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!
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