Europe and Beyond

Our AirBnB apartment is in Greenpoint, about 2km from the city centre and is a very nice, modern two bedroom apartment.  We had planned on going out for tea with three others from the tour but instead invited them over for takeaway. It was a lot more relaxed than a restaurant would have been, though we had a few issues with dinner.  We went online to order pizzas but the nearest Pizza Hut closed at 7:00 - and we didn’t check until close to 7:30. We then ordered burgers from Uber Eats, but when the delivery was made only half our order had been delivered!  Luckily Tracy and I had been to a supermarket and we had already eaten some nibbles. Next day I picked up our hire car before driving to Table Mountain and doing a 2 hour walk to get to the top up.  It was a beautiful clear day in the low 20’s, but felt much hotter as we struggled up the last 4-500 metres. A large part of the walk is like climbing stairs, with some quite large boulders to step up onto. We were...

Leaving Swakopmund we went via Walvis Bay where there were a couple of hundred flamingos. Some of them were quite pinkish whilst others very white. They look very strange when they stand on one leg and tuck their heads in - kind of like a lollipop. From here we turned inland towards the dune fields.  The sand dunes stretch several hundred kilometres with some being up to 200 metres.  We climbed the 'famous’ Dune 45 which is 175 metres high. They say famous, I had never heard of it.  Apparently it is the 45th dune and is 45kms from the National Park entrance. It was chosen as the best place to view Sunrise and Sunset, but we arrived and hour or so after sunrise.  It was quite difficult to climb as - obviously - we are climbing in sand. The views were pretty nice from the top then it was time to head back down. We chose to run down the side of the dune, which was a lot faster and a bit of fun.  Our shoes filled with sand though and we all had to sit do...

Into Namibia and another simple and quick border crossing. Our destination was the capital, Windhoek and a hotel stay. We did not have a meal provided tonight and all decided to go to Joe's Beerhouse, that served a lot of game meats. I decided to be a bit adventurous and had Bushman Sosatie which was a skewer of loin cuts from zebra, kudu, oryx, springbok and chicken. Except for the chicken it was all red meats, the springbok being the palest and the nicest. None of it was 'gamey’ and it came with a nice mango chilli sauce. Tracy had game strips with pasta, though she isn't sure exactly what the meat was. Lauren went vegetarian. We caught taxis to the restaurant (3 of them because there were 10 of us) but when we were leaving Tracy recognised a tour guide that she had seen in our hotel walking towards a bus. I ran after him and asked if he was going to the Safari Hotel. He said yes, so I asked if we could get a lift with him - and he said yes!  There were some very confu...

The Southern Africa part of our tour looks like it will be a bit more relaxed than the East Africa part.  Our departure time from Victoria Falls was 8:00am with only a 4 hour drive to our destination - Kasane. We did have a border crossing from Zimbabwe to Botswana but fortunately it was far quicker leaving Zimbabwe than getting in.  No paperwork, a quick look at the passports, stamp and we were done in 5 minutes. Entry to Botswana was also simple with no visa required. Before I move on from Zimbabwe though I forgot to mention dinner. Most restaurants in Victoria Falls seemed to offer various game meats - buffalo, warthog, zebra, giraffe, bushbuck, kudu and others.  I was interested in some and ended up getting a taggliatelli with impala mince. The girls both had vegetarian crepes. The mince was interesting but if you hadn’t have told me it wasn’t beef I wouldn’t have known. It was a little different but not much. Kasane is next to Chobe National Park and we were...

Everyone was a bit sad to leave 'Wildlife Park' but it was time to move on. The next two days were spent on the road with more early mornings. Our route took us through the capital of Zambia, Lusaka. We stopped at a large shopping centre and it showed how 'modern' parts of Zambia are. Apparently Zambia was opened up to foreign investment about 2008 and it really showed here. The shopping centre was reasonably large, probably a little smaller than Eastland was before the recent expansion. The customers though seemed quite diverse and were certainly not all African. Our camp for the night was less than half an hour away from here yet there was a giraffe near the entrance and zebras walking in the campsite. Strange. Next day we arrived at the Zimbabwe border, and what a drag that was. There were four people in the queue waiting to buy visas and the dude behind the counter spent at least 10 minutes doing a stocktake of his receipt book!  We had been warned that Zimbabwe s...

Our last full day in Malawi began with a 12km round trip walk to a waterfall. In order to do the trip before the heat of the day we left at 6:00am and drove for 15 minutes to the starting point.  We walked through a village and about 10 boys joined us. Apparently they do the walk to the waterfall whenever the guide brings a group past. The route varied from thin tracks to dusty roads and went up hill and done dale. The boys were mostly in 'crocs’ but some had bare feet and they ran ahead sometimes through the bush with seemingly no problems.  We apparently are fairly quick, getting there around half an hour quicker than most groups (They probably say that to everybody) The walk was very worthwhile with quite a magnificent set of falls at the end. It was much higher than the picture shows, but we couldn't get the right angle. The rest of the day was spent lounging by the pool and relaxing.  Next day was another 6:00am start with 11 hours on the road, including a bo...