a small restaurant of a tasty little chicken pita and chips.

The movie was great, really clever and I really enjoyed it! Dan liked it, but not as much as I did. We walked back to the flat via the big supermarket and picked up all the ingredients for spaghetti carbonara, which was delicious if I do say so myself! The next few days passed by in a haze of comfortable similarity. We went to our little cafe every single day, and I started having a ham and cheese toasted sandwich for brunch, Dan had one too on occasion. We went back to explore the old town and went into the museum. The woman selling spoke very little English and somehow we managed to convince her we were students who had left our cards at home, so she allowed us to purchase half price student tickets for just €1. The museum was really quiet and had very little security. It was full of interesting artefacts, one of my favourite was a huge mosaic floor tile display which was found under the streets of faro when some public works were being done.

We were told that there was an Arabian night evening happening, so we went into town later that day to have a look round. Annoyingly one of the gate guards told us to go all the way round to another gate to get tickets, and when we got there he didn't have any and told us to go back! I was getting very angry at them for messing us about and was ready to leave, but Dan convinced me to pay the €5 each to get our arm bands and just enjoy it. We wandered around the stalls and realised that a lot of the fun would be starting later in the evening, so we settled ourselves at a restaurants table in the square for dinner. The best thing that can be said about our sinner was that the location was wonderful, and the wine tasted good!

We were given two appetisers that were going out to all the tables, bruschetta and Parma ham that was good, and also some type of chickpea concoction I didn't like. I ordered tuna carpaccio and Dan ordered a cod dish with matchstick chips. The tuna was horrendous, thickly cut very old salted tuna and was not at all carpaccio in any way! Dan decided he didn't mind it and so ate mine. His meal was oddly fishy in taste, even the chips tasted like fish! We also realised that it wasn't hand cut and cooked chips but actually just a bag of potato chips poured on top of his fish. For some weird reason (probably the wine) we didn't complain about the meal, even when we were given the bill and I realised they had charged us for the appetisers too! I guess the hilarity of it all just made us not really care. While we were at dinner we watched a procession go by in the square of an arabian band, men riding camels and belly dancers. Having decided we were both quite tired and didn't want to stay for the evening performance (on a stage made up of a pile of salt...), we walked back through the Arabian night part of town on our way home.

I found a delicious recipe for prawns with a lime, honey, chilli, coriander and mayonnaise dressing. As Faro is right on the coast, the prawns are super cheap and fresh. We walked to the big supermarket and picked up some wine as well as all the ingredients for dinner. We bought 600g of prawns, which turned out to be such a hassle to clean that many. It was totally worth it though when we were finally done, they had cooked on the braai and had been tossed in the dressing. It was delicious and perfect in the hot weather with a glass of lovely white wine. We bought even more prawns the next day we loved it so much! We did try to make a cocktail at one stage too. I found a recipe on Pinterest for moscato and peach sangria, which sounded amazing. We went to the shop to try to find the ingredients, peaches, moscato, peach brandy and peach flavoured water. 

The only ingredient we could find was peaches, and so we ended up buying some alcoholic melon flavoured thing and cava instead. As you can imagine, it tasted absolutely nothing like it was probably supposed to! Dan ended up drinking most of it and I just stuck with my white wine. We visited little supermarket quite a lot, and ended up snacking on Parma ham and cheese for most of the holiday. The watermelon we bought was lovely and nectarines in Portugal are also absolutely divine, the kind that dribble everywhere when you bite into them, despite your best intentions. On our walk to the park we met a very friendly, beautiful grey cat with a pink collar that I named Mr Pink even though she was a girl. She was there on a few occasions and absolutely loved being picked up and cuddled! Our little cafe in the park sold cheap bags of corn that you could use to feed the pigeons. After watching loads of people feed them Dan finally bought us a bag. They all arrive so quickly after you start feeding one or two, its insane! The pigeons are all quite take too and will happily fly onto your hand to eat, and the peacocks will peck out of your hand too!

Out of all the abandoned buildings one particular one in the old town caught our eye. It was really big and we assumed it may have been an old hotel at one stage. The front door was really intricate with wrought iron screens, carved wood and two beautiful wrought iron escutcheons. I decided that they were the only souvenir from Faro that I wanted and convinced Dan that they would be an amazing reminder of our time in Portugal. Now, I would have bought them from someone, and we actually asked at the town council who the abandoned buildings belonged too, but no one seems to know! So we took matters into our own hands. One morning we went to our cafe and Dan managed to mime to the little man that we wanted to borrow a flat head screw driver and that we would return it. Thankfully someone was there to translate for him, and we were lent one for the day.

The abandoned hotel is on quite a quiet street in the old town, so thankfully that made it easier to acquire the escutcheons. I was look out while Dan unscrewed the three screws on each of them, and we spent about 20 minutes switching between frantically unscrewing the escutcheons and pretending to be chatting on the phone, relaxing in the heat, looking at a map, and examining the house when someone walked by. Dan was ready to give up on the second one because two of the screws were very unyielding, but I took over and managed to coax them out just enough that he could do the rest of the work quickly! We eventually got them both off the door and made our way back to the apartment quickly incase we were seen! They really are very beautiful, the kind of thing that just isn't made any more.

Out the back of our apartment block is a large abandoned factory that Helena told me was partially knocked down to make way for a new harbour that wouldn't have the height restriction of the old one, but the work was stopped when the recession hit and there wasn't any extra money to spare. We walked down the road to explore it, jumped over a wall to get in, walked a little way into it before I got a bad feeling about being there and told Dan I wanted to leave. I don't know what it was but I just felt very uneasy about snooping around the place, and I'm usually the one going gun ho into a place with Dan being the voice of reason. He was all set to keep on exploring but I never ignore a gut feeling, so we got out of there. On the way back up the road I noticed that there was a makeshift washing line with someone's washing on it and other signs of life. I'm glad we left, I'm not sure I want to meet the people who live in there, even in the harsh light of day!

We were leaving super early the next morning, to catch our 6:00am and 6:25am flights, so we packed up the night before. I sent all of the things I had brought on holiday back with Dan, to try to help my packing situation when I eventually move to America. I was able to bring along 10kgs of hand luggage that all went into his bag, along with my Ugg boots and coat I had worn onto the plane. I looked pretty foolish arriving with such warm clothing when it was over 30'C outside, but it was worth it in the long run! The taxi company we rang to organise a taxi at 3:45am the next morning told us they were fully booked from over a week ago, eek! 

I got in touch with Helena who thankfully found another company and actually booked the taxi for us too. It was really hard waking up so early in the morning, especially as We didn't want to leave Portugal and each other. This holiday has been such a gift that we both really needed, five months away from one another is really just too long! We had drinks in the airport once we got through security, Dan actually had a beer at 4:00am :D We bought me two croissants for breakfast and lunch as I'd on,y get home at 3:00pm, and we said a sad goodbye and got onto our respective flights. Dan's second flight from Lisbon to Philadelphia was severely delayed by over four hours, but he received an $800 voucher to use on the airline it he next year, which is a great bonus for us as we want to go to Hawaii next year, and now one of our flights are free! 

Here's to the next big adventure with the love of my life :)

Epic Adventure -- Day 135 -- 11/01/2013 -- Windhoek to Lüderitz

Although our initial plan had been to wake up really early again this morning and start driving as soon as possible, Dan convinced me that we deserved to sleep in as we only had about 650kms to tackle today. I conceded and we woke up at 8:00am and enjoyed a lovely cooked breakfast in the dining room made by two Namibian ladies. We packed up our bags and left the backpackers by 10:00am in search of fuel. Whilst Dan was filling the car and buying snacks for the road I realised I had made a mistake with the distance to Lüderitz. The tarred road route was almost 1000kms, far further than we had bargained on driving today! Dan and I hadn't driven on unpaved roads for a while, because we were in unfamiliar territory and we wanted to stick to the tarred roads whilst in such a vast country incase of a break down or accident. 

After a little discussion we chose to throw caution to the winds and take the 650km route toLüderitz  and embrace the adventure. The sat nav hilariously told us that taking the unpaved route would make our travel time over 35 hours, as it seems to always expect us to do 10kms per hour on dirt roads. After around 250kms we reached the turn off onto the dirt road, and I used the bathroom whilst Dan fuelled up and snacked up. And so began the dirt road adventure! Writing these last few days of the blog four months after our honeymoon ended, it is always today's drive I think back to most folding when I remember our journey. It turned out to be the best decision we made, taking the road less travelled.

The quality of the road was actually quite good, being that we were entering the desert part of Namibia, it was quite compact and easy to drive on albeit bumpy at times! We stopped a few times to get out of Snolly and marvel at how we were literally in the middle of nowhere. We picked up one hitchhiker along the way, a very dusty looking man who spoke very little English but managed to convey to us that he was "going to get horses" ? We hoped they were ones that already belonged to him and that he wasn't planning on stealing someone else's, something we later learned happens a lot in the Namibian dessert as the farms are so vast and because of this have very little security. We passed very few cars on the way, and each and every one waved jovially to us, I suppose as we all shared some sort of comradery, being insane enough to venture off into the Namib desert! 

Our journey progressed uneventfully until we entered into a particular landscape that we both agreed strongly resembled a part of the video game 'Red Dead Redemption' that Dan and JD used to play. Around 80kms from Aus, the next, and last town on the way to Lüderitz, we blew the back right tire. We were driving round a particularly rocky corner that made it basically impossible to distinguish between a blown tire and the bumpy as hell road, but something just made me open Dan's window and get him to look out and low and behold we had blown the back right tire. I'm unsure as to weather it was as shredded as it was because we had been driving on it for a while or because of the condition of the road, but I'd put my money on the rocky road. 

We pulled up immediately on the side of the road and while Dan busied himself with jacking up the Landy and loosening the wheel nuts, I took loads of photos. It was such a beautiful place to have broken down, the scenery had become more and more red as we got closer towards Lüderitz. Once Dan had replaced the tire and we had put the mangled one onto the back, we set off towards Aus again. We drove much slower and more cautiously than before as our final lifeline was now on the car! We reached a T-junction and mercifully turned right onto a tarred road. Instead of continuing straight on to Luderitz we stop off in Aus at a tiny little shop with a petrol pump outside. 

By some amazing stroke of luck the little shop actually had the exact tire that we needed! The replacement cost is R2850, a cost we were most happy to bear under the current circumstances, it had felt like one of our arms were missing the entire time we were without a spare tire. I needed to draw the cash off the American card from the little machine in their shop and halfway through the money being counted the machine stopped as it had run out of money! Whilst I started panicking quietly about the fact that we would now not have any money to pay for the tire we so desperately needed, the shop owner arrived with a bundle of cash from the back. It turned out that he replaced the cash for the bank that owned the ATM as they were so far away, thank goodness! After he had fiddled around in the extremely complicated internal workings of the ATM I was able to draw the remainder of the cash we needed, and pay for the tire.

Outside Dan had turned Snolly back round and had taken the busted spare off the back and it was currently being attacked with a chisel and mallet by the workers in the station. Our new tire didn't actually come with a wheel, just the rubber part, so the men had to take off the busted part of our tire and replace it. Dan meanwhile took of the spare we had used on the back right side of the car so we could put the new wheel there instead. Our spare was a little worse for wear than the rest of the tires and we preferred to keep it as a spare and have the four tires on the car as similar in age and tread depth as possible. We set off for the remaining 120kms to Lüderitz feeling much happier. The road from Aus to Lüderitz was a brilliant road in perfect condition, and the view of desert as far as the eye could see was stunning. 

We also passed through a set of gates with an ominous sign informing us that we had now entered the Sperrgebeit, the protected diamond area, and we were not to leave our cars nor were we to leave the stretch of tarred road we were on or we would be prosecuted and possibly shot and killed on sight. Obviously we completely ignored the sign and stopped at a cool looking abandoned building right next to an old railway line and had a look around. We think it used to be inhabited by someone who tended to that particular section of railway line, but all that is left are the walls and roof, the rest of the house has been reclaimed by the desert. We arrived at the guest house in Lüderitz and I sent Dan in to make sure we were still booked in and that it was the price I was quoted online. Thankfully everything checked out ok and we were put into a cute little room with a gorgeous view of the water, our own small kitchenette and bathroom. The owner of the guest house recommended that we go and eat at Ocean View, a new pizza restaurant that had opened recently in town. We agreed that would be a great idea, and she phoned ahead to book us a table at 8:00pm. 

Even though we left with plenty of time and armed with a map to the place, we were quite late! The name she had given us, Ocean View, was not the name of the restaurant at all and so when we couldn't figure out where the map was taking us and asked directions, no one had heard of it before! It turns out it is called Pizzeria, and it tucked away down a couple of little streets. We eventually got there and were greeted warmly by Betha, the chefs wife, who showed us to the table. Dan ordered a Windhoek beer and I ordered a bottle of wine for us to share once he was done his beer. The pizzas are all made to order, and she recommended that we order two but then share them as they would come to the table one at a time, which was what we were planning to do anyway. 

Dan ordered a spinach, olive and feta pizza, whilst I ordered a chicken and feta one. They were by far the best pizzas either one of us have ever eaten! The base was thin and crunchy, and all of the ingredients were just bursting with flavour. I was very interested by the dessert pizza on the menu so, after coercing Dan to help me eat it, I ordered one. The base was covered in mashed bananas and sprinkled with honey, sliced almonds and a touch of cinnamon, pure genius! It was absolutely gorgeous and very light to eat which I had not been expecting. Once we had worked our way through the dessert pizza and wine we asked for the bill and were astounded when the total came to just R319! After thoroughly enjoying that delicious meal we were convinced they were undercharging for the pizzas and so we left them with a big tip and a promise to return tomorrow evening.

Epic Adventure -- Day 134 -- 10/01/2013 -- Caprivi Strip to Windhoek

After being so tired last night, it wasn't surprising that we both slept well. We woke up at 5:30am, with the idea to be up and out of the camp by 6:00am, ready for another long day of driving. We took a little longer than expected to get ready and packed up, so we only got to reception at 6:30am. When we got there we found the reception still locked and sitting outside it was the same guard who let us in last night. He told us that the reception was only open from 7:00am and that we would have to wait for them to be able to pay the R370 for the night. We were also really lucky to have found this place as we didn't have much money left and it was in Rands, but thankfully the Namibian dollar and rand are pegged together, so we could pay in Rand.

We told him we really needed to get going and didn't want to wait around for half an hour, so he phoned the manager and put her on the phone to us. She told us adamantly that we would have to wait for her and that we could not pay the guard, so what did I do? I handed the guard the cellphone and the R370 and told him it was ok to leave it with him, and we scarpered as quickly as we could. Thankfully the gate was unlocked or our clever plan may not have worked! Dan took the first driving shift, and after a couple of hours of finding no petrol stations at all, we pulled off at a rest stop to use the jerry can. I was so unbelievably grateful at that moment to have our emergency 25l of diesel, especially when we had to drive another 100kms or so for the next fuel stop!

We pulled into the little town with a fuel station right on the main road, but headed past that to find a cash machine. Thankfully the sat nav pulled through again and found an FNB for us, where we could finally get our hands on some Namibian dollars. We withdrew N$2000 and headed back up the road to the petrol station. Dan filled up the car and the jerry can while I went and got us a seat in the Wimpy. We both decided that we deserved a sit down breakfast because we hadn't had anything decent since leaving Lusaka, apart from a couple of sandwiches and some chips. It was heavenly! We grabbed some snacks from the shop next door and headed off, this time I took the wheel.

My few hours of driving were beautiful but uneventful. The scenery in Namibia is truly stunning in this part of the country, it's really quite green at this time of the year, and the mountains were stunning. Dan had been driving again for a while when we hit a really extreme storm. It became extremely dark and the thunder and lightning was petrifying. Great flashes of it would flicker across the sky, and with the rain pelting down on us it was hard not to be a little frightened. We were driving through a town when the rain got so hard that Dan pulled into a petrol station for us to wait it out.

It seemed everyone had had the same idea, as there were cars parked everywhere. We got out and were soaked on the way to the shop. We had enough snacks already but I was grateful to be able to use their loo. We waited out the storm for 20 minutes or so, during which time the whole town had a power cut and the road outside the petrol station was severely flooded with water! It was almost as high as the bottoms of most of the cars lining the opposite side of the street. Thankfully it eventually abated enough for us to set off again, and after driving for half an hour along the roads that now resembled rivers we broke through the storm cloud and left the ridiculous weather behind us. We felt so sorry for those going in the opposite direction, they had no idea what they were getting themselves in for.

The sat nav had us arriving into Windhoek just before 6, but unfortunately we were delayed by a police check point that wanted to search our car. Surprise surprise! The fat lady obviously couldn't find anything to fine us for so let us go quite quickly. I set the sat nav for different hostels in Windhoek. We stopped outside a few and Dan went in to find out the price; if it was reasonable he would agree, if not he would have to "ask his wife" and come out to the car and we would leave! A brilliant plan that has worked well for us this trip :D One hostel was full, another was deserted by the looks of things, but we finally found a great one called Rainbow Backpackers. A private ensuite double room including breakfast the next morning was just R340 for the two of us!

I was exhausted, so after dragging our bags into the room I lay down and skyped Mum and Dad to let them know we were ok, whilst Dan proceeded to have three castles with the owner of the backpackers, both chatting away about our trip so far. The owner recommended a great place for dinner that was quite famous, called Joe's Beer House. Anything named after my Dad is ok by me! As Dan had already had three beers I drove us to the restaurant, which was really tucked away but really busy. It was separated into loads of different areas both inside and out, and was full to the brim with interesting antiques, statement pieces, old farm equipment and signs. It could have easily doubled for a peculiar rummage shop!

They had loads of reservations for that evening but because it was so large they were still able to accommodate us. We were taken into a room on the left and seated at a wooden table near the corner of the room. The mantle piece and parts of the walls were covered in empty Jaegermeister bottles and on my left was a piano covered in antiques. There was always something new to look at! Once we were equipped with a glass of red wine and a bottle of castle larger, the waitress took our order. We decided to share a starter of Namibian smoked fish because it sounded really interesting, and it tasted great too. For our mains we ordered a Kudu steak and a Zebra steak, and shared both as neither one of us had ever tried Zebra before. They were both delicious, the Zebra was a little lighter in colour and had a more subtle flavour than the Kudu, and went perfectly with the herb butter that accompanied it. After the fantastic dinner and the very long day of driving we had had, we went straight back to Rainbow backpackers and fell asleep.

Epic Adventure -- Day 133 -- 09/01/2013 -- Lusaka to Caprivi Strip

It feels a little weird to be leaving today as we have been calling Lusaka home for the last three weeks, a lifetime in our honeymoon adventure! We woke up at 6am this morning and packed the car with all of our belongings. I made Dan, Mum and Dad some coffee, which we had in the lounge. Just before we left Dan remembered our car toolset which we had popped into the shed out back, a vital piece of equipment incase we brake down along the way to Cape Town! After saying a sad goodbye to my parents, Dan and I set off on the road for the last stretch of our adventure. Unfortunately it wasn't all that exciting at first as we were stuck in rush hour traffic on our way out of Lusaka and only properly left the city at about 8am!

Dan drove down to Livingston, and we had one fuel stop along the way. In a little run down supermarket we bought a large 5 litre bottle of water, just incase we brake down! It's not something we want to happen but it doesn't hurt to be prepared. The drive the rest of the way to Livingston was uneventful, and when we got into the town we stopped at a cash machine to draw just enough Kwatcha to last us another fuel fill up and some food. Unfortunately that cash machine was out of order, but our handy sat nav found us another that allowed me to draw money. We stopped at a smelly little station and filled Snolly up one more time before the drive to the border post, where I asked if I could use their loo. I went into it but left very swiftly without doing my business as it was totally disgusting and stank to high heavens!

I stead we drove across the road to a small shopping centre and while Dan parked I found a loo. Our final destination was the Spar where we spent the very last of our Kwatcha on some sandwiches and drinks for the road. It was my turn to take the wheel the rest of the way to the border post with Namibia, some 200kms away. Just after leaving Lusaka we were pulled off the road at a check point by a police officer looking for 'road tax'. I was pretty narked off at this because he wanted us to pay a tax that we had already paid for and had thankfully kept the ticket from, so we only had to pay for the tax to leave the country. Rubbish!! Anyway it was thankful that we had some Rands still on us as we were totally out of Kwatcha. It turns out that the 'road tax' money is most certainly not spent on this section of the road and more than likely goes to the police officers' drinking habit or suchlike.

After a short stretch through a nature reserve where we could only do 50kms per hour, we were on our way to the border. It felt like I was driving through a video game, the road was terrible!! We were blessed with about 40 kilometres of decent tarmac before it started to rain, and everything fell apart. The rain was so ferocious that the fields on either side of the road were totally flooded within a few minutes and we could barely see out the front of the car. That's when the potholes started. Even though I was driving slowly, a particularly ferocious one felt like it almost took the front section off the car! It was so bad that I made Dan get out and check the car and tires which were OK thankfully, and he got into the car quite quickly when we realised a large group of boys were moving towards us. Snolly did us proud and didn't fall apart thankfully :)

The potholes got steadily worse as we drove down the road, it was honestly more dirt than tar in most places. We were getting no where very slowly as I couldn't afford to drive over about 60kms per hour for fear of totally destroying Snolly. It would ha e taken us quite a few hours to get to the border post at that rate but luckily after a while of navigating our way slowly through the craters that were the potholes, we were overtaken by a bus. He clearly had a brilliant height advantage in being able to see the potholes so was tearing along at about 100kms per hour. I out foot to floor and followed very closely behind him, watching for any changes in his driving so that I could mimic them and also miss the potholes. Our tactics worked perfectly and we were able to tail the bus all the way to the border post and arrive in one piece!

We crossed a bridge over the Zambezi river and were then totally confused as to where the border post was. Our sat nav took us straight past it and then lost out location completely, so Dan was forced to go and ask some truck drivers where the actual offices were. We got into a queue of cars entering the border, and eventually nipped into a parking before getting accosted by runners trying to 'help' us again. Ignoring them, we went into the fray that was the border post and attempted to navigate our way to the only book we could enter our details into before they would stamp our passports and let us leave. We each took one side of the crowd and I managed to elbow my way to the front first to fill in the book and had a woman with incredibly bright purple eyeshadow stamp our passports.

Entering Namibia was far easier than I had expected. After handing the Zambian side our stamped gate pass and the temporary import permits for the car, we found ourselves faced with not knowing what to do on the Namibian side. Everyone we asked kept giving us a different story, especially the incredibly rude police officer outside who had to stamp something, and was clearly the smarted man in the whole world and had to make that clearly known. After the pandemonium that was that border post we joined the car queue to leave the border post.

This was where we met the most horrifically fat and bearded woman, who was no nicer than her appearance. She made us pull Snolly out of the line and pull our bags out of the car to be searched. After letting about 10 more cars go in front of ours, she finally got round to belligerently searching heroine my bag, and nearly destroying the Swazi glass jug we had bought, by demanding to see it (which ruined the protective newspaper they had kindly put on for us) and nearly dropping it. She was then joined by three men who were clearly her superiors, and although we have no idea what they were saying it was obvious that she was getting a telling off for searching through our things, which she was not supposed to do! We eventually left with only a smidgen of our sanity left and amazingly without kicking the stupid woman in the face.

The sat nav was set to take us to Windhoek and after turning a corner we were appalled to see that it now said 860kms until the next turn!!! The scenery was very beautiful and basically unspoiled, and we passed many a tiny rural village all made from mud and sticks. Knowing we would need fuel at some point, I asked the sat nav where the next filling station was, which turned out to be in Kongola, a few hours drive away. We ended up driving straight past the petrol station because we had no idea it was even there! It was a tiny little shack next to more shacks, and we couldn't see a pump in sight! Because we missed it, we had continued driving straight through the entire town (which took all of 2 minutes!) and stopped at a gate into the national park. A guard checked our papers and then let us through, even though it was getting quite late, I guess the road must be open 24 hours a day.

Dan and I spoke about the possibility of driving through the night, as we were now in at least 200kms of national park, with no hope of any accommodation till we had left. We stopped Snolly just before the sun set so that we could clean the windshield that had been splattered by thousands of midges, and so that I could take over from Dan. I couldn't have been given two more terrifying drives in the same day. Our headlights, even on high beam, were basically useless if you drove over 50kms per hour. Anything over that speed and we wouldn't have had a chance to react of there was an animal or serious pothole in our path. Thankfully by some miracle a large truck passed by our crawling landrover, plastered with reflective tape. I sped up to stick behind it with the idea that he would be in the firing line to hit any animals that may be in our path, and I could watch the reflective tape for any movements on the road due to potholes.

Dan was meant to be trying to sleep whilst I was driving, so he could take over when I became tired. The conditions of the road and the darkness had us both on edge however, and so when we finally got to the end of the national park we decided to try to find somewhere to stay for the night. The sat nav has been good so far about finding us places to sleep, but after three or four results that turned into nothing, we were getting really desperate. Dan and I were both exhausted and knew we needed a good nights sleep if we were to manage the long day of driving to Windhoek tomorrow. I was also petrified of sleeping in the car because we had passed quite a few shady looking people along the road.

On our very last hope from the sat nav, we finally found somewhere to sleep. We turned into a large set of wooden gates, and I made Dan get out to try to find someone. A guard came to the gates after a little while, and told dan that they had rooms with separate bathrooms, for R370 for the two of us. We were so desperate that we would have taken anything at all, so this sounded like heaven to me! We had to wait a few more minutes at the gate while the guard went to get the keys for our room and the gate. He let us in and walked in front of Snolly, leading the way to the room.

We were told to park in a space next to one of the many square wooden houses, and he let us into our room. It was basic but absolutely fine, there were four single beds, two on either side of the room, mosquito nets and a fan. He showed us the communal showers and toilets opposite our house and then left us to is. Dan grabbed the bags from the car and we took toilet paper and toothbrushes to the bathroom. Dan wanted to go and use the boys side but I was adamant that I was not going to go into the girls side alone as it was really late and quite dark. He agreed to come with me but only because it was empty :D After our ablutions we turned on the fan, locked the door, opened the mosquito nets and went straight to sleep!

Epic Adventure -- Day 132 -- 08/01/2013 -- Lusaka

We have finally gotten our act into gear and we are starting the daily blog posts again, and fittingly on Mum's birthday! First thing we did when we woke up was wish Mum a happy birthday. A little while later we got a call from Bobby on Mum's phone about Snolly and the cost of the repairs. He had managed to source new brake pads for the front tires, but had not been able to find a new brake disk for the front right tire that had been worn down very badly. We could go and pick Snolly up any time after 12:00 when the work would be completed.

Mum then left to go to her Tuesday Pilates session, and Dan made a long list of all of the things we needed to do before we leave Lusaka tomorrow and venture off on our very long drive to Kolmanskop, a diamond ghost town on the coast of Namibia. While Mum was out, Justina and I set to work on baking her a birthday cake, only we were not making a cake but rather a poppy seed bread she had been looking at making for a while. I guided Justina through the process of making the bread and let her get on with the majority of the baking because she adores cooking so much. The recipe made quite a lot of batter, more than mums one loaf tin could cope with, so we used cupcake tins too.

Once the loaf and cupcakes had cooled down we drizzled them with the icing sugar mix and left it to soak into the cake. As we were finished we heard the gate and though it was mum coming home, but it turned out to be Dad, coming home with a terrible toothache. I put him to bed with some muti and his laptop and then got ready to go out. Mum came home and we gave her the birthday cake, which was delicious, before she and I headed out to go and get Snolly. Dan stayed home to work through the things that needed done from our list.

Mum and I drove in the Lexus to the car garage, and drove through some mad traffic along the way. The people of Lusaka drive like lunatics! When we got there and met with Bobby he explained that even though he had been unable to source a new brake disk, it should be safe enough for us to drive back down to Cape Town with what disk we had left. He had not filed it down either, as it was really quite thin, we had no idea how much damage we had done! Once I had paid him the K2000 for the parts and his time, mum and I set off in convoy to the nearest police station.

I wanted to get a police report about the theft of our iPhone so that we could claim for it on insurance. It took a lot of wangling to get the man on the desk to be bothered to help us, but eventually our charm won him over. We manoeuvred our way out of the horrendously potholed dirt car park and headed back down the main road where mum went straight home while I went to fill up the car. After topping up the diesel I drove the wrong way into Arcades shopping centre car park because I was just too lazy to go the whole way round to the entrance in the horrendous rush hour traffic. What was meant to be a quick trip into Spar turned into a 20 shopping trip, because even though I had just popped in to buy Mum some J C Le Roux champagne and some nougat for her birthday, the queues were dreadful! None of the cash registers seemed to be working, nor were the cashiers doing anything to fix the situation.

Before heading home I stopped into the Emirates office to try to change our flights again. Dan and I had spoken about taking a little bit more time to drive down through Namibia and do more along the way, so we wanted to change our departure date from the XXXX we had changed it to before, and instead to the weekend just after that, so we could have a little more time in Cape Town with Chantel and more time to do the drive down the west coast of Southern Africa. When I got there and explained to the woman that I wanted to change our dates again, I was met with a vacant stare. She explained to me that because we had already changed our flights the week before, it would cost us upwards of £700 to change them again. I was absolutely livid when I heard this and called over the woman who had helped us before to explain why she had said we were allowed multiple free changes whereas now it was only the one. That we had already used!

After explaining my displeasure with their customer service I left the office and drove home. While I was out Dan had a conversation with the Saint, the St Andrews university paper, about our immigration issues. It may not help us in the slightest but at least our story being out there will hopefully inform others about the changes to the law and help them to plan for these changes and not be blindsided as we were. Dan and I finished up all of our packing, and we downsized quite a few items that we had not really used throughout our trip. We have all of the clothes and shoes and other odds and ends to Justina, because even if she has no use for any of the items I'm sure she can find people who will be happy to receive them.

She was simply delighted with everything, especially some of the tips I had given her as we are a similar size! Mum took a photograph of Justina and I out on the porch for her to keep. She is really the sweetest lady, I'm going to miss her so much! After Justina left for the day, Dan and I figured out a way to get the Beale silver tray back to the UK, and wrapped it in our blanket to be able to take it as hand luggage. It won't fit into any of our bags as it is too wide, but hopefully it will be alright as a carry on.

To celebrate Mum's birthday we drove in Dad's car to a restaurant called Marlin Restaurant, located inside the Lusaka Club next to the golf course. It was a lovey place decorated in a Chinese style, and we were lead to our reserved table in one corner next to a partition. After our waiter had handed us the menus and we had decided what we wanted for dinner, mum noticed that Natasha and her husband were just a few tables away from us enjoying a meal. What a coincidence!

We gave mum her presents at the dinner table, mostly lots of nougat as it is atrociously expensive in Lusaka but there was a brilliant offer on in one of the supermarkets so we stocked her up. We also gave her the bottle of JC Le Roux champagne and a book, amongst other things. Dad had fish for dinner, whereas Dan, Mum and myself all had the divine steak, and I can very highly recommend the mushroom sauce! The three of us shared a bottle of merlot as Dad was driving. We finished dinner happy and full and drove home for our last night in Lusaka at Mum and Dads, a bittersweet moment for us as we were very sad to leave but also excited to see what Namibia has to offer!

Epic Adventure -- Day 119 to Day 131 -- 26/12/2012 to 07/01/2013 -- Lusaka

Long blog

So, apologies but we eventually fell so far behind with these blog posts because of all the immigration issues and a general lack of drive to write them, so we have a consolidated update of our time in Lusaka so that we can remember the good parts and forget how terrible the immigration issues made us feel. The day after Christmas we did nothing at all, which was wonderful after all the flurry of preparations for the day and all of the research and hassles we have had so far with where we are going to live when we are finished the holiday.

The article that ran in the courier a few days earlier actually got grabbed by the Daily Mail and ran the day after Christmas, but without our permission! One the one hand any publicity about this issue is a good thing in our eyes as it will bring the terrible consequences of these law changes into public awareness, but it did have its downside. Unfortunately the spin off from that article was that my grandfather, Bob, found out about the problem before we told him ourselves, which we all felt really bad about. We had decided as a family not to tell him until after the Holidays because it had spoilt quite a lot of our Christmas spirit and we didn't want to pass that on until we had to.

Dan emailed Louise Richardson, principal at St Andrews, in the hopes that she would be able to do something to help us, but unfortunately although she has been lobbying the issue, she can't help our particular case. We were also very impressed that she personally replied to us on boxing day! Bob Phaff of the St Andrews Brewing Company also learned about our immigration issues and the fact that Dan will most likely now not be able to work with him at the brewery, but he thankfully took the information really well and told us not to let is spoil the rest of our holiday. Which is exactly what we are planning! Dad organised a round of golf for Dan via one of his work connections, so on the 29th of December we went to the Lusaka Golf Club to meet with Arthur.

Arthur is a very kind and outgoing man, whose one passion seems to be playing golf! He was on holiday and appeared to be out on the course every single day, a man after Dan's heart. After paying the K150,000 green fees for one round of golf, Dan followed Arthur to the locker room where he had organised a set of golf clubs for Dan to play with, actually owned by the president of the club. We set off for the first tee armed with bottles of water and an umbrella for me as the sun was really harsh and I don't trust my sunscreen all that much :)

The four ball consisted of Dan, Arthur, a funny man called Brian and another man whose name we never caught. The course was spectacular, very very green becaus we were in the rainy season, and beautifully laid out. The distance we walked that day was around 7km's, quite a lot in the hot African sunshine. Dan's caddy was called Douglas, and he turned out to be very useful to Dan in helping him line up the shots for a course he had never played on before. That round Dan shot 88, and scored 20 but the real dark horse was Brian who turned out to win K100,000 from everyone for scoring over 30 points on his round, even though no one realised he was playing so well!! We played again on the 31st of December with Arthur and another gentleman. Dan played so much better today than he did on the 29th, a combination of getting to know the course and the clubs and loosening up after not having played for quite a few months.

On the most recent round Dan shot 76 and ended up winning big as a combination between the skins(where each of the 18 holes can be won by the lowest scoring player) and the overall pot as he scored 36 for the round. He won K230,000! We paid for the drinks after the match and had a great time chatting with Arthur. That night was New Years Eve and I was the only person who stayed up till after 12am to celebrate!! Mum and dad were tired and so went to bed at around 10:30pm, and Dan was so knakkered after the golf that he went to sleep at 8:00pm! Just after New Years Dad finally received a shipment of water pumps he had been waiting for, which fit into the tops of the massive water bottles that people buy here because the water quality is quite bad. Dad sold some at work and Justina took some home to sell to her friends and family.

We were also happy to welcome Justina's husband to the Beale household soon after Christmas, as he was willing to come once a week to garden! The grass was in desperate need of cutting the first time he came over, and he had organised to rent a lawn mower from one of the street vendors as we don't have one yet. The specimen that he used was an electrical nightmare waiting to happen!! It seems that all of the mowers here are in the same state, with the electrical wire gaffer taped together in multiple places from all the times it had obviously been run over and sliced with the mowers blades! Amazingly Nelson managed to finish the whole lawn without electrocuting himself, and the jungle that was developing in front of the house was conquered :)

Dan and I finally got to meet Pierre just after New Years, which we had been really looking forward to after everything Mum and Dad have told us about him. He came round to the house with his wife and we all had a couple of drinks. He is larger than life and such a very kind person, but also someone I would never want to be on the wrong side of, which is probably why he does so well at FNB working in the repossession department! Just before Pierre got back from his Christmas holidays, we took back all of the items we had borrowed from his house including all of the chairs for our Christmas party. It's a very good thing we had the Lexus and the Land Rover to transport everything there easily!

Along the drive from Pierre's house to Mum and Dad's new house, we passed a few kiosks selling DSTV boxes. DSTV are the Southern African TV satellite company, and pretty much the only way to watch any television at all is to get a DSTV box. We eventually stopped off at one of the shops shortly after Christmas, and went in to speak to the chap about installing the satellite and setting up a new account. It seemed pretty straight forward, we were to purchase the box and set up the account with him then, and then our subscription would kick in after another man came to install our satellite dish, also included in the set up fee. We were told that we didn't need to pay him the set up fee then, as it would be added to our subscription, so we left carrying the DSTV decoder, having not paid a thing.

A man came in the afternoon the next day to install the satellite dish, and he set it up outside the back door so that he could run the cable through the wall and along the roof to come straight down the wall behind the TV cabinet. Thankfully dad was there when the man arrived because it turns out that the other guy from the DSTV shop hadn't told us the truth, and that we needed to pay the set up guy separately. A little arguing and phoning the DSTV guy ensued until the matter was sorted, and we ended up getting a discount for the inconvenience. The dish was installed and the box wired up, and after honing up and confirming the account details, we had TV!

A couple of days later we got an error message when we tried to watch anything, and when Mum phoned the company we were told that the DSTV box was not included in the subscription charge, contrary to what we had been told and because we hadn't yet paid for nor registered the box our subscription was turned off. She and Dad had to phone DSTV multiple times, and drive around to the different DSTV shops until they finally got someone to listen to the situation, and fix our problem. After a few days of being messed around, DSTV was back online and we had TV again! It's so typical here for the service providers to get things so wrong, and for no one to be able to fox the problem they created by not giving the facts up front in the first place!

Whilst in Lusaka we went to the movies twice at the Arcades shopping centre cinema, once to watch the newest James Bond film Skyfall which turned out to be amazing, and once to watch Twilight again because I really wanted to :) Dan only agreed because we had watched Skyfall just a couple of days earlier! The pricings were a little weird because when we first watched Skyfall it was mid week and for two of us the tickets cost K32,000 or around £4, whereas a Twilight was on a Saturday and the tickets cost double! After Twilight we finally went to the casino that Dan had been begging me to go to, and we spent K50,000 trying to win at an electronic roulette table, which we didn't :) We did watch one of the dealers on the real roulette mess up as she didn't pay out one of the players wins. He had put a chip straddling two numbers, one of which won but she removed that chip from the board! A lot of yelling ensued and they checked the cameras and corrected their mistake.

Mum, Dan and I went to the shelter where mum volunteers on a Thursday to walk a few of the dogs there. We took three on a walk, one each, and walked them for about 15 minutes on a loop Mum knows. When we first got there we couldn't find anyone in charge so Dan and I went off to find the kittens and the puppies to play with! I spent a little while trying to corner one kitten and give it some cuddles because it seemed really scared of people, which makes me sad for that animal and the reasons behind it being afraid. I eventually caught it and settled it down before moving on to the next cuddly little kitten, a pure black one. Dan let me out of the kitten cage because it needed to be latched from the outside, and we went over to the puppy kennel to say hello, they were all so so so sweet!!! About 12 little puppies, all different types, scrambling for our attention :)

Mum eventually located one of the workers and told him that she was a volunteer and that we were there to walk some of the dogs. He told us to wait by the inner gate for him to bring them leashed up to us, as a few dogs can get aggressive with the others when walked I between the isles.
The dog that Dan was given first became really weird when we tried to take him out the main gate, he pulled hard on his collar and refused to budge, he started yelping if we tried to get him towards the gate! The man switched him out for us to another dog who needed a walk, but he didn't like the other two dogs on the walk so had to be kept at a distance. The walk was interesting, the roadside in Zambia is not super clean with lovely pavements, it can be quite gross at times and non existent at others! I switched dogs with mum at one stage because the one she had been given was afraid of the traffic going past, so I took her so that I could keep encouraging her to walk along. It was such a shame to see how these dogs were so happy to be given a little love and attention because most of them have been rescued from terrible homes.

We got back and gave the three dogs back to be out into their kennels. I went to say hello to all the puppies before we left, and give them some more cuddles. We left, walking past the very smelly dumpster on our way out that mercifully you cannot smell from inside the dog home :D Dan and I followed mum to the nearby shopping centre to do a little grocery shopping and to try to get her steak knives at Pick and Pay. They still didn't have any stock, but we left with the grocers mum needed. As we were turning out of the shopping centre I realised with horror that I had left Dan's Ray Ban sunglasses on the post next to the puppies kennel!! I had taken it off so that they didn't scratch them! Oops!! We hooted at mum to try to get her attention and turned back towards the dog home. Dan pulled up outside and I ran in, and thankfully at the right time because there was a woman leaving with them when I walked in! I just looked down at them and told her they were mine, took them from her and left :D I'm pretty sure she was stealing them, so I'm really glad we got them back!

Dan was meant to play golf with Arthur three more times before we left Lusaka. The first time we were actually playing with the owner of the golf clubs Dan had used previously, so he was lent a different set that he really didn't like playing with. It was an interesting match as everyone was playing quite badly because the wind started howling on hole number two and the rain started coming down in sheets at hole 5!! We kept playing till hole 8, me shitting myself as the thunder and lightning that everyone else seemed to be happily ignoring was coming closer and closer to us, and we were right out in the open on that god course! I was really scared. We took shelter in a building on number 7's green, until I pointed out that there seemed to be a brat big metal,pole sticking up from the top of the building. Needless to say we scarpered!

The boys called it quits after teeing off number 8, because the lightning was really just way to close for comfort and the greens were all flooded, and you can't play golf in that. We booked it straight back to the clubhouse, boy was I pleased to be under that roof!! Dan was also glad the game got rained off because there was no way he was winning that round with those clubs :) The next time we were going to play with Arthur was a couple of days later, and Dan and I got to the clubhouse and realised that we were both exhausted and just wanted to go home. Arthur had amassed a large crowd for that day in any case, so we didn't feel bad pulling out at the last minute, and we did have the courtesy to let him know in person as we don't have a Zambian phone.

The final time Dan was looking forward to playing with Arthur, but unfortunately when we got there at the appointed time it turns out that he had been unable to secure anyone else to play with and because he wasn't sure if we were coming or not, he went out with some friends for an earlier match. We thankfully caught him at the clubhouse just before he went off to play the back nine, and told him we would be back for drinks later on when he finished up. I had some fanta's and Dan indulged in some beers with the boys, one of whose was Brian who turned up for another round! We all shared a bottle of delicious wine that Arthur produced, and he also gave Dan and I a bottle to take home with us as a gift, which was extremely kind of him.

The morning of the final non golf game, Mum and Dad took is to a place they like for brunch, called Jeckel and Hide. We drove part of the way in two cars, it's not an easy feat following someone in Lusaka where people drive like hooligans! We parked the meat wagon at a spar and took dads car the rest of the way. Jeckel and Hide has some beautiful leatherwork for sale that is all designed by one lady. The building is a cape Dutch style house, and when you walk straight through it you come to the back porch and garden that serve as the restaurant. I ordered pancakes with bacon and a fanta to drink, and Dan ordered the full breakfast. While we were waiting for it to be cooked, Dan and I walked around the garden where I found a trampoline and proceeded to bounce like the child I still am and embarrass Dan :D Brunch was amazing, and it was a lovely day for it too!

On our way back from the golf later on we decided to finally pick Mum and Dad up a braai as a gift. We had all been eyeing up the hand made ones on the side of the road for a while, but we had no idea of their cost. We stopped at one guy's shop on the corner near the metal crocodile mum likes. We quickly realised that the half oil drum braais we had all liked the most were simply way way too big for practical use, it would take an entire bag of coal to cook anything on it, it was so deep! We settled for a much shallower and more practical model that was rectangular and silver. We brought it home to Mum and Dad and now it lives in pride of place on their porch.

Because we now have no choice but to begin the visa process to get me into the US, after a little research we realised that we would need an official marriage certificate for the application. The handwritten abridged certificate we had would suffice for changing my name in my passport, at the bank etc., but we would need the unabridged and Officially issued copy to send to the states. We went to the South African Embassy in Lusaka to try to find it how we could go about getting me. After waiting at the gates for a while we were brought into the gardens and spoke to a gentleman who had been helping move the crowd at the gates. He did a little digging for us and to our horror told us it would take up to four months for the certificate to be sent to Lusaka! Another four months on top of the possible six to nine months we have to wait for my visa?! No ways, we will have to find another solution!

Dan and I went on a drive to the craft market held at Arcades shopping centre on Sunday the 6th of January, to see if there was anything we liked there that we could use as the tiny tokens we would need to play with for our customised monopoly game. Whilst waking around having a look, a shady looking guy sidled up next to me and showed me the most gorgeous blue stone I have ever seen, nestled in a piece of grubby tissue paper. I immediately thought it was a tanzanite and probably started drooling on the spot because of how beautiful it was. I asked how much it was and the man told me it was $700. I told him all we had was the Kwacha equivalent to $50 and he walked away.

Dan had been nearby when I spoke with the man, but hadn't heard everything properly so I explained what had happened to him. He was certain that the man had said that the stone was 700 Kwacha, not dollars, in which case it was extremely cheap! We argued a little over who had heard what while we walked around the rest of the stalls, and we didn't find any little trinkets that would fit our monopoly bill. I was happy to let the stone go because I wasn't willing to spend $700 on something, especially as it probably wasn't sold with verification that it was a genuine tanzanite. Dan was still sure he heard 700 Kwatcha and at the last minute when we were about to get into the car we decided to go and ask what the actual price was.

We had another look at the stone, which I was certain at this stage was a real (and massive!) tanzanite. The seller verified that the price was in fact $700, so Dan and I walked away. He and a bunch of his friends followed behind us trying to haggle with us, and eventually the seller simply told for us to have a chat with one another and give him our highest offer. Dan and I spoke privately and decided that we would be happy to risk $250 on the stone, on the off chance that it was real and because I was absolutely in love with how gorgeous it was. We told the man our price and he told us he would sell it for $300, as it was his last one and we gathered that he had been hanging onto it since Christmas time, clearly a long time for him.

We split up at this stage, I stayed behind with the stone and the seller whilst Dan drove home to get one of our bank cards and to bring my mum back with him. As it was a Sunday, all the jewellery stores were closed and so we had no way to verify of the stone was genuine or not. I asked for mum to come along because she is one of the people whose opinions I value, and she is a good judge of jewellery too :D Dan wasn't so sure that the stone was a genuine tanzanite but I was 99% convinced that it was because it has what is known as the 'red flash phenomenon'. Tanzanites are trichroic, meaning they display three different colours when viewed at different angles. The colours found in tanzanite are blue, violet and a red or pink colour.

My tanzanite is an incredibly dark hue of blue, and the red flashes are blindingly obvious when the stone is moved around. There are very few imitations on the market and all of these are unable to display the same trichroism. I love it so much! Dan came back with mum, who had a look at the stone. She also questioned Ben, the seller, about how he acquired the stone and got his mobile number from him. His answers were reasonable and informed, and we felt comfortable with going ahead with the sale, and that we could ring him the next day if the stone turned out to be fake. She gave us the very valuable advice that it was a gamble, but as long as what we were spending we were comfortable "gambling" it, then it was a risk we should take. Dan withdrew the $300 in Kwacha for Ben and as Dan was counting it out in K50,000 bundles, Ben was tucking each individual wad of cash into his pocket.

We got home from our tanzanite adventure and I showed daddy the stone, which he thought was extremely beautiful. That evening Mum, Dan, Dan and I had a party at Natalie's house next door, and she had invited a lot of her work friends from the casino and her fiancé had an epic braai going! The previous tenant of her hose had been a Greek man and he had left behind a rotisserie type braai, and they had marinated cuts of lamb that had been on there for hours! They were just divine :D I met one of her colleagues there, a man called Jaques. When I started to tell him about the tanzanite that we had bought, and he really wanted to see it. He had bought a couple of emeralds from a street vendor and had a jeweller that had certified them for him. When I went next door to get the tanzanite I was a little more tipsy than I realised because I got up onto the couch to look at it in the bright lamp light; and I dropped it!! :D Thankfully it was ok, proof at least that its not glass!

Jaques, as well as everyone else at the party, was completely convinced that we had managed to buy a real tanzanite. He also offered to meet us outside the casino at Arcades shopping centre the next day to take us to the jeweller who helped him with his emeralds. We all thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the evening drinking, eating delicious food and chatting. The next day Mum, Dan and I went to the casino to meet up with Jaques. He took us into the jewellers and introduced us. She very kindly looked at our tanzanite and compared it to the tray of their tanzanite, and confirmed that it is, in her opinion, most certainly a tanzanite!! She also valued it between $6000-$7000, based on the stones in the shop. We were obviously really really happy to have a jeweller confirm that it was real. She offered to have it sent away to have it certified but we are leaving in a couple of days so we didn't want to risk it not coming back in time.

We had been hearing a funny noise coming from the right hand tire for some time, and feeling something funny on the mechanics of the brakes when braking, but as it was Christmas and we are in Africa, no mechanics were open to help us out. We asked Natasha's husband to have a look at it at the party, and he told us that the brake pads had worn right down to the metal on that side and had started to grind against the brake disk. Mum managed to get hold of the mechanic, Bobby, who helped fix her brakes when the Lexus arrived, because the driver had somehow destroyed them on the drive down from the port. Bobby agreed to fit us in on Monday January 7th.

We had an extremely harrowing journey in Snolly, following Mum to the repair shop. She knew where it was but it didn't have an address we could plug into the sat nav, so we needed to follow her there as we didn't know where it was and also so she could take us home. Following another car isn't generally too difficult, until you get to Africa!! In the early morning rush hour traffic in the centre of Lusaka, it's a free for all and is stressful driving at the best of times, and throw trying to follow someone else to a place you have never been and it becomes near impossible. We had cars, vans, bicycles etc trying to cut us off, the roadworks we encountered forced us apart for a little while and we had to squeeze back into the moving traffic in front of a very angry truck driver! What multiplied the stress factor ten fold was the fact that our brakes were obviously very dodgy and we were trying to drive within a hair from the very expensive Lexus to avoid being separated from her! A couple of times someone cut Mum off and she needed to brake quickly, it was a miracle that we didn't destroy the back of the Lexus!

We were all so relieved to turned into the repair yard, over a muddy track strewn with car parts and stray chickens. As Snolly braked to a stop, I felt a weird kind of shudder through the car. When Bobby came out to have a look at what might be wrong with the landy, it turns out that the shudder I felt was the brake pad falling off!!! He told us that we were so unbelievably lucky that it had happened after we braked as one more push on the pedal and the brake shaft would have slammed into the brake disk and shattered, leaking out all of the fluid and meaning we would have needed to replace the entire braking system! We were also so lucky it didn't happen as we drove, or we would have lost control of the car at the very least, and most likely rolled it depending on how fast we could have been going. Talk about lucky!!

We are also very lucky that we have Charles Mercer as our marriage official. We emailed him and explained the situation we had been having with the UK visa and that we were now looking to go down the US route, and for that we needed our unabridged marriage certificate. I asked him if there was anything he could do for us in Cape Town as we would be there last on our trip and hopefully could pick it up before we left. He very graciously agreed to help us, and sent us all of the necessary forms to fill out that he would then take to the department of Home Affairs for us. A few days later he came back to us with good news, that he had managed to find a very helpful woman in Home Affairs who would hopefully get our certificate ready in the few weeks we had until we left. Hopefully when we get to Cape Town later on in the month, it will be ready.

One other amazing stroke of luck befell us whilst in Lusaka with Mum and Dad. A few weeks ago whilst staying with Karen and Tiennie, our iPhone 4 went missing, thought never ever to be seen again. We were unconcerned with the monetary value loss of the iPhone but were devastated to have lost every single photo from the entire journey, as majority of them had been taken on that phone, and we hadn't yet backed them up. Yeah stupid, I know! Before Christmas, Dad was on Skype one day whilst at work and noticed a really strange name in his contacts, a one Eugene Kashokele. He clicked through to the previous messages listed on that contact and realised that it was Dan's account!! This Eugene person had changed the name, photo and all the details on Dan's account, instead of creating a new one for himself.

He had also listed three separate contact numbers, which dad immediately passed onto Tiennie to try to contact him. Dad also messaged him but got no response. Thankfully he answered the phone to Tiennie who explained that the phone had gone missing and that he would come by to pick it up with a reward. We are unsure as to how this man came by our phone, he claims that he found it at the entrance to the farm where Karen and Tiennie live, but as Dan lost his last phone by placing it on top of a car we know we wouldn't have done that again, nor could it have made it that far along the bumpy track! We are just very thankful it had actually been found! They organised for the iPhone to make its way to a hotel in Livingstone, just beyond the Botswana border, where Kyle and Mike would be visiting for New Years. They picked it up without and issues and a couple of days after New Years we were once again in possession of Dan's iPhone and all of our holiday photos, which were immediately backed up onto my computer.

Because of the issues we have been with the visa and the certificate, Dan and I decided to see if we were able to move our flights to a week later, and also about the possibility of having him fly straight to America. We were unsure as to weather the UK government would let him in because he would now be viewed as an "overstay risk" because he was married to me. We visited the Emirates office in Lusaka, and were told by the stewardess that I had purchased a flexible ticket, so date changes could be made at all time for no cost. Excellent! We moved our flight easily to one week later, at the same time. Moving Dan's flight to America proved ridiculous, as the cost of switching the flight turned out to be over £3000, you could get 5 flights for that cost!! We left his ticket as flying into Glasgow and we will just have to book him a flight to America for a few days later and hope he gets into the UK.