My Sister Lisa sent me an email when I had just arrived in Cape Town with “Jambo Jambo!” as the subject line. I had no idea what she was on about, and no one greeted me in Cape Town that way. I wrote her a slightly perplexed reply. But now, in Tanzania it all becomes clear. “ Jambo” is one of the three ways that you can greet somebody in Swahili, the lingua franca of Tanzania and Zanzibar. We are in Dar Es Salaam today, using the fast internet at the YMCA to catch up on the blog and some chores, namely, renewing the carnet. Paul is sitting next to me with his head in his hands trying to open fancy adobe acrobat documents on a not-quite-fancy-enough computer. 

But before we get to Tanzania,  back we go to the land of Chichewa, Chitumpunca, where Paul Theroux spent his early adult life as a peace corps volunteer teaching English and had his eyes opened to the world. Malawi.

Monday 26th July – Zam Zam Modern Lodge, Tanzania

We are packing up and leaving the Mushroom Farm with a modest amount of sadness.  We take two English guys with us as souvenirs. After an hours driving to the bottom of the road we stop in Chitimba and have a last meal at the Rastaman’s of rice, beans and tea. Paul and I ate with the Rastaman (Elijah) about a month ago and had a fun time talking with him about the bible and it’s place in Rastafarian beliefs. We talked about being vegetarian (which of course Rastafarians also are) and  Elijah added that if we want to become properly pure we must also abstain from the fermented drink - meaning the beer that he had sold us, which we were currently consuming with our meal. Rastafarians believe in the bible, both old and new testaments and they also believe that Emperor Haile Selassie was the second coming of Jesus Christ, so they follow his teachings as well. Interestingly, all of the support for vegetarianism that Elijah invoked came from the bible. (Such as Genesis 1:29 -31 and Isaiah 6-9)

After lunch we carried on to Karonga, the last major town before the border where we would try and buy some US dollars and Bilharzia medication.  Bilharzia is the number two damaging  parasite in Africa after Malaria. It is very damaging in the long term, as it burrows through your skin, into your body and then breeds in your liver, kidneys and bladder. All four of us have been swimming in Lake Malawi and so must take the worming medication to flush it out. I am the first to see the doctor, a charming, laughing man who says “Don’t swim in the lake!” when I tell him what medication I want. Too late for that, I’m afraid – and I defy anyone to see the crystal clear waters of lake Malawi on a hot day and not swim there. Well, maybe if you are staying at a guest house where it is known that a big crocodile lives nearby, then it might be easier. True story – we had a guest stay with us at the Mushroom Farm who had just finished working on the other side of Lake Malawi at a five star resort. At the edge of their property they had a five metre resident crocodile that they protected by not allowing the local Malawians (who hate and will kill any hippos or crocs that they can) onto the property to murder it. They simply told their guests not to swim after dusk or before dawn and never had any problems. Shockingly, some of the guests would ignore this caution and still go swimming in the dark!

Anyway, it was too late for us four, we are all likely to be infected, having swum close to where large populations of people are living, so we need the tablets. I tell the doctor I need them and he jumps up from his chair and does a laughing, wriggling impression of worms devouring him from the inside. He writes the prescription for me and I take it to the waiting room where I study the posters while waiting for the script to be made up.  They are all posters for different contraceptives, advocating “one child every 2 -5 years saves lives.” There is a daily contraceptive pill that also contains an iron supplement, female condoms, depo shots and one that I can’t work out, a product called “Eros” that enigmatically offers the benefit of ”helping you to conquer joy.”

After a failed attempt at buying US Dollars at every bank in Karonga and then on the black market – only the black market has them and it wants 30 percent more than the bank rate - we give up and loan Nick and Chris some US dollars to cross the border with.  We know that we are in Muslim country when suddenly the government toilets are spotless and sport bum guns.  We receive a friendly entry into Tanzania, until darkness falls after about an hour of driving and I nervously remember why we have the rule about no night driving. As little as people obey any kind of road courtesies during the day (there is no way you could call anything here a “road rule”) under the cover of darkness they abandon them totally, doing random U-Turns, busting out of side streets and onto the road, having headlights continually on high beam or having no headlights at all. Like the add says, better to crash at a hotel than on the road - we collectively decide to take the very first guest house that appears.

“Zam Zam Modern lodge” says Paul. “But does it look modern?” I say, weakly. It hardly matters, we have to get off the road. As it turns out, it is very modern, having only opened a couple of months ago. The floors have spotless tiles, it has a lovely secure courtyard in front to park the car and tiny neat rooms. Paul and I eat leftover potatoes and dahl for dinner while the boys hunt down some meaty local fare.

Tuesday  27th July – the White House, Iringa

Wake up happy in a new country – Tanzania! At 7am Paul and I are sitting in the courtyard listening to the sounds of a busy town – so different from the peaceful animal noises of the mushroom farm – and having the Tanzanian ubiquibreakfast of hard boiled eggs, bread and coffee, provided complimentary with any hotel stay. At the Mushroom Farm we got into eating eggs again because the choice of available proteins was so small -  and since leaving we have been only eating out – meaning maybe a handful of beans as our only protein each day. I don’t think it’s enough, so at the moment we are accepting the eggs.  

At noon we are at the junction where we are leaving Nick and Chris. We have lunch with them and Paul and I  have our first witness of the magic of the swahili phrasebook. For Nick and Chris, with their pointing, are only able to secure a plate of chips topped with a simple salad. But the phrase “Mna Chakula Bila Nyama” meaning “I would like a meal without meat” gets Paul and I a delicious, plate of hot rice, peas and carrots in a rich tomato gravy that the ladies keep topping up until you are totally full. Yummy. Since then, that little phrase has delivered again and again.  Paul and I leave the boys here and carry on towards Dar Es Salaam, spending the night in a little mountain town called Iringa.  It is a charming, crowded little village where Indian temples sit peacefully amongst Nazareth stationers, churches, mosques and the Madina hardware store.

28th July – Oasis Hotel, Morogoro

Paul’s birthday is rapidly drawing near and we are still pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  After being woken by the pure and haunting sounds of the call to prayer we eat another hotel breakfast and buckle down for a transit day.  It is a hard days driving, the main route between Dar Es Salaam and the southern part of Africa is clogged with desperate bus and truck drivers taking desperate risks. The only rewards are a few glimpses of giraffe wandering on the savannahs and the tall and elegant Masai men walking beside the road in their white ankle gauntlets and brilliant red drapings.

29th July – the Oasis hotel, Morogoro

We are stopping in Morogoro because we need some minor repairs to our power steering and handbrake cable, and Paul has heard that there is a highly recommended Toyota repairer here.  It’s three pm before the work is done and so we decide to stay another night rather than push ourselves into more night time driving. It turns out that “the best indian chef in Morogoro” is the chef at the Oasis hotel where we are staying. Coincidence! So we eat at home, and the food is as good as promised.

30th July – Kipepeo beach Campsite, Dar Es Salaam

Sadly, we are transiting again on Paul’s birthday but I think we are both happy that we got the necessary work done at a reputable dealer and now we can relax and celebrate when we get to Dar. As a transit day, certainly it is memorable. This is definitely the worst driving we have encountered in Africa, which is really saying something! It seem that the closer we get to Dar, the more desperate the bus and truck drivers become, either to make good time getting out of the city, or to achieve a deadline going in. It is a two lane road right to the egde of the city, and buses and trucks simply pull out into oncoming traffic, regardless of whether there is anyone coming or not, and overtake. If you are oncoming, then you must pull onto the hard shoulder (no matter what condition it is in, flat or sloped, rocky or tree filled) or be flattened. Period. Despite consistently being able to reach speeds of 80km an hour on the good roads, the need to be constantly evading head on accidents means that it takes us five hours to cover 200km.

We arrive at Kippeo Beach at around 4pm, open the roof tent and clink Paul’s survival to the age of 34 with a couple of beers. Despite crocodiles, kamikaze driving, flesh eating worms and terrible roads - he has made it. Cheers!

Two days of rest is needed after four transit days on Tanzania’s psychopathic roads, so we swim and lounge about on the white beaches.  Two days is enough, though, because for all the things that Australia lacks, clean beaches are not among them and they probably are better than anywhere else in the world. Wev’e been spoiled! After two days on the beach we headed back into Dar Es Salaam to try and do some shopping for small bits and pieces that we have been lacking for some time, like a belt and a swimming costume and so on.

Wednesday 4th August -

Time to go to Zanzibar. Zanzibar for me has been one of those mythical places, like Troy and Delphi, that loom so large in history and fiction that it was both essential that we go there and seemed not quite real. The first glimpses of it at the end of the two hour ferry ride from the mainland are of well preserved white washed buildings, long beaches, green gardens and palm trees.  Once the centre of the slave and spice trades, Zanzibar seems now to cater mainly to tourists. For a former “spice island” good food was disappointingly hard to find (we did eventually find it), but unlike many other places we have visited where the backbone of the economy is tourism, Zanzibar still has a thriving and vibrant local populace that is not solely devoted to hassling foreigners. On the sea front there is a large, carefully manicured garden studded with palms, shaded by huge banyan trees and overlooked by ancient buildings. During the day it is a place to rest and watch all the shades of the muslim – africa rainbow and at night it becomes a vibrant al fresco dining area that is as heavily trafficked by locals as it is by visitors. 

 Tanzania certainly has a large proportion of women wearing all different versions of the veil, and many who do not wear it. On Zanzibar the muslim influence seems stronger, more concentrated, and still diverse.  There are women wearing modest western clothes, and a coloured hijab just covering their neck and hair. Others wearing brilliantly coloured loose dresses of carnelian, umber, dazzling azure or canary yellow, often studded with sequins or patterns of sparkling tassels and jewels, with matching coloured shawls over their hair, gold jewelery and henna patterns on their hands. And there are women who at first glance seem to be wearing a conservative black burqa (that only shows their eyes and hands) but are subverting it’s drabness in some way. Some wear a black burqa but made of a rich satin material, almost a “wet look” and clinging. Others have fiery petticoats that flash from beneath, drawing your eyes into them as they walk. In the evenings at the night market, young veiled women meet their boyfriends like the young girls of any other place and stroll along the promenade, or sit overlooking the ocean and talk. Seeing this gives me the impression that the women have a choice about what coverings they wear and how they wear them. It is quite different from the police enforced dress codes that I saw in Iran.

I thought, though, that if I had the chance I would approach a woman wearing a burqa and ask her what made her decide to wear it.  It was when I decided to do this that I discovered the difficulty of the full veil. For I have not had any problem starting a conversation with a woman wearing a hijab, you look them in the eyes, they look at you, you smile, they smile to indicate that they are willing to talk to you and then you talk. Easy. But the full face veil makes it impossible to know whether your advance is welcome or not, and indeed it acts as a kind of deterrent against saying hello. The more I thought about it I realised that it was impossible for me to tell if the woman behind the veil was happy or miserable and I found that quite unsettling. I have no problem with people withdrawing themselves from society for religious reasons – for certainly the effect that the veil creates, is to withdraw one from people who they have not already met – but the difficulty in finding out whether this withdrawal is voluntary or not is a problem for me.

Thursday 5th

We began our exploration of the historic stone town, the former site of the largest open slave market in the world, taking in the sights and smalls of the tiny, winding stone alleys.  Zanzibar smells like coffee and oranges. All the local people eat these oranges that have had the thick outer skin scraped away leaving just the white pith and juicy flesh inside and the air is full of this scent, as well as that of the scraped peel that they dry on nearby concrete steps.

Sunday 8th August -

We catch the afternoon ferry back to Dar Es Salaam, planning to stay here in this poorly designed, difficult and polluted city for a couple of days completing errands like the blog and organising a new carnet. Why build a city without footpaths! Without market areas? Without public green spaces? But the no footpaths, that is the worst, because the traffic in the centre is as deadly as anywhere and frequently you are forced to wade in amongst it. I hate it. It is very unrelaxing.

 And I need to organise voting. There is no embassy in Tanzania, so wasting my vote in a symbolic gesture of support for good management of natural resources and fair treatment of indigenous people will be slightly more difficult than usual.  Ah, two-party preferential voting. Thanks, England.

Anyway, the nearest embassy is Nairobi so we will be heading there and hoping to arrive by the 19th so that I can cast my fantasy into the wind before polling closes on the 20th. Who knows what will happen? Maybe we will end up with an extraordinary English style coalition of the far right and far left grafted together.  At least it would be something different.  See you all in Nairobi, until then Hakuna Matata, people – and if you don’t know what that is you can do what all the whitey’s here have done and crib some swahili by watching the Lion King.

A big part of the appeal of the Mushroom Farm is its isolation. Set high up in the hills in Northern Malawi it has veiws of Lake Malawi, the nearby Tanzanian mountains and Malawi’s rolling hills that are too vast to be taken in with one look. Every day when I get up at sunrise I see something different: an island of rain floats across the lake, trailing shimmering grey veils, or a clear sunrise stains the Tanzanian mountains orange and red. The sleepy blue cover of night is slowly withdrawn from the rich green forest below.

There is no news, no TV, no newspapers to speak of and a very sporadic contact with very expensive phone and internet connections. To reach the Mushroom Farm dedicated travellers have to contend with an hours’ drive around twenty narrow hairpins on a road with a hard potholed centre and soft and crumbling sides. It was a group of Teachers from Edinburgh who brought me the news that History has been made in Australia with our first unmarried woman prime minister (In fact it was a History teacher who told me!).  I’d feel happier about Julia if it wasn’t the right factions of Labour that brought her in. All I want from the elections, Julia, is for the racial discrimination act to be reinstated, please!

Anyway, the Mushroom Farm. We arrived at the Mushroom Farm on Saturday the 22nd of May, directed there mainly by lots of positive word of mouth from other travellers, most notably an English conservationist from Dorset who said that it was the best campsite in Africa and that having been there she felt that her tent had lived. On arriving at the Mushroom Farm it was perfectly clear what she meant: the campsites are perched high up on the edge of an unfenced cliff, giving panoramic (and slightly pulse-raising) views of Lake Malawi and surrounds. We had barely sat down with our drinks before Mickie Wild, the owner, approached us wanting to know how long we were travelling for and whether an extended stay at the farm could fit into our plans. I was keen immediately; the setting is so beautiful and the chance to get a break from continually moving was too good to pass up. Paul felt like the break from travel would also be welcome and that it would be a good opportunity for him to try his hand at a career that he had never done before.

Over the next three days we heard more about what the job would consist of and asked some questions and then Mick left for Mzuzu and we were officially the managers of the Mushroom Farm. Our daily routine is a little bit like this: At 5.45 I get dressed in the tent and go and let the ducks and chickens (who are always lamenting noisily for me to hurry up and let them catch the early worms) out of their coops. I take bowls of ground up corn husk or layers mash to them and then go and do some quick ablutions. The cook, Efreeda, a beautiful Malawian grandmother also starts at the Farm at 6 – she begins by lighting the fire in the stove (a mud construction with three holes to rest pots in and a side oven for baking bread) and a fire under the donkey for the hot showers. I tally up all the previous days bills and then either help Efreeda get ready for the breakfast service if it is going to be busy or chill out drinking tea with guests or water the garden if it is not. Through the day this same pattern is repeated: I feed the birds, maybe do some gardening in the vegie garden that has lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, basil, cucumbers, papaya, banana, mustard leaves, carrot, onion, and radish, help out with cooking and service in the cafe, socialise with guests and prepare bills. Paul relaxes in the mornings, served breakfast and lunch in the cafe he starts his day at two. He feeds the birds in the afternoons and then puts them to bed at sunset. One of his first jobs was a bit of carpentry on the chicken coops (we are completely infested with termites. They live in the soil, in the trees and of course in all the wooden structures, so they need constant maintenance and repair) and I think he developed a bit of affinity with them then. He likes to take them treats like banana leaves and a purple plant that grows thickly around the property which they love. His role in the evenings is primarily that of host and bartender. He presides over happy hour and after dinner he builds a fire in the fire hut and then keeps the conversation and the party going. When we took the job my biggest worry was that in his role as night-time party guy he would be going on a month long bender  (all our food and drinks are free) and end up doing  his liver some damage. As it turns out, there have only been a couple of big party nights in the month that we have been there, and for the most part he has been able to just enjoy a social beer or two in the evening around the fire and then retire at about 10pm.  This is because at the moment most of the party people stay down by the lake, whereas the people who want to do some hiking in the mountains (and get up early without a hangover to do that) come up to us.

We are approaching the two month mark of our stay at the Mushroom Farm and we are now ready to move on. I think that any heady dreams Paul and I might have entertained about taking over a backpackers in some remote corner of the world have been thoroughly dispelled. It is too much responsibility for too little reward.

Today, 16th July we are in Mzuzu running errands and enjoying all the luxuries the small northern capital has to offer, a thrumming little market, internet and the rumour of a second hand book store. (I still haven’t found the book store.) We will be heading to the Mushroom Farm tomorrow and staying there about a week more, before we pack the car and rejoin our northern trail. Next stop: Tanzania.

Look forward to catching up with you all in Dar Es Salaam and the legendary city of Zanzibar.

Just a quick update as it’s been a while since we posted. Well we’ve now been in Malawi about 6 weeks, and we’ve decided to stay longer helping out at a lovely backpackers lodge called the Mushroom Farm, near Livingstonia. We’re staying, eating and drinking for free in exchange for our work. Where we are is quite basic (only solar power, no tv or internet) but a beautiful location on the cliff overlooking Lake Malawi  with stunning views. The work isn’t too hard, but sometimes it can get busy, and overall we’re enjoying it so far. It actually makes a pleasant change to have a little routine, but I’m not sure how long that’s going to last!

Things have been getting incremetally more difficult each day for the past month, so it is very nice to be in the capital of Malawi having a rest, enjoying the excellent produce at the market and luxuries like internet and hot showers. But mainly the produce. There is an unbelievable market here; the area just outside Lilongwe bills itself as “the home of fresh fruit and vegetables” and it really does live up to it’s claim. The simple market of wood tables under thatched covers has rows and rows of vendors selling tremendous quantity and variety of every kind of vegetable. It felt like a bit of a miracle to find tiny heads of broccoli and cauliflower (at huge, western prices) in a market in the middle of Africa. I wandered around surveying the spinach, daikon, eggplant, pineapple, peas, beans, chermoula, avocado, papaya, tomatoes, onions, coriander and so much more.*Joy*. In the evenings I made vegetable curries totally ignoring the rules of what is supposed to go together and just trying to cram in as much and as many vegies as I possibly could.

Mozambique towards the end was a killer. For the month that we were there we were hit with a deadly combination of few places allowing camping and self catering and almost no fresh produce being available. For the last two weeks that we were there, there was literally nothing to buy except some tomatoes and the occasional banana. When we crossed the border into Malawi we were both not feeling very good from eating so much terrible restaurant food (cold gready chips, cold greasy rice. Why is the rice greasy? It’s probably better not to ask. Not to mention that we ate an animal of some kind (chicken or fish) almost every day. I don’t think I have ever been so happy to see a tin of baked beans on the supermarket shelf just over the border in Malawi in my life.

Thursday 22nd April – Kayabuni guesthouse Illa de Ibo, Mozambique

4am wake up to try and catch the  high tide and the public boats going to the famous Illa de Ibo of Mozambique. We pack up in the dark, leaving at 5.15, just as a hint of light appears in the sky. We’ve decided to take “the short road. ” To get from Pemba to the port there is the long road and the short road. The long road is about 200km longer, but is paved. The short road is shorter but no one calls it “the quick way” or “the short cut” because the passing is so difficult. It takes us five hours to cover about 170km (with a breakfast break) and on the way we pass two trucks hopelessly bogged over the axels in thick mud.

We arrive at the port thinking that we are too late for the high tide, and so allow the boat operators to persuade us to pay almost ten times the regular fare, for what we expect will be a special charter. But it’s just the regular boat. Before we land the captain is working hard to secure our lucrative business for the return journey at the same price.

Ibo is quickly moving upscale: most of the lodges there are multi-starred and way out of our budget: some are asking around $360US a night. Even to go up one bracket ( $35US) is too much for our allowances, so we go to the budget place, still travelling with Lewis and Katie, the english conservationist and journalist we collected on the Illa. The budget place is $10US a night for a room with a bed and a mosquito net, and a guy to refill the bucket you flush the toilet with. The two rooms have one full size double bed and a king(ish) single. We flip a coin to decide who gets which room; Lewis and Katie are unlucky and not only win the small bed but also the room which leaks and has deadly fat tailed scorpions living inside. Bummer. There are some egalitarian discomforts too, the water for the shower is putrid, the mosquitoes are singularly ferocious (I score 30 bites just on the top of my right arm the first night we stay) and the electricity generator (there is no public power on the island) seems to have a novel way of producing power from turbines turned by solid noise.

No electricity, no running water, but the big problem on Ibo for budget travellers is no food. Our first day on Ibo is capped off with a visit to the “local restaurant” that a local hanger-on who spotted us coming off the boat takes us to. Ah, FOBs*, sucks to be you. In a grimy little front room lit with a tiny kerosene light we are served cold rice on wet plates and some fish that might have been cooked today…or yesterday. The fish taste a bit spicy so it is hard to tell.

Friday 23rd April

A beautiful muezzin wakes us before dawn. There is no megaphone distorting his supple, pure voice. I lay awake in the dark and listen in wonder. Our brick room heats up immediately with the sun, so I head out for an early exploration of the markets. It is a tropical island, after all, there simply must be some fruit. But there is nothing to be had beyond the prison staples: bread and water. We don’t even have a way to make tea where we are staying, so we have peanut butter rolls with water for breakfast and lunch every day we stay.

There is no way that we are repeating last night’s dining experience, and I have to say I am guiltily relieved that there simply is no other option apart from a swanky resort restaurant. Shame. The meal is expensive in Mozambican terms, but cheap in global terms and we are happy to pay US$10 for a gourmet three course meal of incredible fresh crab and rice.

But still, not a vegetable, not even a salad garnish to be had.

Saturday 24th April

The sea is too rough for snorkelling, but we head out regardless on an ancient wood and cloth sail boat to go swimming around a tiny sand island.  When we reach it we dive off the boat into the warm, crystal blue water and swim around the tiny private beach.  I enjoy the rough boat ride in and out of the channel, bucking on the spray, but Paul becomes quite sea sick and really does seem to turn green at one point.

We eat another lovely dinner at swanky Cincas Portas and then their lovely manager puts on a movie on the projector in the open air. We watch “the hangover” and have some light laughter under the cloud-heavy sky.

Sunday 25th April – Pensao Macomia

We are trying to leave the island, and because we were so ripped off on the way across we are not willing to pay over the odds to get back. Usually we don’t mind paying a bit of a “tourist premium” in poor places but the shameless way they took advantage of us from the outset has made us stubborn. It is not a flattering look, the four of us on the beach refusing to pay more than 50MTS  each ( about$1.50US) and haggling essentially over about $2 for a 40 minute trip. But we win, if you can call it that – after a tense stalemate the boat operator caves in and takes us back to the mainland for the price we should have paid the first day.

At about 4.30 in the afternoon we arrive in Macomia, and again there is not much food to be had in the market and no where to camp and self cater in any case, so again we have to look for a hotel, but this time the offerings are a little better. When we travelled in Asia I loved to eat or stay at places run by Muslims – show me a place run by a lady wearing the hijab and I’ll show you a place where the food is hot and the toilets are clean. So I am very happy when we check into our Muslim run guesthouse and later eat at a Muslim run restaurant. Both of them live up to my hopes: I would happily eat the hot meal we are served off of the scrupulous tiled hotel floor.

Monday 26th April – near Balam Village S13 50 009 E 044 50 733

Despite being able to sniff out some basics at the local market – some potatoes, onions, tomatoes, greens and okra – it’s a sad day. After ten days travelling with Lewis and Katie they are heading north to Mocimba de Praixa and we are going west to Malawi. We say an extended goodbye to them over excellent tea at the Muslim restaurant (strangely called the Soweto Hotel) and then see them off as they prepare to climb into the tray of a blue ute for a bumpy day.

We don’t know it yet, but a policeman asking for a bribe is a kind of opener, a sign that says “Welcome to the start of some very difficult travel. We hope you have your head turned around by your stay.”

We are having lunch by the side of the road, gearing up for a 400km stretch, when a police truck pulls up on the other side of the road.  After exchanging greetings in portuguese he apologises for his English and asks to see my driver’s licence. I show him my NSW licence, and he inspects it closely. Then he asks for my international licence, which Paul produces from the important document place which he fastidiously maintains.

“Ok, this is the one that I am asking for when I ask to see your licence. But you showed me the other one. For this, there is a fine. But I won’t fine you today. Now can I see you temporary import permit.”

He finds a minor error on it, clearly a mistake by the customs official who have given us one day on the permit instead of the standard month.

“For this there is a fine of 200MTS which you pay to me now.”

I protest politely and rather meekly that it is obviously not our mistake, but rather one made by customs, and he just lets us go. It’s strange.

At about 4 in the afternoon we are parked trying to decide wether we will wild camp or not. There is really no where to get away from the road, every available inch of land seems to be populated. But we don’t really feel up to the hassle of staying in a village, where we know that as “Mzungu” – white foreigners – we will be treated like fabulous aliens who are both wealthy and entertaining, and not get a minute’s peace. We are thinking of just waiting until dark and then putting the tent up, when a group of men appear in the road. They perform a charade for us which could have a couple of different interpretations, among them:

“You scared us. We thought that your bearded man friend was a bandit. You are lucky none of us has a gun or we would shoot you. Go to the next village and stay there.”

or

“You should be afraid. You cannot consider sleeping here because the area is full of bandits and you will get shot. Go and stay in a village.”

Either way, the word “Pistola” and the sentiment “don’t stay here, go to the village” makes an impression on us, and to their obvious relief we pack up and leave.

At the next village I ask about “campismo” – the word the English-Portugese dictionary gives for camping. No-one knows what it is, but we are able to convey the message that we want to stay overnight. As we feared, a large section of the village turns out to look at us and see what we will do. Instantly there is a crowd of about 30-40 people, mainly children but also adults and elderly people standing around, staring, laughing and making comments we cannot understand as we put up the roof tent and try to go about our buisness. Simple things that we do, like opening the drawers or lighting the stove delight them to the extreme and the whole crowd erupts in appreciative awestruck laughter.

The crowd stands and watches as I cook dinner, they scream with joy when we get a folding chair out for the owner of the hut (Luis) whose property we are staying on and whom I am attempting to treat as an honoured guest. We pour him a juice, and he shares his cup around the entire crowd. We refill the cup until the litre of mango juice is finished. When dinner is served the same process follows, but Luis first puts some in a bowl for his parents who are inside, and then proceeds to dole a mouthful out to every spectator. It’s not because they are hungry, but rather they seem curious. They all want to have a taste of what these aliens eat, see how the aliens cook and so on. On that night I made brown rice with an indian style brown lentil dahl with fried onion, tinned tomatoes and the greens I got at the market.

After dinner we can’t stand it any more. Paul kept sneaking to the front of the car saying “I just can’t be stared at anymore.” I feel that it would be good if I could provide more of a show, get out the hula hoop or the guitar, but feeling sick and weak and desperate for the toilet all I can think of is finding a way to get the crowd to disperse.. It’s clear that this will only happen when the show is over, when we go to bed. Paul delicately asks Luis about a “casa de banyo” but the portuguese preserves the English ambiguity by translating literally as  “bathroom.” Luis has no idea what he is talking about, so we have to ascend to our tent, giving the impression that us white aliens have no bladders, and make alternative arrangements to avert the imminent rupture.

Tuesday 27th April

Another sublime village muezzin wakes us before dawn. We are anxious to leave before the village gets up, so we rise early, thank all of Luis’ elders who are sitting in a line outside the hut, and give him the usual fee for camping and a bottle of cordial as a gift for his hospitality.

When we set out we calculated that the 400km on bad roads might equal 40km/h and therefore – ten hours, or two days driving. At present we are averaging an agonising 10km an hour across streams, metres of marshland, and shallow rivers. We progress along a “main road” that is often just two brown lines in the grass. Arriving at a log bridge across a narrow but deep stream that is just ten logs laid lengthwise across the banks I think two things: I have to take a photo of this and I don’t really even want to walk across it!  I take a photo of “the bridge” and the men adjusting it by picking up the logs and rejigging them and then Paul drives across it. It is extremely fortunate that we are only carrying one tank of fuel and about 20 litres of water – and only one person. The front driver’s side tyre presses one of the logs down so far it very nearly pops through on the other side. We would have been wedged, if not tipped into the creek if we had been much heavier. There are three more bridges exactly like this one to cross on this one day.

At 5pm we are reluctantly looking for the smallest village we can find to ask permission to stay when we pass into Cuamba and find…camping. Ah, a campsite. I grandly promise that I will never complain about camping at campsites ever again.  So no running water, no shade, and a weird toilet made out of a small pipe driven into a hole in the ground (it’s about 7cm across. I am concerned that I am not calibrated for such precision) no matter. I am very happy to cook and eat unobserved in this cool and quiet part of Mozambique.

Wednesday 28th April.

Paul starts his day by having a chicken run in to the shower room and around and around him while he is having his bucket wash. The chicken repeatedly runs in the door, around him, and then out another hole trying to evade the staff who presumably have lunch on their minds. I don’t think the chicken’s evasion was ultimately succesful.

Another full day’s driving deposits us at Cuamba. I am feeling quite ill, flu like, no fever, and miserable because not only is there no orange to console this sick person, but even our drinking water is full of silt and algae and really very unpleasent to drink.

In the evening again there is no camping, another hot, expensive and not so clean room and another contemptible greasy restaurant dinner of cold oily chips, cold oily rice and fried fish.

Thursday 29th April – Fat Monkeys, Cape Maclear

We cross into Malawi at last, and I am despairing. Malawi seems even poorer than Mozambique. When I visit the supermarket there is almost nothing; only the most basic things like sugar and laundry powder and salt. At least, though, there is baked beans. We stop at Lake Malawi for a few days so that I can get better, but really what I need is some good food. After a little rest from all the driving we strike for Lilongwe, and find the most fabulous market in Africa, as far as I am concerned. I got a fridge full of garden fresh vegies,  and a box of fruits of every colour and persuasion for about $9US – a bargain.

On our first night in Lilongwe we met at Nurse who was complaining about the long term side effects of Doxycycline, the same anti malarial that we are using. Doxycycline is an anti-biotic, and like all anti biotics it kills off all the good bacteria in your gut as well as the nasties. Good bacteria are a crucial part of digestion – not having them results in all sorts of nasty side effects but most importantly, you are not able to absorb nutrients from food very well. This is a double whammy for us, being on an erratic diet and then not being able to absorb the good stuff even when we get it. The nurse has crystallised for us what we had been thinking, to just take the anti malarial when it is raining and there are a lot of mosquitoes about, and just avoid getting bitten by wearing long clothing and repellant the rest of the time.

So bye bye doxycycline, hello cooler, drier climes, gut flora and hopefully, hair regrowth! (I reckon nothing will make a woman quit a drug faster than clumps of hair falling out.)

If someone hadn’t already got the title we might have called this adventure “The wrong way round” because as we are progressing from the south of Africa into the north little by little luxuries, comforts, development are being stripped away. For all the bad press about Zimbabwe, the tap water is drinkable, the tarred roads are driveable and the police were more professional, courteous and friendly than their Australian counterparts.

In Mozambique the roads are very bad. The roads are in three classes on our map; the third class of road marked on the map are almost all currently impassable because the rivers are too high and there are no bridges. The second best roads are like driving on a honeycomb that has had a little water poured on it and can easily slow you down to ten kilometres an hour. The best roads are in some ways the worst: There might be a few hundred metres of smooth new tar where the road is resurfaced or at least the holes have been repaired, you speed up to eighty to try and make some time and then concealed behind some slight curvature in the roads’ surface is a ditch of potholes large enough to lay two people inside. Mostly the “A” roads are a patchwork of stretches of smooth tar, stretches of unrepaired dirt and stretches of tar full of sneaky potholes. Perhaps the condition of the roads, which are the veins of a country, function as a barometer for the developement of the country in general. Here the tap water is not drinkable. In Chimoi, the first place we stayed in Mozambique just over the border, there is running water for only one hour a day. In that time people who have one fill up huge water tanks and every bucket they have so that they can wash up and flush the toilets for the rest of the day. Power outages are regular occurences and unemployment is extremely high. Needless to say, we have had a lot of difficulty getting to use the internet as in the few places that attempt to provide it the connection is down a lot more often than it is up, either because of connection problems or because there is no power.

For this reason I am going to try a twitter inspired version of our blog to bring you up to date, so I can get this done and off while the window of online opportunity is open.

Monday 29^th March – Bulawayo Zimbabwe

The National history museum is actually an exhibit of the attitudes old Rhodesia but it hasn’t woken up to the fact yet. There are dusty exhibits juxtaposing bone and skin “witchdoctoring” against the little glass phials and shiny instruments of “modern medicine.” One “exhibit” is a trophy room, full of world record holding horns and plaques congratulating the people who killed them. One wall purporting to show the evolution of African man from monkeys includes all the various “types” of “the black african” in the stages that he passed through as he moved away from his monkey relatives, but the face of the white Rhodesian who curates the exhibits is like the face of God, implied and absent.

Bulawayo art gallery functions as a kind of Salon; we have overheard so many interesting conversations about art and freedom here. While we were sneaking a prohibited peek at the closed Owen Maseko exhibition an artist introduced himself to us and invited us to his studio. I spend a lot of monday afternoon there with a bunch of other painters / sculptors / poets / hangers on / talking about Zimbabwe and the world and end up buying some art as well.

Tuesday 30^th March – Kyle Veiw Chalet Masvingo

In Australia if you work in an animal orphanage you get to work with wombats and wallabies. If you work in an animal orphanage in Africa, like Chippangali on the outskirts of Bulawayo you get, oh, maybe ten lions, half a dozen leopards, caracals, hyena, monkeys, crocodiles, kudu and a black mamba you could wrap longways around a car and still have some left over to tie the bow with.

We arrive after dark at our campsite and take a cheap chalet instead. We feel the ghosts of wealthy Zanu PF ministers here – it is a huge place, with a big kitchen and entertaining area, bedroom with a tv, a bathtub for a man of 7 foot and palatial views over the lake. And nothing in it has been touched, not the lime green patterned curtains or the fat orange sofas or the see through glass china cabinet that divides the kitchen and dining areas since the 70′s when this place was obviously the peak of privilege and luxury. It’s fabulous.

Wednesday 31^st March -

Great Zimbabwe ruins. Neither of us can understand why we weren’t taught at school that for four centuries (1200 – 1600 ish) Zimbabwe had a civilisation and an architecture to equal much of the civilisation that was developing in Europe.

Thursday 1^st of April – Heaven Lodge Chimanimani village

I try telling Paul that my poo came out bright blue; he believes me, so I press on “Aqua, tending towards a shade of lavender” and he just nods, presumably because these things will happen when one travels in Africa. I haven’t thought the joke out far enough and when he continues with his bland acceptance I run out of things to say and it’s a bit of a fizzer. “Maybe it’s something I ate…or maybe it’s April fools day?”

In the hill areas up towards Chimanimani they have bananas, avocadoes and macadamias that they break into using fire which gives the nuts an exquisite roasted taste. They also have drive through shopping: when we pull up to buy some fruit the vendors rush over before we can even switch off the engine. They have barricaded our doors, so through the windows we buy a plastic grocery bag with 10 massive grapefruit sized avocadoes ($1) as well as a bag of bananas ($1) and two bags of macadamias….$1.

Friday 2^nd April – Base Camp Chimanimani National Park

The base camp is on the side of a mountain overlooking the village and giving little sign of how beautiful hiking in the mountains will be. We spend the afternoon resting and preparing for the hike.

Saturday 3^rd April

For $5 a day we get a guide who takes us for eight full hours of walking. The front side of the mountains has stratified trees hung with grey moss, streams hidden in rocky gullies and pockets of rich forest wedged into small valleys. On the Mozambique side one of the mountains is (annoyingly) called Ben Nevis (for Aussies that’s the biggest mountain in Scotland, and the U.K. too, I think) but at least this time the facsimile Ben Nevis, with it’s swiftly pouring grey clouds, rugged grey stone peaks, stone strewn streams and sweeping grassy valleys actually does resemble Scotland: unlike the waterfall which bears no resemblance to Queen Victoria whatsoever. We walk too late and miss the sunset. We have to scramble down the front of the mountain in the dark. Under the cover of trees the blacknesss is complete and gives no hint about where the footing is even or treacherous. We descend by trying to walk exactly where the person in front has just proved the path sound. At home we have a freezing mountain water shower – it’s so wrong to have to end a hard day’s walking with a cold shower!! and then eat bananas and roasted macadamias in front of the fire the staff light for us before collapsing in bed.

Sunday 4^th April

Paul has terrible blisters meaning no more mountain climbing for at least a week. We drive to Mutare, near the border with Mozambique and have a terrible night in a hotel with no hot water, rude staff and no mosquito nets. We roast in our skins and the mosquitoes descend on us to feast on our crispy skin. When we cover ourselves in repellant the mosquitoes try to land on our sleeping eyes. Awful.

Monday 5^th April Pink Papaya Mozambique

A lovely friendly guesthouse and dinner at an Indian “mini cafe” which is three plastic tables at the top of a basket ball stadium. Excellent food and nice company provided by young German guys doing volunteer work against AIDS with a local NGO.

Tuesday 6^th April – Caia motel

Everybody has a story like this one: you pull up in a small dusty town on the trucking route after a full days driving and you just want a cheap bed for the night. You pull into the first hotel you see. You are tired, so the fact that the lounge area is full of men without luggage sipping drinks and waiting for something does not arouse any suspicions. It is only when you return from your meal of the only food the town serves – chicken and chips – that you notice the women moving between the rooms, the women answering their doors wrapped in a towel, the women who also don’t have any luggage, that the penny drops…Oh, we are staying in one of those hotels.

Wednesday 7^th April – Macuacuane in Pebane

We have a four day rest at this empty beachside hotel. The beach is not fit for swimming, the water is cloudy and rough. Two fishermen are killed by an accident with their net and the difficult sea while we are staying there. Despite the lack of swimming, the place is very peaceful and we enjoy taking the two beautiful Labradors to the beach morning and evening and hanging in a second storey room over the beach in the heat of the day.

Sunday 11^th April – Pensao Cruseiro – Mocuba

We are really forced out of Pebane because we have run out of vegies. There are only coconuts and bread in this sandy place. It’s a full days driving of pothole mania to Mocuba, and the map and the roads don’t add up, so I have lots of fun stopping regularly and screeching out my rusted portuguese to try and get directions. Almost no one, unless they are an economic refugee from Zimbabwe, speaks English here, but they are pretty forgiving of my ignorance of the lingua franca and do their best to help me and to understand.

Monday 12^th April -

And another transit day…poor places propagate preposterously potholed passings.

Tuesday 13^th April – Pensao Brasilia Nampula

We get up early not realising that we are about to discover my perfect morning. We go to the hotel’s own pastelaria at opening – 7 am – and have a very light first breakfast of toast and butter and black tea. Then we head out to walk around the little city and search pleasantly (but in vain) for suncream and internet. We stop at the cafe attached to the four star hotel for an excellent second breakfast of european quality espresso, croissant and portuguese tart. Then the primero mercado on the way home – long rows of shaded tables piled with spinach, parsley, coriander, lemons, eggplant, onions, potatoes, bananas, red and green capsicum, fresh chillis, cucumber, tomatoes and oranges. I buy as much as I think will fit in our fridge. I am in vegetable heaven.

Wednesday 14^th – Friday 16^th April – Casa Luis Illa de Mozambique

We stayed three days but I didn’t really enjoy our time on the Illa. The main reason was because of the guesthouse. They have a beautiful great Dane cross that is totally untrained and unmanageable. On our first day after being jumped all over by him we tried to take him for a walk. But no one ever walks him, and he was completely terrified to be out with us on the lead. Over the four days the pattern of mistreatment deepened – constantly scolded, never praised, never played with or walked the miserable puppy is beaten by the staff, the owners, the owners children, regardless of what he is doing; they hit him for being naughty, they hit him with an umbrella while he is standing around, they hit him when he is tied up and not able to do anything. By our last day I am totally sick with the hopelesness of the situation, in contrast to the dog who is finding ways to live and survive in it, laying low when the staff are around, finding clever ways to torment them, sleeping in the day and playing with guests at night.

The Illa is also a toilet and a rubbish tip – the beaches are covered in litter, and people openly use the beach as a toilet even during the day. The Illa is hugely overcrowded – a tiny island with a few compacted slums in the centre the number of people moving around at peak times – 5 pm – seems to threaten to sink the island. But like anyplace where people live cheek by jowl, they are all extremely unreservedly friendly and every time I go out I am met by lovely strangers who want only to learn what little my portuguese can tell them about me.

In the Illa we meet a lovely English couple who make a shortcut of our next transit day with their excellent company and conversation. We travel a full day together to Pemba beach where we are now and are planning to all go together to the famous Island of Ibo in a few days.

We love Pemba. The guesthouse is run by a service-minded Australian who does everything possible to make our stay nice. The campsite is grassy and shaded, the beach is close, calm and clean. From Ibo we are planning to head into Niassa National Park and then Malawi.

Thanks again to all of our readers and commenters – we love your comments and greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback. Until next time, Adeus.

p.s. we are going into the main village to try and put photos up tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

And a few other headlines that won’t sell any papers but might add some balance to the picture of Zimbabwe that they create:

“Thousands of tourists visit Zimbabwe: report having a nice time”

“Fuel and groceries  widely available  in Zim”

and even

“Vegans on the brink of death from culinary boredom find salvation in Zimbabwe. -  “Best fruit and veg markets in Africa.”

But before we come to how cool Zimbabwe is, lets go back to Botswana because we saw some really amazing stuff there…

Friday the 4th of March – Deception Valley, Central Kalahari Desert

S 21 403.38 E 023 771.46

We came up with a “lion plan” on the drive to the Kalahari. If one of us is ambushed by a lion or other toothsome predator then the other is to blast it in the face with the fire extinguisher. If that doesn’t work, then bludgeon it with the fire extinguisher. We have decided that yelling “fire” is better than “Iambeingattackedbyaliongetthefireextinguisher”for saving precious seconds, so that is our safe word. At the gate the ranger is appalled by our lack of firewood and insists that all camps must have a fire lit at night to be safe. We buy firewood.

Friday 5th March -  Sunday Pan S 21 33.196 E 023 68.810

Up at 5.30 to try and get to a waterhole before sunrise: we are not even close. By the time we get organised and drive to Sunday Pan it is about 7.30 and the sun is well up. We eat breakfast in a shady grove of trees and watch Eland graze around us. We drive around all day and mainly see antelope and butterflies, scores and scores of butterflies, a living confetti that swirls up in little gusts out of the long golden grass. In the afternoon we watch the same spot feeling like ancient Romans who have come hoping to see somebody die.

Sunday 6th of March – Day of Stakeouts.

At 4 am the alarm sounds and we get straight up without dwelling on how early it is. We are ready to drive at 5am as we slept at Sunday Pan campsite so as to be close to the waterhole of our choice.The waterhole and everything that surrounds it is a tawny grey when we arrive. For three hours we watch a procession of different birds; guinea fowl, doves, flocks of white heron come and go. A little group of jackals come to drink and play and wade. But no lions. At 8.30 we give up and start on a slow game drive around the park. At lunchtime we are resting in a campsite having coffee when a German couple we met earlier arrives. They have their fingers on the lion pulse: they saw a pride of six at the gates the day they arrived and have seen lions every day that they have been in the Kalahari. They tell us that there are two male lions near the road about 30kms away. We jump in the car and hurry. We don’t need to. When we arrive at 1.30 there are indeed two male lions asleep under a bush about 5 metres from the road. And that’s where they stay for the next four hours as we sit in the car, watching and waiting. I am alternating my novel reading with one book of the bible at a time, and I manage to  read through the whole of Joshua while we wait.

The most exciting thing that happens in that time is when one of them stands up to do a wee. And then goes back to sleep. Lions sleep 20 hours a day, so what did we expect? As dusk approaches we decide to leave as driving at night is forbidden in the park and it is forbidden to follow animals around anyway. Despite the lack of activity, we are both very excited to see these two huge animals so close. They are mature male lions, with the big black mane of the Kalahari lion. The power of them and the beautiful impassive gaze they give when we take their photo is awesome.

Tuesday 9th March- Audi Camp Maun Botswana

Back in Maun we spend the whole day at different garages trying to get a diagnosis and a cure for the grinding / clicking sound that comes from the car when we turn the wheels at slow speed. With some help from the best mechanic in Australia we are able to conclude that the problem is not serious and does not need to be fixed right here and now.

Wednesday 10th March – Happy Birthday Dad

We managed to find a way to call Australia, so I can call my dad and wish him well which was super nice. I had an early birthday present as well:  using my standard pick up line that I try on everyone I meet “excuse me, do you read books in English?” I finally hit the jackpot. Two South Africans who are travelling home from London overland not only read books but read Literature. **Joy**. From them I acquire “Northanger Abbey” and “Country of My Skull”  among other delights.  In the afternoon we do a massive “are there really any groceries in Zimbabwe?” shop and fill up on diesel.

Thursday 11th March

Bankwest won’t let us have any US$ unless we call them first so we are stuck another day. Probably there are very few real medical conditions that can totally prevent a person from travelling, but Hypochondria, man that really gets in the way. In the afternoon I feel hot and sick and I have a headache. Malaria!! my mind screams. Malaria!! I take my temperature and Paul ‘s – 36.5 and 36.9 respectively. He is actually a little hotter than me. Phew. I feel better right away.  Once I regain my composure I wonder, is he a little hotter all the time and thus built for England? And me a little cooler, and more able to tolerate heat than him?

Friday 12th March – Nata Lodge

Feeling very anxious and sweaty we left the bank with $2000 US stashed in various different pockets. We jump in the car, lock the doors and drive away so that we can stow the loot safely.

At Queta we picked up a hitchhiker named Jemima next to a statue of a Giant Aardvark. She is from Sheffield. If she had done something amusing I am sure I could have made a limerick out of that.

Saturday 13th March – Chobe Safari Lodge.

I have come home. Or almost as good as. Chobe Safari Lodge is a 4 star resort with air con and big soft sofas, a salt water swimming pool that overlooks the river, a restaurant and …a campsite. So campers can enjoy all the luscious amenities without paying US$100++ a night. And this is what we do for the next three days; reading on sun lounges by the pool.

Tuesday 16th March Ihaha Campsite Chobe National Park

S 17 50.374 E 024 52.586

Chobe Safari Lodge is also flooding. It’s prime position right on the river means that soon about half the campsites and the campers’ bar will be under water. It also means that on the way to the ablutions first thing in the morning it is possible to first hear, and then see Hippos blowing like little whales in amongst the mangroves. Also, for the sharp eyed, there are small crocs too.

Our stop at the supermarket before going into the national park brings a welcome surprise. For some reason this one supermarket has nuts. Lots and lots of nuts: walnuts, macadamias, almonds and our beloved cashew. Finally, a break from the monotony of ground bone!

When we enter Chobe National Park we drive straight into the largest herd of elephants in Africa.  Estimated to be a herd of about 100,000 their constant movement between the forest (on one side of the road) and the river (running closely parallel to the other) makes for interesting and mostly very slow driving.  It also makes for a hairy moment when a group by the river are spooked by something.  A stream of hooting, running elephants begins to pour across the road in front of us. For a moment I think that we are going to be trapped by elephants rushing blindly on all sides, but the road behind us stays clear. Reverse! Reverse! This becomes a catch phrase over the next two days, as we encounter many playful young bulls who enjoy giving the fly ins a fright by flapping their ears and staring meaningfully at us while grinding dust under their feet. By the end of the second day we are able to decode posturing from real hostility, but it takes us some time.

Wednesday 17th March

The sun is getting up later and later, so at 6am when we rise it is still quite gloomy. We set off on the days game driving, trying to explore the “loops” that usually branch off the main road to provide a better veiw of the river. Due to the high river levels almost all of them are flooded completely.

Elephants are an emblem of African conservation because where they can survive everything (despite their heavy footsteps) thrives beneath them. Chobe then, is simply throbbing with life: before lunchtime we see two huge, fat black mamba snakes – the most infamous snake in Africa, as well as loads of water monitors, meercats, mongoose, giraffe and impala – but most of all Elephants. By lunchtime it was getting quite hot and the river has filled up with the playful pachyderms, who wrestle, squirt, spray, wallow and occasionally even drink the water. For me, this is a heaven on earth – I feel so at peace seeing that such a place really exists. From a vantage point over the river you can see the wide water, dotted with islands, perhaps a kilometre across, a green band of forest as far as the eye can see, the sky swelling with thunderclouds that seem as big as continents and all this dwarfing thousands upon thousands of elephants  moving freely across the landscape.

Thursday 18th March Chobe Safari Lodge

Food and exercise: they are the two precious commodities on this trip. It has begun to feel for me a bit like a paraplegics tour of Africa: no where allows you to get out and walk anywhere, and on transit days we might spend six to eight hours in the car just sitting and driving.  So it is super nice  to be able to walk the two kilometres from the hotel to a restaurant for my birthday dinner.  We have a vegetarian meal of pizza and salad and a bottle of “goats do roam” Merlot that we first tried and liked on our wine tour in South Africa.  It’s late when we leave so we catch a taxi home and have another drink at the hotel bar overlooking the river.

Friday 19th March

We were going to cross into Zimbabwe for my 30th but we are feeling a bit worse for wear after our unaccustomed drinking spree and decide to spend the day lounging. We have a great vegan lunch at a cafe that has several vegan options, and then in the afternoon it rains and we sit on the plush sofas reading, having devonshire tea and watching the river.

Saturday 20th March – Shoestring Backpackers, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

I wake up in the morning and my first word is – Zim – ba -bwe! I’m so excited!

While we are doing our final preparations a group of ververt monkeys moving through trees over a newly flooded area start making alarm calls. We go to look because we assume it is a crocodile. We don’t get to see the croc but while we are away from the car one of the troop goes inside. She finds a big bag of unopened nuts and beans and opens a bag of roasted and salted peanuts. These she leaves neatly behind on the seat before escaping with the raw nuts that are more to her taste. I am impressed that she makes no mess: just takes one bag of what she wants and leaves. Later she manages to get another bag of nuts while I am showering and Paul is working on the car, so shame on us, really.

We fill up all our jerry cans with water because Zim is supposed to be Cholera country, do a final shop, and cross the border. It’s a short drive from Botswana to Victoria Falls, about 80km.

Sunday 21st  March – The smoke that thunders – Victoria Falls

So there’s a big puzzle for me here: Why does an educated, intelligent and pioneering Scottish person take a name like Mosi oa Tunya- “the smoke that thunders” and replace it with another name, a cipher, totally devoid of any poetry or even relevance to the place or the experience?

As you drive into town at this time of high water, the smoke is visible from the very outskirts rising,  serene and pure, a luminous white that cannot be confused with regular smoke.  At the falls you enter into a kind of hanging swamp, a rainforest that flows with the creeks and pools of perpetual rain from the mist of the massive falls. As you move along the walk each lookout builds up the picture of the vastness of the gorge you are trying to create in your mind. Geysers of water shoot up from the gorge like volcanic eruptions, the sheer volume of water tumbling over the edge drives them up creating a perpetual pulsating rain. Everywhere you look into the mist there are rainbows, a multiplicity of them shimmering in the roaring space.

Mosi oa Tunya is the largest waterfall in the world and one of the seven natural wonders. The sheet of water that falls over it is more than a kilometre wide. It truly is a wonder of the world: I have never experienced anything like it. Not just the natural beauty and awesomeness of it, but another quality. There is a plaque at one of the first viewpoints dedicating the falls to peace, and as you move along the falls a kind of euphoria overwhelms you. The rainbows in every direction. The falling water and the luminous roar. And all the visitors, totally drenched and soaking, laughing. Laughing and laughing, at the sight of you, soaking wet and at themselves dripping, and at the delightful warm sunshowers that sweep across us over and over again.

Monday 22nd March – Sinamatela Camp Hwange National Park

It turns out that the woman who runs Shoestring is from Como in the Sutherland Shire. She used to have a salon in Cronulla and came to Zimbabwe eleven years ago. Small world eh?

Is  Sinamatela camp the best one in Africa? It has a spectacular view over a wide green valley. Free firewood, and super friendly attendants. Shady campsites and hot showers. We love it. At 6pm the night security guard arrives and we invite him to dinner. He stays to have cashew and cauliflower curry and tells us all about his politics and why lions become man eaters.  So you think that I am easier to catch than a spring loaded antelope?  Ageing, toothless lions think so too, and when they can no longer catch their usual prey they turn to the villages.

Tuesday 23rd March

The big attraction for us of Hwange National Park is this: guided walks. We get up at 5.30 am to be ready for a 6.30 start. What I expected to be a scenic stroll for two hours turns out to be a brutal trek, bush bashing for four hours in the wake of a very experienced tracker. The experience reminds me very strongly of when, in the summer holidays my dad would take my on bushwalks conducted by the National Parks and Wildlife rangers in the Royal.

The ranger that takes us on this walk has successfully tracked the rhinos in the park more than 20 times – he does this to try and prevent the animals being poached. The gun that he carries with him is not, as we think, so much for lions and buffalo as for poachers. It turns out that both the rangers and the poachers have a “shoot first, ask later” policy, so he carries it in his hands all the time so as to be ready.  To track the rhino, which move more than 30km a day, you have to move fast, and this guy really does. I quickly lose all track of time and find myself totally immersed in the scenery, the mint smells, and concentrating on where to walk. We don’t see much game, just two very fresh lion prints and a lot of small animals like warthog. When we arrive back home at ten thirty we are destroyed: we both down a litre of water immediately and then fall asleep for two hours.

In the night we hear all the calls: the lions roaring, the leopard panting and the hyena making their strange high-pitched wail. Literally the minute we are in the tent the hyena are there, sniffing around the tent looking for leftovers.

Wednesday 24th March – Masuma dam Hwange NP

S 18 43.848 E 026 16.835

The lions are still roaring when we get up at 7. At 12 we arrive at Mandavu dam and spend three hours watching a constant stream of croc traffic back and forth across it. The dam is infested: sometimes we can see three at a time. This is the best place for watching crocs ever, a comfortable shelter with tables and chairs where we can eat and drink tea and relax.

At three we leave and find an even better dam at Masuma: it is smaller and easier to watch, and it has 15 hippos in it, up very close, all quite relaxed and just doing their thing. The camp attendant invites us to stay the night so we spend the whole evening in the comfortable hide cooking dinner, talking and watching the hippos play and growl and posture with each other. There is also one large crocodile that spends most of the afternoon on the bank. Godfrey, the camp attendant, eats with us and tells us all about Zimbabwe and the animals. This definitely is the best campsite in Africa.

Thursday 25th March – Bulawayo Caravan Park

We are sad to leave Masuma but have run out of fresh vegies, so it is time to go. It’s a long day’s drive to Bulawayo, and when we arrive it is coming on to dusk and drizzling rain. Kind of appropriate for this city that seems like it is a relic of thirty years ago, just excavated and covered in lush foliage. It is a beautiful old colonial city, with wide tree lined streets and art deco buildings. It’s like the TV show “life on mars” where the guy wakes up in 1976 – old datsuns everywhere and snappy clothing.

On the way to the campsite (we are quite lucky, we weren’t sure if there would be camping here or not, and there is, right in the centre of the city) we pass a lady selling perfect produce at a stall. I buy the silvery thing that is like spinach (she calls it “Chermoula”), a cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes and oranges. Dinner with all the trimmings tonight feels very luxurious.

We love Bulawayo, and being able to stay so close to the centre. We are enjoying the restaurants and drinking the tap water and getting to see “how it really is.” And it really is: two steps forward, one step back.

On Friday we went to the gallery where an exhibition critical of the government had just opened. Owen Maseko had filled the windows with text and pictures of depicting the violent oppression of opposition and dissent. While we ate lunch we listened to him talking about his exhibit and read “the Zimbabwean” – a UK based paper carrying articles critical of Mugabe and his ministers.  On Saturday the windows of the galley are plastered over with newsprint, Owen is arrested and the exhibition is closed.

We have been able also to find quite good internet here: but none of the computers are fast enough for us to upload any photos. So sorry everyone. I am trying to put a photo up of Mosi oa Tunya at the top of the page, but am having trouble with that. If I don’t manage I do recommend people google “Mosi oa Tunya” and “black mamba.”

Probably our next update will come from Zambia or Malawi (we still haven’t decided.) Until next time!

Thursday 18th February – The Bridge Backpackers  S19 56.679 E 023 29.348

We pack up easily and are ready to go by 10 (pretty good for us) but the battery is not ready. When we try to wake it up it makes the same noise that people make when you try to wake them at four in the morning when they are really drunk and maybe have a head injury as well. It goes: unhunhh hunh hunh. And then it doesn’t go. We try a well tested hangover cure: attaching it to electrodes from another battery. Ok, I have never really tried that as a hangover cure, but to my surprise it doesn’t work for the battery either. A combination of the extreme level of the battery’s flatness and the cheapness of our jumper cables (very thin wire carrying a very small current) means that it is about a half hour before the battery has enough charge to turn the engine over. We get a recommendation for an auto electrician which we drive directly to. They inform us that our smart solenoid isn’t working due to a missing wire, and they add an extra one. We, not being auto electricians don’t know what to think about this. Did the guys in Australia not do a proper job? Has a wire come loose when driving over very rough corrugated roads? Do these guys really know what they are doing or are they just talking? We have no way of answering any of these questions.

Now at least, the car runs, so we can run our errands in town and head for Moremi National Park, on the East side of the Okavango delta. On the road between Maun and Moremi we pick up four hitchikers: more than usual – two young women and two very cute babies that ride on their laps. Child seats don’t really exist here. I have seen people put tiny toddlers (a chubby little girl who could only just stand up) in the tray of the ute with the dog, I assume because very few babies here wear nappies. So riding on mum’s lap is quite accepted and the norm. The women live at one of the camps inside and they are very helpful to have in the car because before we have even entered the park there are big herds of elephants strewn across the road. At one point, because of the heavy tree coverage, we are in the middle of a herd quite close to a young elephant before I even realise the herd is there. It is very important not to come between the mother and her calf and I don’t know what to do. The local woman encourages me to drive steadily through the group in 2nd gear, which I find out later is also what the park rangers do. It’s very hair raising, driving amongst these animals, many of whom could easily turn the car over if they wished. And these elephants are not the sedate, disney elephants of Etosha, either.  They make it clear by standing, staring, flapping forward their ears that this road belongs to THEM and you drive upon it on THEIR terms.

The map for Moremi comes with a number of worrying instructions like

“It is extremely dangerous to walk around the campsite at night. If you are parked away from the ablutions, rather drive. It is allowed.”

Unlike Etosha national park, with it’s fenced campsites and it’s 2WD friendly roads, Moremi feels really wild. There are no fences around the camps, no prohibition about getting out of your car (common sense must supply that) and few rangers patrolling. We arrive at our campsite much later than we should have: it is just on dark when we start putting up the tent and fix dinner. We can’t decide wether we are too far from the ablutions to walk or not, and to tell you the honest truth, being Westerners I think we are a little desensitised to the constant hysterical prohibitions that are everywhere in life back home. So we feel, they say it, but do they really mean it? The answer is yes. Yes, they do. This is the first and only night that we walk about. Huddled over our torch we hurry to the ablutions. Just outside the ring of campers my headtorch catches the eye shine of a huge hyena. We brush our teeth and wash our faces quickly in the bathrooms, too afraid of the deepening night to have showers. Back at our camp the wide set eyes of a hippo grazing at night are lit up about 20 metres away. Hippos and mosquitoes kill the most people in Botswana – so now my heart is slamming in my chest as I scramble upstairs. Thank goodness for the roof tent!!

Friday 19th – Xakanaxa camp Moremi National Park S19 10.907 E 023 24.865

While we are having breakfast four Dutch people drive their car into one muddy puddle too many and kill their engine just across from us. I greet them and offer to help, but they seem confident that they can resolve it themselves. When we are packed up ready to leave and their car still won’t start they come and ask us to give them a tow. With a skinny yellow rope as thick as my thumb we tow their car while they attempt to start it. It is very difficult because the road is full of deep and shallow potholes of water that need to be negotiated slowly and carefully. We get the car started and decide to see the park as a convoy, since we both planned to take a boat ride on the river today anyway. It takes us two and a half hours to drive the 40km to the boat station, but their car does not stall again and neither of us gets bogged. At the boat station, to my disappointment, they are only offering powerboat rides, not the slow, quiet, mokoro canoe. We have a thrilling zip along the tiny twisting lanes of the delta and across the vast sweeps of the mighty river in the centre but the only wildlife we see are nesting birds and the groups of hippos that don’t really care who you are. The groups of hippos are impressive, but such is their reputation for tipping out boats of people and chomping them (every guide I have spoken to has a story about the time it was his boat that got tipped in) that the driver never lets us get near. And our boat is far too noisy for us to spot a shy snake or a wily crocodile. At night we camp with our new friends and make a big fire. We watch the big hyena (a camp regular, it turns out) come and check each site for tidbits when he thinks he has the cover of darkness. He is quite huge and I find the strange loping walk rather creepy.

Saturday 20th February - Bogged – S19 12.914 E 023 22.615

During the night I had nightmares about sleeping on the ground, being attacked by mosquitoes, with Hippos walking around me. We are camped close to a “Hippo lane” – a clear channel made by a massive body pushed through the grasses, and the prints tell us that they come up and inspect the camp at night. When I need to wee I do it with the headtorch on and one hand on the ladder. In the morning there are Hippo tracks all around the car.

The Dutch people leave for Kasane, and there are no other campers so we are exploring on our own. Paul is driving and I am attempting to navigate with the map and the GPS, but there are so many tracks that are not “the road” (and no signage) it is impossible to tell which is the “real” road. Also, many of the GPS coordinates given are wrong. We are following a track that seems to me to be quite well used, trying to head towards the “Lions Den” area of the park when the road starts heading through some boggy strips. We drove through a lot of water the previous day, and so are not worried. We should be – we are heading  straight into the middle of a huge marsh. At first we make it easily through three fairly wide stretches of water and then at midday, just like that: Stuck. Really stuck. I am quite beside myself with fear about the hippos, the crocodiles, and all the other wonderful, wonderful wildlife that we have come here to see. The car has sunk in quite dramatically, there is about a centimetre to spare before water will start coming in the passenger door. The car is totally surrounded by reeds and water. And when we get in the water there are leeches. Paul is so focussed on getting us free that he seems quite oblivious to the mud, the leeches and the threat from the locals. I am worried about his obliviousness (and I don’t want to be in the water!) so I climb up on the roof and keep a vigilant look out while he digs. A family of giraffe pass very close beside us, about 10 metres away while I am sitting quietly there. At 5pm Paul has been digging for hours without a break, I am aware of my concentration wavering, and I am worried about the approach of night. We set up the tent, collect a bag of provisions and head upstairs. We cook and eat on the roof and sleep heavily in the safety of the roof tent.

Sunday 21st – still bogged.

We eat breakfast on the roof of the car, drinking tea, eating nuts and dried fruit and watching hippos walking up and down in a nearby copse of trees.

I am convinced that someone will pass us and help us out of the mud; that we only need to be patient and sensible, take no risks in terms of getting sick or injured, and just wait for help with the car. Paul thinks that because we are no longer on one of the main roads, and because it is the low season, that it is very  unlikely that anyone will pass this way. Paul is also concerned that if it rains more we may sink deeper or the car will flood. As it turns out, Paul is right about nearly everything.

So despite my preference for reading and waiting, I am unable to sit by while Paul lays down in the mud with the leeches trying to get the jack under the wheels and wedge firewood under the car. I have no option but to join him in his nonchalant acceptance of the soft, sticky mud that swallows our legs, the leeches, the risk of schistosomiasis. In our underwear we spent the whole working day: a full eight hours digging. It is hard for me to get Paul to stop and eat lunch, he is in such a fever of desire to get us free.

We start a leech prison, to stop the same ones biting us over and over. When one gets us we pull it off and drop it in a bottle of water.

At the end of the day we shower using the solar shower bag and the clean water flowing across the hole we are stuck in. We eat dinner on the roof, our supply of fresh vegies rapidly dwindling because we have turned the fridge off to save the battery. While we are cooking it starts to thunder and a torrent of rain arrives, almost causing an accident as we struggle to move the stove and the pot under shelter. The heavy rain, impossibly heavy, continues, to our dismay, all night.

Monday 22nd February – still stuck.

It’s clear that Paul is right about the lack of visitor traffic and the threat from the intensification of the rainy season. We must to get ourselves out. But we are hung up on a solid reed bed and despite a full days digging it seems like no progress has been made. Despite our attempts to be careful we are both badly sunburned: one of the side effects of the anti malarial medication we are taking is increased sun sensitivity and there is no sunscreen that can protect you from eight full hours of African sun. I start doing survival tasks, taking an inventory of our food, (heaps and heaps; like all the squirrels in my family, I have a natural tendancy to stockpile. We can easily live for a month on the rice, beans and oil that we have) setting up a system for collecting rainwater and attempting to start a signal fire that we can burn some rubber on to attract attention. After doing these tasks and seriously contemplating a month of eating nothing but brown rice and beans I am able to tackle the task of getting us out with renewed energy. At 4.30 in the afternoon we are ready to try and drive the car out again. We have to try before the water gets any higher. It is an amazing feeling, maybe a little bit like giving birth. Having spent three days digging, Paul hops into the drivers seat to try and get us out. And it doesn’t work. I suggest that I will push, just to give it everything we have. And I push like our lives depend on it and the car comes free.

Despite being out of the hole, we are now simply on a little piece of dry land, an island in the marsh and no where near a driveable road yet. It’s now 5pm – animal hour – and time to pack up, have dinner, and get tucked away upstairs before dark.

Feeling confident that we are leaving I feel more at peace with the surrounds, and I am able to more fully enjoy the sounds of frogs, the hippos laughing their low, dirty laugh; and a new sound, the grumbly rumble of lions roaring in the forest. I am so energised by this that I climb out onto the front of the roof to have an open view of this wild part of Africa at night. And we are surrounded, not just by marshland, but by life. There are hippos grazing, and hyenas crouching in their hollows. It is all very unique and beautiful, and a totally different experience from what we have had in the regular campsites.

Tuesday 23rd of February – a premature cry of freedom.

Muddy Moremi doesn’t let go of anyone that easily. We have breakfast thinking that we are leaving, but we are actually gearing up for the most difficult and scary day so far. After breakfast standing on solid ground, seated on our camp chairs we walk and walk and walk back and forward through the familiar little piece of marsh we call home, trying to find a line that we can drive Nandi through. The real answer is: there isn’t a line we can take. But this is the only option for us, to carry further along this road, which leads nowhere and maybe end up in a worse situation is impossible. We have to get back on the main roads. So we walk, we lay down firewood and we plan, but when Paul tries to drive it the car simply slips off the narrow ridges, back into the deep ruts, and we are hung up on reeds again, tantalisingly close to the other side. There is maybe two metres before the road becomes sandy and solid. We are both so sunburned, and tired and aching, and sick of leeches, but there is no option but to get out the shovels and into the water again. It is 10am when we start. Again I have to force Paul to stop for an uninspiring lunch of olives and crackers, and three o’clock when with Paul pushing and me driving, we are able to pop the car out. Soaking wet Paul finds his last leech, way up on his thigh where no leech should ever go. Naughty!!

We are out of one hole, but not out of the marsh and certainly not out of Moremi yet. While we have been bogged it has rained so much that roads which we were just able to drive in on have since become impassable. We are terrified of getting bogged again and think that the sensible thing is to walk each hole before we try to drive it. We approach a marsh that has a large water monitor walking across it. I am driving so it is Paul that gets out to look at the piece of water in front of it. As he climb out I say to him “don’t get bitten by the big lizard” -  a prophetic caution. He walks through the first piece of shallow water and is approaching a second piece of the marsh that is much bigger when I see simultaneously the swipe of a huge set of open black crocodile jaws and Paul jumping backwards, turning and running. I am frozen in the car willing him to run. He high steps it back through the water and across to the car as the massive animal (at least 2 metres long) pushes itself across the road and off into deeper water.

So now we are both properly terrified: both of the prospect of being stuck for days and the really “big lizards” that live here. This state of heightened awareness makes the next three hours driving a sheer hell. We are trying to leave and every road we follow takes us into marshland. Paul gets increasingly frustrated with our inability to use the map – it is just a  confusion of tracks without any signs of which might be the “real” one. We end up trying every road and a familiar pattern emerges: we drive along a road that looks dry and promising; we come to a little bit of water. We drive a bit further and there is a longer stretch of water. Then there is a stretch that we hold our breath as we cross, and then suddenly the road narrows, and there are two watery lines ploughing off through the long grass for perhaps twenty metres in front. We can’t even contemplate trying such a stretch. If we get bogged in such a place there would be no question of getting out of the car to dig, we would have to live on the roof until help, or the dry season came. So over and over again, one of us climbs out the window on to the roof to guide the driver in a multi point turn, we turn around and drive back to try another road and the same thing happens again.

Towards six o’clock we are still driving when, coming back along a stretch that we had driven earlier the car gets stuck trying to climb a slope that was fine going down but is now not fine to go up. Paul quickly shifts the car into reverse and we speed back about 5 meters, giving us a good run up to attempt the climb. We are nearly up the bank when the car stalls. The are reeds towering over us, and water at the height of the car doors all around. My heart is thudding and I feel quite sick not again, not here. This is when the travel gods decide to give us a break, bless them. Paul shifts into low range 4WD and miraculously a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else works here, and the marsh lets us go.

We decide to head back to Xakanaxa camp site and try a different route out of the park tomorrow. It is nearly dark when we arrive, just giving us enough time to put up the tent and rig the stove. There are no other campers, and because of that there is no water (the staff only fill the water tanks on the afternoon campers are booked and the water is always used up by the morning.) so no showers for weary, weary us. We eat the last of our vegies – an asian style soup for dinner of noodles, tofu, chilli, seaweed, shittake mushrooms and carrot and capsicum. Thank goodness for dried seaweed and mushrooms! We both feel exhausted and feel the kind of fear that comes from being over extended and too tired to cope with anything more. A howling wind is blowing, and in the lulls we can hear the roaring of lions nearby. We go to bed feeling wrecked and apprehensive. I wake a few times in the night seeing the crocodile flashing at Paul over and over, and feeling the fear I felt when I thought he was within it’s striking distance.

Wednesday 24th of February

I take a kettle of warm water into the shower block to wash. It’s boiled muesli with sugar and cinnamon (Paul says the boiled raisins and spice make it a bit like christmas pudding) for breakfast, and then we head off feeling confident of leaving before 11am, out onto the wide, sandy main road.

But Moremi, oh Moremi, she is still not finished with us yet. About 30 minutes into driving, feeling confident that the wide sandy road isn’t concealing any sticky mud, I choose the line through a puddle incorrectly and we are stuck again. We can’t believe it. I am not worried at all though, because we are definitely near the camp and the airfield, we are on the main road, not in a marsh, not near crocodiles, and guaranteed that people will pass. We only need to stay with the car and wait. We wait two hours before a safari vehicle packed with American tourists who immediately start photographing us arrives. Typically American, they apologise for the necessity of taking pictures, rather than saying “do you mind….” The car is deeply stuck and we are unable to free it. Desert and Delta safaris radio back to base and half an hour later three men and another vehicle arrive. They work in the mud for close to an hour lifting the car on high lift jacks, collecting wood from the bush and digging to get us out. We are happy to give them each 100 pula for their effort – far cheaper and quicker than a call out to a rescue company.

A little way down the road we pass through a national parks office and two park rangers ask us for a lift to the other side. I am happy to oblige: and it turns out that they do us a much bigger favour than we give them. One of the rangers chats happily to us on the whole journey, giving us lots of information about the wildlife, answering all my questions and most importantly giving me a 4WD lesson about choosing my line through puddles that means the whole rest of the way we do not get stuck again.

Ranger trivia includes: elephants move freely in and out of the park and regularly raid nearby farms. Elephants particularly like watermelons.

Lions also conduct cross border raids on livestock like cows, and they know where the protected areas are. When a lion kills a buffalo they eat slowly, eating their fill, resting and then eating more. When they kill a cow they eat quickly and then run straight back to the park, knowing that the cows have their gods who protect them with guns.

Hunting season starts in April and wild animals that will have dispersed all over Botswana in the previous months will retreat into the protected areas as soon as the shooting starts. Local people are not allowed to hunt wild animals, only those who pay for an expensive permit to shoot a particular animal.

At 5pm we arrive in Maun and go straight to Nando’s – we only had peanuts for lunch and we are starving!! We have grilled corn, spinach fried with tomato and onion and potato wedges for lunch; then shop – Aisles and aisles of food!! And then head to a campsite for a few days R&R.

Thursday 25th February

Total rest day. We eat a lot of fresh, raw vegetables; most notably Amanda’s “celebration of rawness” salad – see “what do you eat?” for update and recipe.

We needed to have our clutch replaced anyway, and some maintenance arising from the car being submerged in water for so long. Additionally, and very luckily, our electrical problem has only resurfaced since we have been back in Maun. Basically, our battery was refusing to hold any charge. We had to get a jump start every time we wanted to drive it and then the third time we tried to jump start it (to drive to the garage) it would not take any charge at all. Luckily, a french family we have been friendly with helped us out with a tow to the mechanic and all has since been rectified.

Today(4th March) is probably our last day in Maun; we are organising permits for the Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pan National Parks. We may not go to the Kalahari as the Botswana government is treating the indigenous people there very badly (they have cut off the water supply in an attempt to get them out so that the government can mine in the park) and we will probably not try to drive through Chobe as the area has had the most rainfall that it has seen in 25 years and conditions are considered, even in normal times, to be more difficult driving than Moremi.  Our plan is to drive to Kasane from the Makgadikgadi National Park, possibly do some satellite exploring of Chobe from there (rather than trying to drive across Chobe) and then cross from Kasane into Zimbabwe.

We understand that Zimbabwe gets a lot of bad press in the west and that many readers are concerned about us going there, but as the common way to “do” Africa is from North to South (rather than South to North as we are doing) we are meeting a lot of travellers coming from that way who report that conditions there are fine: fuel can be bought, the supermarkets are full, and tourists are warmly received.

Maybe it’s a park, not an ark because there are a lot more than just two of everything.

Friday 5th of February – Hilaly Camp, Etosha NP

We timed our leaving of Opuwo for a Friday because Friday is “Market Day” at the main supermarket/grocer in Opuwo. You can understand that I was feeling a little low after we arrived at ten am, looked at the shelves that were rearranged more than replenished, and had to leave without a single fresh green item in our trolley. There weren’t even any fresh cabbages.

We left Opuwo and headed towards the Etosha national park entrance. We wild camped in a place that we thought was quite close to the gate, but actually was still a half  day’s drive away. Etosha used to be huge, and more importantly it used to protect the migratory routes of animals circulating from the delta and Etosha pan to the skeleton coast and back. An orginisation called SPAN among others is now trying to stitch together a patchwork of community conservancies (where people can farm but still allow wild animals to migrate by not putting up fences) that revives this. It is one of the striking, wonderful things about Northern Namibia, the absence of fences and the accompanying sense of wildness and freedom. When Etosha was carved up a lot of the wet and fertile land at the bottom was given to farmers, and it is this, with it’s endless gates and fences that we have to get through. Paul wisely called to drive the morning shift, so muggins ended up getting out to open well over 20 farm gates on the drive into the park.  We arrive at Etosha at lunchtime and are barely through the gates before the car is stopped by a herd of massive, graceful giraffe loping across it. Just on the drive to the campsite ( inside the park) we encounter vast, vast herds of ghost-faced springbok, zebra, kudu and a variety of other antelope as well as a group of vultures huddled on a corpse.

At the reservation office for the Hilaly camp there is a sign to warn campers about the threat posed by rabies infected Jackals who may come into camp to scavenge at night. While Paul puts up the tent I cook dinner – satay vegies with brown rice and lentils, and then at sunset we head to the waterhole. Many of the waterholes in Etosha are artificial, and the waterhole near our camp is also floodlit at night, enabling us to see the nocturnal animals that come to drink. Tonight we are lucky: as soon as the cover of darkness is down a mother Rhino and her calf come to the waterhole. The mother drinks water, the baby sniffs at it and paddles it’s feet. The baby is quite small and still totally dependant on it’s mother’s milk. The Rhinos stay about an hour, and it seems that no other animals are permitted to drink as long as they are there. At about 10pm we head to bed. At 5am a heavy storm wakes us. It’s the first rain that we have had on the roof tent and I am pleased to say that it, unlike the ground tent, is genuinely waterproof.

Sunday 7th February – “shall I get the Betadine?”

So far Paul has had a total monopoly on the first-aid kit. Every few days I am digging around in there for antiseptic for cuts and scratches, tweezers for splinters or stingose for bites. To make matters worse, it seems like he has developed a rash, an allergic reaction either to the mosquito repellant (DEET) or to the number of bites themselves. And now, taking down the tent this morning one of the springy metal rods that holds the awning out slipped loose and slapped him across the face. Super, super painful and quite a nice quail egg to show for it. (He won’t let me post the photo on the internet, but we have the pictures.) So Paul sits in the driver’s seat with a litre of pinapple juice on his head while I remove the rest of the poles very carefully. I don’t even want to think about what would have been if it had hit him an inch lower – straight across both eyes. Paul’s mum will have to post a comment to say if her weekly shopping list always had Dettol on it when he was little.

After some cold first aid and a couple of Neurofen the sheer pleasure of Etosha takes away the pain. The dust has been cleared from the air and the plants have a fresh green sheen. The spring babies are old enough to leave their mothers and frolic, running, jumping, wrestling, playing, pronking. There is a lot of joie de vivre about, and the vigour of the start of the rainy season. At lunchtime we eat in the car (you cannot get out of your car except at campsites and designated fenced areas) at Olifantsbad ( elephants bath) which is an artificial waterhole created by drilling a bore hole. At first there is just one big bull elephant, quietly drinking the sweet water as it comes out of the pipe (I think he’s enjoying the peace and quiet.) After about 10 minutes he trumpets, and then the rest of the group (about 15 elephants, 5 cows and a lot of young ones) comes trailing in. They stay for about an hour, milling about, the mothers drinking the clean water in the pipe, the older calves wading in the water, chasing one another and wrestling, while the two littlest babies played in the water on their own. They seemed to like to sit in the water and then roll on their sides until they were totally submerged, breathing through their snorkel like noses.

Later we drove past a massive herd of springbok. Normally, they move in very small groups of five or ten. This might have been a herd of a thousand, and the young ones, in a rain induced frenzy are butting one another, sprinting in wide circles and pronking. Pronking is when they jump in the air on all four feet at once, a little like what pepe le pew does, but more energetic and fast. It think it is practice for when they have to spring up quickly to their feet from resting. Those readers wishing to use it in a sentence might say “I was so frightened I nearly pronked.”

In the evening we take over one of the sheltered picnic areas as an extension of our camp so that we can hang out our wet laundry and cook. It rains steadily all night, but the inside of the tent remains dry and warm. The choice to camp at the picnic area instead of at a site turns out to be strangely fortuitous. The picnic area is where the bins are, and so at 2am the campground lights make the scene just like the water hole when the honey badger enters, and we have a prime viewing place from just above it in our tent. We are woken by the sound of it tipping over the glass bottle filled bin in search of scraps. The honey badger is much bigger and more powerful in life than I imagined: if you think of a polar bear, the way that it is solid and stocky, and shrink it to about 1.2m long, stretch out it’s tail and add black and grey colours, voila! Honey badger. They have a reputation for being aggressive, so sorry folks, I didn’t go down to the car to get the camera. Maybe next time (and maybe it will be Paul’s turn to ask if I want Betadine.)

Monday 8th February – Catbird Backpackers, Tsumeb

Two of the wheels of our car have started making a mysterious, regular clicking noise that speeds up when we go faster. Paul removes one of the tyres while we are still in the camp area: and takes a stuck stone out, but when we drive off, the noise continues. Paul is concerned that we might be damaging the car by driving, so we stop at one of the “designated areas”  to take the wheel off again, but the designated area has no gate to close. So much for that. In the steaming heat of the sun drying yesterday’s monsoon out of the clay Paul jacks up the car and removes a tyre, only to see that the tools he needs are in the car. He replaces the tyre, sets the car down, gets the tools, props the car up (now for the third time today) removes the wheel and still can’t stop the noise. We decide to drive to the nearest place that might have a mechanic to get it looked at. Since the big rain means that there is water everywhere, animals do not need to come to the waterholes to drink, so it makes viewing them more difficult. So leaving Etosha is not too hard.

We drive to Tsumeb, and I get a tiny lesson in how easily perceptions are changed. When we arrived Tsumeb looked to me like another prosperous mining town (copper): nice concrete houses with watered gardens and fences, big modern shops and lucky for us, lots of car dealerships and mechanics. After finding out that the people parked next to us in the Catbird backpackers had been broken into that afternoon I started to notice the large number of vacant, abandoned buildings, the people hanging about in ragged clothes. It made me think that maybe crime is not so much to do with poverty as it is with inequality. Of poor people living amongst others who have a standard of life that they can’t have.

Tuesday 9th February Sarasungu River Lodge S17 53.387 E019 46.848

We don’t know if we can leave Tsumeb today, but we certainly are leaving Catbird, which has no security guard and a broken security fence ( we have not stayed at a single backpackers in a town that has no security until now.) We drive down the road and find an AutoTech, a mechanic recommended to me by a staff member at Etosha. One of the mechanics spends quite a bit of time with Paul and Nandi, driving him around, jacking him up, spinning his wheels to find the problem. The wheel nuts are loose, probably since Paul rotated the tyres when we were staying in Marienfluss. It’s a bit of an embarrassing beginner error, but we are quite happy that it is not something more serious (and expensive). A few turns with the wheel iron and we are on our way, to Tsumeb spar which has – gasp – soy milk! spinach! broccoli! parsley!

From Tsumeb we drive 300km to Rundu, giving a lift to an off duty police woman on the way. The place that we wanted to stay in Rundu is now only accessible by boat due to the high water levels in the Okavango river. It doesn’t matter – Sarasungu is so nice that we stay there three days to finally get out laundry dry, do some walking along the river and tidy the car. Paul changes the oil and we have a hilarious misadventure with the grease gun. Paul wants to grease the chasis: but it’s not clear what is the best way to get the grease (from a tub) into the gun (a tube). I suggest a piping strategy which involves filling a plastic bag with the grease, chopping a corner off and then piping the grease in. Over the course of four grease shooting misfires we discover that as the internal mechanism of the gun gets more greasy it also becomes more sensitive. By the fourth misfire in which Paul shoots yet another massive blob of grease into the air he is totally fed up and I cannot stand up straight from laughing. So our chasis remains ungreased.

Friday 12th February N//goabaca camp, Popa falls.

A very nice campsite with a viewing platform over the river, and huge shady trees over our tent. We have decided that we need to move a bit quicker as slow travel in these expensive countries is hurting our budget too much.

Saturday 13th February Guma Lagoon camp S 18 57.731 E022 22.385 

We rejected the swamp stop camp about 50km before because it was too expensive (again, about $50US to camp for as night) and have ended up, almost at dark, miles away from the highway at a camp that is even more expensive. And they gave us money that was not legal tender as change the next day. Guma lagoon camp is under construction: so we cook in the kitchen without electricity, and help ourselves to drinks from the unattended bar. (we wrote down what we had.) It was a bit like being in a post apocalyptic future with no other humans, but in this future there are an awful lot of mosquitoes. The next day is our last in Namibia; we cross through the Mahango game reserve sighting hippo, sable antelope and crocodile and then into Botswana.

Currently we are in Maun, heading for the Okavango delta tomorrow. You may hear from us again in Maun … if not, we are going to go through Chobe national park, to Livingstone and then most likely  Zimbabwe. We have met a lot of people who have recently travelled through there are said that it was no problem, you can even buy fuel. Until then, happy valentines day for all our lovely readers, xxx Mwah!

Or “Ways with Cabbage”

We’ve been hearing that question a lot lately, so I thought that I would answer it with a blog post that I will keep updating as we move through Africa and the culinary opportunities evolve.

Meat and animal products are culturally important to many people. Two hundred years ago, or less, meat was a luxury food, that the poor could not afford to eat, and which the rich indulged in. Feats and banquets declared their richness by different kinds of meat as well as the presence of cheese and butter. In the 20th century meat is marketed as a body building food and most westerners eat quantities of meat without thinking at all about what their body really needs. For these two reasons, mostly the former in poor countries and the latter in rich ones, people are often perplexed about why we would willingly choose to give up animal foods.

I believe that humans do not need meat to live, but they have evolved to need lots of different types of vegetables.

I want to quote at length from “The vegetable book” by Colin Spenser because what he has to say is so interesting.

“Out of those 3,000 species of plants [previously] eaten for food, only 150 were ever cultivated, and today the world lives off just 20 main crops. Most importantly, I want to stress how several millions of years of living from plants, and the crustaceans, and plants – long before hunting began – has a possible significant message for our present day metabolism. Humankind has relied on wild foods for 99.8% of our time and through these millions of years human physiology had adapted to such foods. According to The Driving Force – Food in Evolution by Michael Crawford and David Marsh “There is a diet to which humans are adapted; this diet includes regular exposure to substances on which human metabolism is dependant, only some of which to date have been labelled as “essential nutrients” According to a scientific paper “Vegetables, Fruit and Cancer” by Kristi A Steinmetz and John D Potter (Cancer causes and control Vol 2 1991) “Vegetables and fruits contain the anti-carcinogenic cocktail to which we are adapted. We abandon it at our peril.”

It is my experience that people who eat meat almost invariably eat a limited range of dishes regularly that they know they like and can prepare, and so they generally end up eating a much narrower spectrum of vegetables and fruits, and a smaller variety of total foods: maybe they eat ham and beef and chicken, but they only eat eggplant in a restaurant, and rarely if ever eat barely, quinoa, millet, adzuki beans….and so on and so on in the possible realm of plant based foods.

So it is usually the case that Paul and I have a much more varied diet than most of the people that we know, but how about in Africa?

Definitely it helps that we can buy anything that we want: price is not the final word on whether we can have something, and in South Africa (mainly Cape Town) I was able to get things affordably that I could not buy at home, most notable was our “four mushroom risotto” that had shittake, swiss, oyster and regular button mushrooms in it.

However, as we have progressed further North into the arid and remote areas of Namibia, price has become less of an issue for us than availability. Because the people here cannot afford things like spinach, it does not exist. Most places so far we have been able to get soymilk, but not Northern Namibia.

Africa has some of the best produce in the world: they grow fantastic coffee, cashews, and every kind of vegetable, but none of it reaches the supermarkets to be bought by Africans, it is all exported to more lucrative foreign markets.

Breakfast:

I took a leaf out of my mum’s book, and started making “birdseed” quite early into our trip. You can buy pepitas (pumpkin seeds) sunflower seeds, linseed, sesame seed and I blend them to use in a snack mix (blended with dried bananas, raisins, almonds and whatever other dried fruit and nuts we can get)  that we call “monkey bait” I also use the seed mix in our home made muesli which includes almonds and rolled oats and raisins, along with the seeds. This has been very satisfactory, until just yesterday (4.2.10) when we ran out of our stockpile of soymilk. This is a small disaster: soymilk is a significant part of our diet and a psychological luxury. So we have moved to pancakes with wholemeal flour and black tea, but it all needs a lot of sugar to be palatable, and I am not really so happy about this. The fruit has been pretty terrible, apart from apples, so we have been usually eating a tin of fruit and an apple, each day.

Lunch

So far we have always been able to get onions, tomatoes and cucumbers, so lunch is often either a sandwich or a salad using these things. We might, for instance, have a tin of chickpeas or three bean salad and add to that tomato, onion and cucumber, or red, yellow or green capsicum. In the big places we were able to get olives, and this was very nice in a salad with a tin of chickpeas and some capsicum. Namibia is a former German colony, so the brown bread is excellent everywhere. (But there’s no Vegemite, or I would be having Vegemite toast for breakfast!! I really miss that!  In Windhoek they had a quite good fruit and veg mart (but no markets for vegetables anywhere, so far – everything is grown in South Africa and trucked here. No vegies are grown locally at all) with ……….Gasp………Parsley!! Big bunches of parsley, almost as good and fresh as my dad’s. So we had blessed tabbouli for the whole week we were in Windhoek. When I should have been updating the blog I was in the kitchen chopping up huge piles of parsley.

Dinner

Our regular favourites include:

Red Dahl (lentils, tomatoes tinned or fresh, carrot, onion, spices) Punjabi Cabbage (indian style cabbage) and Chappati that I make myself from flour and water.

Cashew Curry – cauliflower, onion, cashews, garlic, green beans (tinned if necessary, as it was last night) spices served over brown rice

Tagine-style chickpeas in tomato paste, harissa, other spices, as many colours of capsicum are possible, and then any vegies we can get: zucchini, onion, broccoli, golden squash, carrot, served with five grain cous cous.

Stir fry cabbage with onions, carrots, capsicums, garlic, chilli, tofu and soy sauce and served with noodles or quinoa if there’s no Tofu.

Corn roasted over coals and served with a bean salad that also has onion, capsicum and fresh herbs in it.

Pilau rice (brown rice cooked with onions, zuchinni, capsicum, carrot and adzuki beans) with a vegetable in a sauce, like broccoli or flame roasted eggplant in a tomato based sauce

Mexican style kidney beans (spices, tomato, onions and capsicum) and wilted spinach with flatbreads (made the same as chappati)

I hope this gives you a picture of the things that we eat regularly at the moment. I will update this post as we move along. Please attach comments and questions and I will try to answer them!

BOTSWANA

So I found out on the internet the reason for a weird phenomenon that we have been experiencing: even in the really cheap supermarkets here, all the grocery stores have nice vegetarian products. Vegie burgers, chicken nuggets, sausages…lots. And they are yummy. But in this meat centric centre of the world, why? It has been so puzzling to see a whole half a freezer cabinet devoted to fry’s vegetarian products. Who buys them? The answer in small part is the Rastafarians and in a larger part the Seventh Day Adventists. God bless you vegetarian Christians, I love the chicken style nuggets so much!

Also, we have been able to get huge bags of TVP (not the chunks, shudders Paul – they are too much like Quorn!)

But best of all, that worth it’s weight in gold item…and that previously elusive but expected thing…the market. Hooray for the ladies who grow vegies in their yards and then bring bunches of them to little tables lining the road beside the supermarket. They have the best onions, tomatoes and cabbages and I don’t know what to call it, but they assure me it is, “like spinach” and it does the job. It varies: sometimes it is a little like kale or kohlrabi, a silvery, crinkly leaf, and other times a shorter, rounder, deep green veiny leaf. Wonderful.

We ate a mopane worm at the same market (not vegan, and not a worm but a caterpillar that has been boiled and dried) very tasty, just like bacon bits or biltong. I can’t see why they haven’t caught on in the west, it seems like a good use for an annoying pest. The ladies minding the stall nearly wet themselves watching us chewing thoughtfully, trying to decide if we like the taste or not.  We didn’t spit them out, but we didn’t buy a bag, either.

When we got back from Moremi I bought every good fresh thing I could lay hands on and we got some very good, very fresh, tiny red cabbages. So for Carol I provide a recipe my oldest friend (and best vegan) Amanda gave me when I was struggling with a glut of Brussel sprouts. Now, whenever I am feeling sick or run down I crave this feisty mix.

Any cabbage type vegie works, and today we had the same salad without cabbage, and a double quantity of mung bean sprouts instead. Its a flexipe.

Amanda’s Celebration of Rawness salad.

Brussel Sprouts or very fresh red or green cabbage, shredded as finely as you can manage, about 2 cups.

One or two medium tomatoes, finely chopped

Any combination of red, yellow or green capsicum, finely diced.

one smallish red onion, diced as finely as you can.

Optional extras include: any kind of sprouted thing, mung beans or whatever, fresh peas, avocado, snow peas…you get the idea.

Take the above and mix in a bowl with the juice of one lemon.

Dry roast in a frying pan any or all of the following nuts ( about 1/2 a cup) of sunflower seeds, pepitas, walnuts, cashew nuts, or almonds.

when they are going brown add 1/4 tsp of chilli powder and a tablespoon of tamari (if you have it) or soy sauce (if you don’t.) Stir through the hot nots to coat.

Put your salad in a bowl, top with the nuts and a generous glug of a raw oil like EVOO or flax seed oil.

So yummy, do try it. We’ve eaten it three times since we got back, but are starting, finally, to run out of the huge stockpile of nuts and seeds we brought from Australia. There is just nothing here except peanuts and the occasional tiny bag of almonds or flavoured cashews. I was able to stock up on some “health nuts” in Windhoek – some sesame seeds, linseeds (for muesli) and sunflower seeds, but now that we are away from health conscious German land, I don’t know when we will see these things again.

Mozambique

We really struggled in Mozambique, especially as we were travelling only in the much less developed Northern areas of the country. We ate a lot of peanut butter, some chicken and quite a bit of fish. The opportunities to buy fresh fruit and vegetables simply weren’t there – virtually no markets selling more than bread, tomatoes, bananas and potatoes (and lots of dried fish) existed. Also, camping is severely limited in Mozambique so we simply could not cook out of our own supplies. I snacked on dried seaweed that we thankfully stocked up on in Botswana and waited the country out.

Malawi

Malawi has rich red soil everywhere, plenty of rain and a good variety of fresh produce. Outside the big cities you can find tiny stalls selling one vegetable or another, although these are mainly tomatoes, bananas and not-so-tasty huge paw paws. I try to buy the small ones which are cheaper and I think better.

A particular favorite in Malawi has been eggplant. We have been able to buy lots of slender deep black eggplant that are about 15cm long. I fry them with onions and spices (either a cumin or paprika, usually) and then add a tin on tomatoes. At the end of cooking (about 15 minutes) they are tender and then I add shredded spinach, tinned beans and salt. We have this with brown rice.

We had satay pumpkin the other night – foolishly I bought a small blue pumpkin to provide some variety, but found it almost impossible to peel. I have had success with a butternut earlier in our travels and forgot that all pumpkins are not created equal.  I was mainly concentrating on not losing any digits as I attempted to prepare this thing, which turned out to have a massive hollow and almost no flesh for my trouble. Thank you Tom for giving us your knife – we slept with it the first night we were in the scary caravan park in Bulawayo and I am sure it is your knife that saved my fingers this time. Die, Pumpkin!!

Thursday 7th January 2010

We left Swakopmund and drove north up the skeleton coast road again, intending to go far enough North that we would enter the skeleton coast national park, officially. We reached the skull and cross-bones gates at about 5pm and decided to wild camp nearby, as entry to the park is free only if you enter and leave during the same day between 9am and 7pm. We drove around a little bit and ended up camping very close to a boundary fence which is dissolving slowly into the sand, the wires broken and sagging, the whole thing keeping nothing in or out and adding to the feeling of desolation and decrepitude. It must have been because I had been blogging that very day about all the sailors who lost their lives on the coast, but something very eerie happened while we were huddled around the fire after dinner. The wind was quite strong and a very fine, mist like rain was falling and making everything cold and damp. Through the wind I could hear a clear sound of a pipe being played, a high, wandering, aimless melody that was neither happy nor sad, but simple and beautiful in the way that falling water has no emotion but is just beautiful. It was strange, but I didn’t feel frightened. (Until I had to go away from the fire before bed to wee.)A little later, although the moon hadn’t risen yet, and the famous fog meant there were no stars and no ambient light, but both Paul and I,  sitting watching the ocean, noticed that the waves had a powerful luminescence that we had never seen in a night ocean before. The white caps of the breaking waves seemed to have their own light, as if they were generating some phosphorescence as they broke.  We were quite unsettled by the strange sight, and happily crawled into our snug bed in the back of the car.

8th of January – the day of things going slightly wrong.

After we had gone for a jog along the beach, breakfasted, packed up and washed, we went to start the car and it didn’t. We shouldn’t get flat batteries, thanks to the two battery system and a smart solenoid, and so Paul quickly identified the loose connection that was at fault and set us on our way. We headed off and entered the Skeleton Coast National park which, for us, was a bit of a disappointment. It is excellent that the park authorities want to discourage people from off road driving there, which chops up the sand dunes and destroys the slow growing desert foliage, but it makes for dull driving when the road is so far inland, and there are no authorised routes to the sea. The inland road was very dry and bleak.

We arrive in the afternoon at the Torra bay fishermans’ camp and decide that we have had enough of the skeleton coast and decide to go inland. A little while later I found out that there are still desert lions in the most remote northern parts of the park, where people don’t often go, and so regretted that decision. At 6pm, an hour before the park’s gates close, I stopped the car to take a photo of a Welwitschia which is one of the natural wonders of Namibia, and is actually a tree. As we walked back to the car we saw that we had a flat tyre, probably due to the razor-sharp banks of slate and shale that stand up out of the road at intervals like lines of tyre-eating teeth. With some difficulty (he only threw the handle of the jack into the road in frustration one time) Paul changed the tyre and to my amazement we were back on the road within an hour, and out of the gates narrowly before the closing time of 7pm. We wild camped in a beautiful spot, about an hour from the gates in a river bed, surrounded by purple mountains and waving yellow grass. We had a quick dinner of red lentil and tomato soup with bread, and went to sleep.

We drove the next morning to Twyfelfontein, and spent the next three nights there. We loved their campsite: plenty of shady trees, the dry river bed lined with elephant dung, open air showers, and lots of bird life. The open air showers are particularly nice: having a night-time shower in the cool night air under the trees and stars with fire- heated hot water and the faint smell of wood smoke is extremely pleasant.

Twyfelfontein is a world heritage area due to the prescence of rock engravings made by the indigenous Dammara people. The engravings function as a map showing where the permanent water is, and which springs are only temporary (twyfelfontein means “doubtful fountain” in Afrikaans). It also tells which animals should not be hunted: elephant, lion and rhino because they are too strong, and giraffe because they need to drink everyday and so can be used to help humans locate water.

While we were at Twyfelfontein we were also discussing the future form of our travel in Africa: it is still taking us hours and hours to pack and unpack everyday. We decide to go back to Windhoek and buy a roof tent to try and cut the amount of daily chores down a little.

When we wake up on the morning we are leaving, a big cloud of mosquitoes can be heard pushing against the netting of our tent, trying to get in. Not really thinking through what I was doing, I got out of bed and went to the car to get my blanket because it was still cold. The mosquitoes followed me in a cloud, and zoomed into the car, taking refuge in all the dark, hidden places.  After a few days in Windhoek we had to put a mosquito coil in the car to get rid of them, so persistent was the problem.

Wednesday 13th January

The morning was spent driving around the different industrial estates trying to look at roof tents. No one seems to want to help us: the attitude seems to be “if you want it, buy it, and if you don’t, go away.” We try to get people to show us different styles of roof tents and they tell us that we should just buy it and have it installed to see, and if we don’t like it then “that’s what the warranty is for.” Never mind the inconvenience of having the wrong thing fitted!! It’s very frustrating. When we get back to the backpackers Paul has just sat down to have a beer and watch some cricket, and I have started doing a few circuits when the heavens open. Monsoon style. I run into the bar, to ask Paul to help me put a tarp over our “water resistant” (but not waterproof, as we have discovered) tent. It quickly emerges that the tarp is not a priority: the water is rising so fast, that it is shortly going to rise above the 10cm canvas barrier around the base of the tent and flood it. We unpeg the tent and drag it to the last piece of higher ground, and then erect the tarp over it. By the time we have finished we are freezing and shivering, soaked to the bone. Even in the hot places, monsoon rain, those huge sky-drops are very cold! We mostly saved the tent, and went to bed with just a little moat of water around our mattress, but the bedding fairly dry.

Monday 18th January

Having finally chosen a roof tent, Paul went out in some very heavy rain to get it, and the awning fitted. When he comes home we enjoy the cold weather with some cold weather food – mash and beans and broccoli and gravy, with my new absolute favourite thing – vegetarian chicken style nuggets. Vegan junk food. I love them so much, and Paul just shakes his head in wonder when I exclaim about them because they are so unlike the healthy things we usually eat.

Tuesday 19th January

Our first night trialling the roof tent is not exactly a success. The roof tent is, as I suspected, the natural enemy of the person with a tiny bladder. Also, the car is not perfectly level, and it is very difficult to sleep with you head even slightly lower than your feet. The car-park is closer to the bar than the campsite and a rowdy party is going on late. Worst, knowing that I have to unzip the tent and climb down the nearly vertical (and sometimes swinging ladder) if I want to go to the toilet, seems to have made my bladder completely shrivel away. So I have to keep getting up to go, when I normally would not go. Very annoying.

Wednesday 20th January

Our first night wild camping with the roof tent. I realise now that my temperament is totally unsuited for camping in Africa. It was unfortunate, but unavoidable, that we only found a spot off the road to camp at 7.45pm – about 15 minutes before it is dark. And the spot was in long grass. I was quite paralysed with fear when I saw a big centipede turning itself around, and so doubled over, appearing just like the head of an average sized black snake. Not being able to adjust to a campsite while there is still light makes it nerve racking for me: all the possibilities of spiders, scorpions and snakes come alive. Just as the sun was setting I looked up into the lattice of some nearby heavy-load power lines and saw what I thought were black bin bags that had been tangled in it in the wind. I realised, to my horror, when I saw them moving nimbly about, that it was a large group of Chacma Baboons. I like all animals in a general way, some more than others (goats, for instance, I like specially) but I don’t really like baboons – I find them scary. They are too big, too aggressive and too strong. They are just like people, but more like the ones without impulse control.  And they were sitting up above us, watching us unpack. Very quickly it was completely black all around us. We ate our dinner sitting in the front seats of the car, and I didn’t drink any more water.

In the morning the Baboons had not assaulted us or used the roof tent as a trampoline, nor, as I was very afraid of, had they broken off our precious arial. At lunch time, just west of Uis, we saw our first Chameleon, changing colour as it moved from the sand up into a bush, and swivelling about it’s incredible eyes.  Just a little further down from this Paul continued to display his aptitude for finding excellent wild camping spots when he took us down an empty desert track and delivered us to a wonderful, secluded camping spot tucked inside a small mountain. S 21 18 184 E 014 34 757 Despite our fire it was shockingly cold at night and we had no option but to retreat to cosy upstairs environs of the tent.

Friday 22nd January

We went for a jog, and discovered the one drawback of this place: flies. Terrible, terrible flies. I inhaled one and there are simply no words for how disgusting that is. I could still feel the little blighter swinging on my tonsils for the rest of the day. We leave the camp and drive through stunning and varied desert landscapes, fields of Welwitschia, and a landscape crammed solid with smooth round hills, lined with shale in lines as though combed. It is into these hills that we drive: Paul received a tip from a German motorcyclist also staying at cardboard box about an unmarked route to Doros crater that takes in “the best campsite in Namibia.” I am keen to stay at this “best campsite” so we set out trying to follow the German’s directions. We find a creepy abandoned mine: too creepy for us to camp there (especially after we have made a few jokes about the zombie cave-dwellers that probably live there) so instead we make camp on an exposed mountain top nearby. S 20 58 065 E 014 11 877.  Again, as soon as the sun sets it is freezing, and despite the fire we quickly scuttle off to bed.

Saturday 23rd January.

We’re lost. The German’s directions spoke of a road out of the Brandeberg mine, and we thought that we were following it, but when we reached the river there were lots of 4×4 tracks in all directions, but no clear road. We have tea and lunch in the river, marvelling at the hugeness of elephant dung (like bales of hay!!) and their immense tracks – as big as the head of a squash racket pressed into the sand. There is a track that continues into the mountains on the other side, but with only two days worth of water left and the obvious poor quality of the very rarely used road meaning that no help is likely to pass for months if we were stuck, we decide it is too much of a risk, and head back to the nearest campsite.

Sunday 24th of January- our first campsite invasion.

We stayed at the Save the Rhino trust campsite S20 57 744 E 14 07 981 which is also a very nice campsite, shady, hot showers, picturesque etc. Except for the flies. Tiny flies, that crawl into your eyes, nostrils, buzz and scrape and try to get beyond your finger deep into your ears. Unbearable. I think it is because of the recent rain. We left the camp with a hand drawn map supposedly showing the way from their site to Doros crater. It is very good of them to prepare a map, but for those who don’t know the area, it was not that helpful. When we set up our wild camp that night we have no idea that we are quite close to the burnt mountain and Doros crater.  Before dinner I do a couple of circuits in the sand of a river bed which is full of Rhino tracks.

Later I am cooking dinner when a single bee comes to investigate the sweet smelling, empty can of tinned fruit from breakfast that is in the rubbish bag. By the time dinner is cooked, one bee has become five, and then shortly twenty five, swarming over our table, the car, and crawling into the bucket of washing water (from washing the vegetables, which I have reserved for doing the dishes) At twenty five bees, I get in the car to eat because I believe that if one stings you it releases a hormone that tells all the others that you are an enemy and they should sting you too. Paul stays outside and lights a smoky fire to try and drive them away, but despite this, twenty-five bees becomes a hundred and then he hops in the car with his bowl of soup too. When dark falls the bees disappear, and I feel very sad as I tip the wash water out, and there are at least fifty drowned bees floating limply in it.

Monday 25th January – Happy Birthday Daniel -

The bees are back. As I am packing up the car I am stung by one concealed in a towel, and after pulling out the stinger and poison sac with tweezers I start looking about to see if there are signs that the rest of the swarm are coming for me. It does not seem that I have been marked in anyway: the bees continue their hunt for sugar and water and ignore me. The drowned bees from last night have miraculously revived in the sun, and are staggering about in circles, being helped by more active bees as if drunk or drugged. When I try to have a wash the bees get very excited and try to jump in my wash bowl and fly all around me, so Paul doesn’t even bother to try and we just go. Sorry dad, I forgot to get the GPS co-ordinates in all the fuss about the bees.

Shortly up the road we see what we think is Doros crater, and then something to really take our breath away – a huge, elegant cheetah loping with it’s big tail held up, through the grass. Ahhhh! Our first big cat! And just wandering about, in the wild! So marvellous. We stayed the night at the luxurious (and pricey) Palmweg lodge S 19 53 138 E 13 56 318

Tuesday 26th January

When I see a “big town” marked on the map I am now in the habit of taking  this with a degree of scepticism, but Sesfontein really needs to be demoted from two dots down to just one. We needed fuel and cash and groceries for a big adventure into the mountains and the desert, and all that Sesfontein offered was dusty, goat strewn road, a few abandoned tourist information buildings, and an empty diesel bowser. So, no choice but Opuwo then. The road between Sesfontein and Opuwo is quite exciting, there are lots of Himba and Herero people living traditionally and we picked up a Herero woman hitch hiker. The road is like a roller coaster, impossibly steep in sections, you get to the top and just have to trust that the road is still there. Obstacles include: cows and calves, donkeys, donkeys tied in pairs, a recently overturned ute stinking of petrol, pot holes, washouts and children who run out and beg for “sweeties”.

Thursday 28th of January

After a full day doing all our laundry by hand: towels, tea towels, pillowcases, the lot (and reading – I finished “The Good Earth” by Pearl S Buck and Paul finished “A man of the people” by Chinua Achebe between loads) we headed into town to stock up on food and fuel.

Budgeting is so much easier when there is nothing to buy: the concept of marking food down in price as it gets close to the end of it’s life is non-existent here. As a result, the supermarket shelves are mainly stocked with long-life goods, and the refrigerated cabinet is full of spoiled produce. I found it very sad to see in this undernourished place broccoli, that would have been fine to eat a few days ago, now brown in it’s plastic wrapper and totally worthless. And still asking the price of $24 a head (a very expensive price for any fresh item.) Along side it were mouldy zucchini, black spattered cauliflowers, and rotten mushrooms, all of which would have been fine if they had been moved off the shelves by a more reasonable price a few days ago. So only long life vegetables for us: I call them the depression standards because I imagine it was what people ate during the great depression: cabbage, onion, pumpkin, potatoes, carrots and a coffee blend of “highest quality” coffee beans mixed with chickory that  maybe my grandmother would have drunk (and I heard is or was illegal in England to stop people adulterating valuable coffee?)

It is a strange thing that the further we go into Africa, and the smaller our choice becomes, the more grateful I am of our ability to simply buy whatever is on the shelves, and for the first time in my adult life I have spontaneously felt like saying a word of gratitude before meals – something I didn’t feel as strongly when I was in Australia making a luscious tofu laksa with lemongrass and coconut milk, fresh coriander, lime and bok choy. Bizzarely, and showing the tastes of the aid wokers here, Nescafe Gold is available (at $70N a jar, an outrageous price and almost a fifth of our weekly food budget) as well as frozen oysters. (I didn’t bother to look to see what they cost.)

In the evening we arrive at Van Zyl’s pass campsite. We were thinking of staying more than one day, but the flies are a plague. I am cooking our dinner of dahl, chappatti and punjabi cabbage when one of the local herdsmen appears. Usually the people from the villages are not permitted in the campsites so this is strange. He asks me if I speak Afrikaans, and when I say no he explains in halting english and with gestures that one of the flies has gone deep into his eye and under his eyelid. I get an ampoule of sterile saline out of our first aid kit (Paul was having a shower) and wash the bug out of the man’s eye. In the evening, with the flies gone, we sit around the fire quite late savouring one of our favourite dinners and enjoying the peaceful surrounds.

Friday 29th of January

Van Zyls’ pass. I was feeling quite anxious about it, knowing that it can only be traversed in one direction by tough 4×4′s. It didn’t disappoint me, and was generally a very difficult road with the last obstacle (right when you don’t want to turn around and go back) being the most difficult and terrifying. It took us 3 hours to travel 20km of road, with an awful lot of stopping the car to choose a line through the obstacles or to fill a pothole with stones when there was no other way. When I was little and we went four wheel driving as a family I can remember my mum, either being impatient with sitting in the car or the slow pace, would often get out and walk or jog ahead of the car. I have found myself similarly impatient, and doing the same thing, stopping when the road became so difficult that to drive it requires a second person to guide you down. In many places the rocks are scraped all over from where vehicles have chosen a line that doesn’t allow them enough clearance, or the road is so steep that you simply cannot see over the bonnet to where the tyre is going to go. Then you need somebody in front of you pointing out which way to turn the tyres and how much. We travelled most of the pass very slowly, and so without too much difficulty in just this way. The last obstacle, a very steep section that requires the driver to “slalom” – first turning sharply one way, and then the other, and also to dive the car into a terrifically steep drop, stopped us for quite some time. Walking down it, and up it, and down it, trying to choose the line, it just seemed horrifically, impossibly steep; and worst of all, an error or mechanical failure, or loss of nerve would drop you over the edge into a sharp valley. We considered going back, before Paul decided that he felt that it was drivable and he would do it. And he did it. He will tell you that it was very scary but I think he drove it nicely and also Nandi behaved well.

We had two days rest at the Marienfluss community campsite after that, spending the mornings walking up and down the river looking for signs of crocodiles (we didn’t see any tracks or crocodiles) and birdwatching. My favourite is the “Grey Go Away bird”  which is grey with a long tail and a little mohawk on it’s head and it makes a noise that a person might make if something revolted them so much that it rendered them speechless. If you try saying “Mlahhhhhh!” and poke your tounge right out at the same time, it’s a bit like that.

Sunday 31st January

We still have a full tank of petrol which is more than enough to take us back to Opuwo via Purros, so we decide to go to Purros. We have been told that you are fairly certain to see desert elephants there, and so we are keen to do this. We calculate that Purros is about 200km away, and feel that by leaving in the morning we should get there in the afternoon without difficulty. At 6pm we are lost again, so often the road dissolves into a nest of tracks that it is impossible to tell which is “the road” and clearly at one stage, or more than one stage, we have chosen wrongly. We have a difficult descion: to try and make Purros before dark, which the GPS says is a mere 60km away, or to set up camp now and be prepared to tuck ourselves away in the roof tent when night falls. The part of the skeleton coast where we camp (S 18 37 359 E 12 34 801)  is alive with animals, there are lots of springbok and oryx. The area is also known for desert lions and brown hyena which are quite large; bigger and taller than a rottweiler and roaming in packs. We decide to make camp and go to bed directly at nightfall, and we camp in a flat area without grass or bushes that the ambush predators could make use of. As it is, we have an uneventful night.

Monday 1st of February

When we begin driving again, still using the GPS and the points for Purros that we have, it is clear that stopping when we did was the right decision: the remaining 60km to Purros takes us all day to navigate. When we arrive at the Purros campsite one of the campsite attendants is taking two other people to a Himba village nearby, and then out into the desert to look for the lion which are supposed to be quite close. We go to the Himba village and see the beautiful red-ochre painted women, and go into one of the huts scented with holy fire and a bark that smells sweet and also like black pepper. Their children they adorn with colourful waist beads, and I cannot stop looking at the gorgeous chubby black limbs and bellies garlanded with primary coloured beads. We don’t find the lions when we go into the desert to look for them….

Because they are at our campsite!

Tuesday 2nd February

Paul and I go for a walk along the river bed and I notice the huge lion prints in the sand, as big as my hand with the fingers outstretched. Massive. We dismiss them, thinking that the camp workers would have told us they were there, so we assume that the prints are old. Only the next day do we find out that the lions were in the camp, and left prints all around the site.  They had been there at night, and not disturbed anyone – just come for a look.

Wednesday 3rd of February

We are nearly out of fresh food and fuel, so it is time to head to Opuwo again. On the way we pick up another Herero hitchhiker (Herero women wear a very severe and elegant style of dress, that you might expect to see on a London high street in the 30′s – but not in Africa! Himba women, by contrast, cover their bodies and hair in red mud and wear a leather skirt and bronze jewelry.) This Herero lady is bringing her 3 year old boy to the clinic. She has some English and Afrikaans, so I use the phrase book to tell her about us in Afrikaans, and she answers in English. We find out all the relevant things about her, but I don’t think she was satified with our answer as to why we don’t have children. (Nobody ever is.)