Our research came to nothing. Going from Victoria Falls over the border into Botswana we had 2 options – an expensive transfer through a safari company to Kasane, or a taxi to the border and see what we could find on the other side. We sided with the latter option, and ended up spending a while sitting in the sun on the Botswana the side of what is probably the quietest border crossing in all of Africa. A few more people trailed over and after about an hour we had a small group sitting and waiting for some kind of transport to arrive. No one really seemed to know when it would come, nor what kind of transport it would be. Happy to show M's parents a nice African “wait and see what happens” experience, we continued sitting, waiting, and seeing what happened. Eventually a minibus pulled up from some safari company, the guy hopped out and asked where we were going. “Kasane, how much?”. It was just to help us out and give a favour, the guy said. Fair deal then! We hopped in, made some space for our co-waiters to share the ride but the door was pulled closed. What about the others? we asked. There's no space, he said. There's lots of space, we said. No there isn't, he said. And anyway, a minibus will be along soon. With that, he drove off. Strange.
Anyway, Kasane wasn't far off and before long the guy had dropped us off at a German restaurant-hotel where he said we could find somewhere to eat and took his leave. Lunch wasn't ready, they said – you can go down the road to “The Old House”. Only problem being that we had no Botswana money, so the girl at the bar pointed us to an exchange bureau in a small shopping centre down the road. And what an experience it was!!! A Spar supermarket straight out of Europe, and more bizarre even, there were white people working at the checkouts and working as electricians! For us, who'd only seen white people in safari vehicles or chauffeur-driven Mercedes cars in the last 8 months, it was a surreal sight.
Transport to Katima Mulilo, Namibia, was nearly as elusive as it had been from Vic Falls to here. People couldn't really direct me with any consistency to any bus station although they seemed to agree that the minibuses to Katima left from the Immigration office. When I went there it didn't look like much of a bus stop – an office in a compound and a woman sitting outside under a tree watching the world go by. I went inside, asked around and seemingly confused everyone inside before heading out to poke around again. This was when I saw a minibus with Namibian plates on picking up the woman who was sat under the tree. The driver told me with certainty that he was the last one of the day although he was a little more vague on when the minibus would come tomorrow. “10, 11...” he trailed off as if to imply that it could be at any time at all. And so it was that we ended up scouting out the rooms at The Old House and spending the night in Kasane. Another reconnaissance trip with M led to us finding out that there should be a minibus at 7 from the bus station. Someone else said 8. We decided to give up and go back for a beer and to (eventually, after having a hard time persuading the resident Afrikaners that it was a good idea) watch the Champions League final, which was boring and won by the least entertaining team, so I won't go into that in any detail, to the relief of all.
Kasane bus station. Clean, organised, empty - are we still in Africa????We'd decided to take the earliest possible answer from the previous day's inquest and aimed to wake up in time to make the potential 7am minibus. Our first error was waking up too late for it, and this was compounded by our total inability to open the gate leading to the street. This second error was rectified about 20 minutes later when M's dad realised that actually the gate was not locked at all, although the result of this combination of errors was that we missed the minibus to Katima. Another bout of waiting around then began before we decided to up sticks and move to the Immigration Office where we set up a gypsy camp and, for the first time, introduced M's parents to our favourite sport here in Africa - “sit and wait”.
"Cos I'm a gypsyyyyyyy..."After the traditional 4 hours arsing around, we decided that we couldn't wait for the minibus any more as we'd got tickets on a bus from Katima at 3pm. It was now midday, although we knew that Namibia was 1 hour behind Botswana at this time of year, so effectively we had 4 hours. The taxi dropped us at yet another mind-numbingly quiet border post where we faced a kilometre-odd walk across the beautiful Ngoma bridge to Namibia. If we didn't have the bus to catch I'd have quite happily taken all afternoon to gaze at the scenery provided by this low bridge over a flooded Zambezi river. Luck was on our side as a shared taxi was going to Katima and had four spaces left so we were off pretty quickly. Unfortunately we also found out that the Caprivi Strip area of Namibia where we were was in fact not an hour behind Botswana at all (unlike the rest of Namibia, which was) and so the rush was back on. As so often happens in Africa though, the bus was several hours late and so the whole “will we/won't we” worrying was entirely academic. This left us several hours in the sunshine of Katima Mulilo's main petrol station minding the bags, munching on biltong and drinking Coke. Any attempt to get hold of a beer was thwarted by the revelation that it's illegal for a shop to sell beer on a Sunday in Namibia. Thankfully, selling biltong on a Sunday is perfectly legal and so I was left happy. Yka was also introduced to biltong during the early stages of this trip and was by now seemingly quite a fan. Several packs of biltong later, the bus showed up, and we piled on with a spare pack of biltong for good measure. I liked Namibia already, despite the bizarre beer-selling regulations.
Mopane worms go in...The next day. It's 7am, it's Windhoek, it's cold and grey, and we've slept a bare minimum to be functional. Rgh. Tiina had wanted to press on to Cape Town as quickly as possible so we'd decided just to stay the day in Windhoek and then get a night bus to South Africa that same evening. It's a nice enough town although quite hard to get a feel for – part big town, part village, part Germany and part suburban England, and the central Kalahari Sands Hotel is probably the ugliest swanky hotel I've ever seen, something out of a 1960s English council estate. The day passed by with us wandering around, seeing a few shopping centres, having a few beers (for it was now Monday) and adding a new food to our alimentary CVs: mopane worms. They're quite a delicacy in this part of Africa and, although they look about as appetising as one could expect deep fried caterpillars to look, I found them quite tasty. I was, however, the only one of us who felt this way. Time went by as we sat in various cafes and restaurants and we got onto the night bus for a second evening in a row, as M and I resolved to visit Namibia again in a lot more detail. We hadn't seen much but it looked nice from the little we'd seen. Most of which was in the dark. Throw in a slow 3am border crossing during which a border guard saw my French football shirt and brightened up the evening by declaring loudly “I will steal this man's shirt!” (when in fact I can't think of any shirt less worthy of theft in 2010) and another night of less-than-average sleep levels and that was it – we rolled into Cape Town 21 hours after leaving Windhoek. The final stop of the Cairo to Cape Town route definitely wasn't going to be the final stop on our trip but... WE'VE DONE IT!
...and mopane worms come out again
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