Hi you out there!
We are back safely from an amazing trip to another amazing African country. We love this continent. So diverse, so beautiful, so friendly and passionate people. It is so worth to visit it. Do it folks, just do it!!
Anyways, we decided to leave our "home country" South Africa for a week. We started on wednesday, very excited about our trip. Everything went well and our mood was at a peak as long as our car broke. It was a little explosion. Don´t worry guys, it was just the engine, which said goodbye. Well, it was actually pretty bad and we were really really lucky, that we did not get into any dangerous accident, since we were speeding with 170!! km/h. So we were standing in the middle of nowhere just 300 K´s north of Capetown. We stopped another car who took one of us to the very next town (20 KM away, actually very close) to get help. The guy who helped us was very nice and barely speaking English, since people in the countryside speak mostly Afrikaans (a kind of mixture of dutch, English, German and whatever). Anyways he said he could fix our car and we agreed on 11000 Rand for everything. A bargain for European standards.
However, we had to spend our night in Van Rhynsdorp, a very very rural town. We guess about 1000 inhabitants. It was a true adventure and we had an awesome evening at the only bar in town, hehe.
So we sit together to decide what to do next day. Going home or continuing was the question. It did not take very long time to figure out. We definitely want to see Namibia!!!!
So we made some phonecalls with some car rentals and we got our deal with Imperial, 6 days, unlimited KM (which was very very important).
We left Van Rhynsdorp at 1pm and went all the way up to Mariental, very close to Windhoek, the Namibian capital. It was another very small rural town and we were soo tired of the whole day.
At breakfast we had a nice chat with the owner, who told us to take a road straight through the desert, where we could see sand dunes and stuff.
We were very into it and did it. Unfortunately we had no 4x4 vehicle. But we made all the way up to famous Swakopmund. Guys, u have to know, Namibia was a German colony in the early days. So many people still speak German and many names are in German. Very bizarre actually. Tired of driving so much, we spend 2 nights in Swakop. Was very relaxing. Best of all was our Quaddrive through the many sand dunes around town. So smashing and fun.
Sunday morning we left Swakop towards north-east. Destination was Etosha National Park. It is a very big area (200 x 100 KM) full of wild living animals of all kinds, including the BIG 5 = lion, elefant, buffalo, rhino and leopard. It was so exciting, watching these animals in wild. Check out the pictures!!
Later on the day we started our roadtrip back towards south. We did a 8h drive through Windhoek (in our view the very only real city in this country) to Mariental.
We took a short 6h sleep and started driving again at 5:45am!!! We crossed the boarder at 11am and arrived at Van Rhynsdorp at 3pm (the very little town where our car was fixed). Giving back the rental car and doing all paper work with the garage we continued driving again at 5:30pm. Finally we arrived back home in Capetown at 8pm and we were so happy to get our beds back.
It was an awesome very very exciting trip, which we will never forget. Definitely worth it. Finally we were lucky not taking our own car up there, because it would not have survived the tough roads and the dust.
Cheers folks, your guys far down south, damn spring is around the corner here!!!
