We left Cape Town in the afternoon and started our journey up towards northern Namibia and the hunting farm outside of Kamanjab, a journey of about 2 200 km, with an estimated time of 27 hours. We didn’t go alone, as we carried an old land rover on a trailer. An extra load of three or four tons. The aim was to reach the farm in the late evening the day after. Dragging that old and heavy bastard restricted us to a top speed of 80 km/h, so of course things didn’t move at the pace we’d wished for.
African bureaucracy
With the sun slowly making its way towards the horizon on our left we drove north towards the border, where we didn’t arrive until four in the morning. After going through customs and passport control in South Africa we drove into Namibia and started the same procedure there. The eagerness to work and the level of service at that time of the day, isn’t exactly topnotch. It’s the exact opposite.
We did make it through all the departments and got back into the car to continue our ride, when a customs official woke out of her slumber and made her way over to us in a zombie state mind. “What’s this?”, was all she said and pointed to the old land rover on the trailer and this sparked the beginning of a three hour parody of the always so impressive African bureaucracy, with close inspection of documents, the important stamps and everlasting waiting for the right person to show up to sign it all off…Africa wins again!
28 hours on the road
We were now many hours after our intended schedule as we headed into Namibia just after seven in the morning. With no sleep at all so far, and with the recent annoying three hour drama at the border we sat quietly in the moving car, taking in the vast and barren landscape around us. The saying goes that God created The Namibian land in anger, and after taking it in at first glance, you could do no more than agree. It is barren and uninviting, and your thoughts wander off to old movies about outer space and Mars. It looks like you’re on another planet. Sand, really dark sand runs all the way to the horizon, where ranges of rocky formations take over, with the occasional shrubs here and there.
The plan was to reach Kamanjab by sunset, but that wasn’t going to happen. We approached Windhoek surrounded by rain and thunderstorms in every direction, and as we pulled into the capital of Namibia around eight that night, the rain was coming down hard with lightning and crashes going off at an incredible rate. It is the rainy season after all. We arrived into Windhoek after 28 hours on the road and stopped for a few hours of sleep.
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