People We Meet, Part 1: The Independent Travellers

So I promised that I would write about the people we meet on our travels, and now that we have been on the road for slightly over 100 days (yay!) I feel that we have met a good collection of different types of people, so I am going to write a little mini-series.

Let's start with the non-locals. There are a few varieties of those, one of which is the independent traveller (as opposed to the overland tourists, who require a separate post with their big trucks). We meet them at designated traveller hangouts like Fat Monkeys at Lake Malawi, Jungle Junction in Kenya and Eureka Camp near Lusaka. It’s usually a couple between 30ish and 50ish, who have put their jobs on hold to spend a year or more travelling. They drive a robust 4 wheel drive, or a huge MAN truck, or a bashed up old Defender, and they can spend hours discussing car fitouts, routes and favourite camp sites in a range of countries and continents. Some are driving the classic Cape to Cairo (or Cairo to Cape) route, while others loop down through West Africa and up the other side, while we have also met a few open-ended trips, where the plan really just consists of “a year in Africa, a year in Asia and then who knows.” Example:

Jan and Trevor - they left London in their kitted out Landrover for a gap year, driving through Europe, to Turkey and round the Med into the Middle East. We met them in Uganda where they were heading to Rwanda to finally arrive in South Africa at the end of the year. Trevor is a twitcher, so Stuart got on famously with him, as Jan and I were busy sharing movies and audiobooks from their terabyte drives. Entertainment is important on a long journey like this.

Poomba, aka Mandy and Jacques, had been on the road for 14 months when we met them at Fat Monkeys on Lake Malawi. They were heading back home to South Africa from Australia, having shipped the car to Novosibirsk to cross Asia and Europe. Their Land Cruiser was home made, and after such a long trip everything most definitely had its place.

The first big truck we encountered made quite an impression on us. Two German guys had dissolved their company to pay for a brand new truck to be fitted out so that they could go on a World tour. When we met them in Lusaka they had already spent a year dawdling their way down from Europe, planned to spend another year in Southern Africa before shipping the monster truck to South America and carrying on. They were so self sufficient, they looked like they may never return to stationery life.

Border Crossings

Crossing into Kenya from Uganda, at Busia, was the usual mayhem. Goods trucks were parked in long rows down the main street waiting for their paperwork to clear. Young guys run up to the car to offer their services as middle men to handle our customs and visas for a fee. We learnt very early on, at Kazangula in Zambia, where the signs at immigration insist that no brokers are allowed to deal with the officials, that we didn't need or want someone helping us. As it turns out, at every single border crossing there is a very simple process: get the visa, sort out the car through customs, pay any taxes or fees, done - move on to immigration on the other side and repeat with other taxes to pay and other forms to fill in. That sounds easy, but of course is attended by uncertainty and chaos. Still, we wouldn't trust someone with our passports, our dollars, our car papers. Instead we found a place to park in the midst of trucks, soldiers, vendors selling cold drinks and snacks and officious looking men, and wandered off to find immigration to get our exit papers.

One thing that has been singularly lacking at the borders has been decent signage. There are any number of huts and containers serving as offices, forex shacks and barracks, but nowhere a clear sign who does what and where to go next. The best option for us in the beginning was to follow the overlanders in front of us and hope they knew what they are doing. Eventually we worked out to look for the distribution point of immigration forms, although those are sometimes just photocopied sheets, so that is not so easy either.

Once we have located immigration, we fill in forms that are never looked at again by another human being - first name, last name, passport details (which I know by heart by now), length of stay, mode of transport, contact details. Then we get scrutinised to make sure we match our passport photo and sometimes have to fill in a big ledger, too, and that's usually it. We haven't overstayed our visa anywhere yet, so I don't know what would happen in that case. I suspect a small dollar amount would take care of it.  

After immigration, customs. Stuart usually does that part. It means getting the carnet stamped to leave the country, and sometimes the payment of exit taxes. When we left Kenya, we had spent two days over our seven day transit limit and had to pay US$40 for road tax. No big deal as we hadn't spent anything coming into Kenya. Getting the car out of a country is usually also a pretty easy affair. No-one has so far even wanted to look at the car in case we were smuggling something, or even checked our insurance.

Before we started I thought that the border crossings would be day-long events, where our car gets taken apart Cold War style, our intentions are scrutinised and we might be sent back for lack of the right paperwork. As it turns out we are through much faster than the backpackers travelling by matatu or the overland trucks with their crowds of youths. May it stay like this for the rest of the journey.

Roadside checks

There is a lot of talk amongst overlanders about corruption and bribery attempts along the roads. This usually takes place is the form of a speed trap or a police check where something is found missing with the paperwork or the car. We have heard from people who take a special budget of small denomination dollars for the express purpose of paying off bribes, and others who were stopped 8 times in one day in Malawi (we put this down to having South African plates, as South Africans are not very popular in Malawi, for historical reasons). Ever since leaving Botswana we encounter roadside checks multiple times a day, where a couple of uniformed police men and women check on the condition of mini buses, trucks and other local traffic. We are always amazed how these guys get let through, specially considering the condition the vehicles are in most of the time, with back doors tied down by rope and spewing black fumes while inching up the hill due to overloading, but we rarely see anyone pulled over for good. We are often waved through after everyone has had a good look at our strange number plates, the steering wheel on the wrong side and the woman driver, but we have also been stopped for a check on our paperwork. Our papers (driving license, registration, COMESA insurance, temporary import license and carnet) are in a business-looking folder and when we whip it out we are usually given up for a lost cause. No-one so far has asked for money outright, but I suspect that the cops who checked that we carry two warning triangles and that we have a fire extinguisher were secretly hoping that we didn't. Maybe we are dense, on reflection I now suspect that the cop who miserably told me that he hadn't had any breakfast yet was really fishing for a can of coke or a bit of cash. Who knows. Fake speed traps are another apparently popular way to extract some money, so the two times we were stopped for speeding we were very dubious. The first time was in Lusaka, just after we had been subject to a major rip-off by the local laundry, so we were not interested in paying any more money out to a spurious claim. There really was little chance that I had been speeding, as anyone who has driven through Lusaka traffic knows it's not possible to actually clock 80. As the police man came up to us, having flagged us down in the fast lane of the dual carriageway, Stuart - in the back seat - went into outrage overdrive and immediately told the guy that we weren't speeding, we could prove it with our GPS and we would be happy to go to court over it. And by the way, could he please have a complaint form, he would like to make a formal statement. This resulted in a back and forth for a few minutes where the cop claimed we were doing 86 in an 80 zone and anyway, we had probably not slowed down for the hospital zebra crossing earlier. In the end I left my South African address and phone number and left with the information that the police would call me by the end of the week with the court's results... Yesterday we were caught speeding for real, though, and despite arguing that there might not have been a 50 sign (there was, we were just distracted from it by a street seller waving his bunches of maize at us) or that the speed trap machine might be measuring wrong, we had to admit in the end that we had gone to fast. 20000 Tanzanian Shilling (£10/NZ$20) and a proposal of love to Merryl by the traffic cop later we had completed the long process of filling out a receipt - UK addresses are hard to spell - and we were back on our way.

Zambia roundup

We arrived in Malawi on Wednesday, our Zambian visa having run out. When we entered at Kazungula from Botswana we had planned Zambia to be a transit route to Malawi and Mozambique, so we only got a 10 day visa, which seemed ample time to see Victoria Falls, get our laundry done in Lusaka and drop in on South Luangwa National Park. It didn't turn out that way. 40 odd days into the trip we are finally slowing down enough to not need to 'complete' every country in the time allotted to it, so we are spending more time in less places. Roads are getting worse, too, so it's not feasible to plan a 600 km drive in a day anymore. And Zambia has been captivating in a whole new way. We are starting to leave the established tourist locations behind, specially those traditionally visited by South Africans, the major tourists in the region. Even Victoria Falls, which in any other place would have been inundated with tourist coaches all day long, was remarkably peaceful. The view from the road changed as soon as we left Botswana. The occasional small villages consisting of reed roofed huts and fenced open spaces became more numerous and interspersed with rows of small dilapidated shops with little porches busy with people. Apart from Livingstone and Lusaka, we came across nothing that we could call a town. Even the border town of Chipata is just a long row of shops along the road to the border, and dusty sidewalks filled with market stalls. Most shops, general traders, 'supermarkets', boutiques and bars, were painted faded greens and creams, but many had recently been repainted a loud fuschia, the livery of Zain, the local mobile network. We decided that Zain's marketing budget has been spent in its entirety on emulsion and subsidised house painters who offer cut price jobs in any colour as long as it's Zain pink! The abiding image of Zambia has been people on bicycles along the roadside, carrying all sorts of loads - sacks of charcoal, baskets of fruits and vegetables, bundles of fire wood, furniture and crates of bottles, or just other people - younger brother, wife and baby, friend, colleague. Also along the road we saw signs for local schools (motto: Knowledge for Life; Learning is Service) and religious centres, representing every flavour of Christianity from Jehovah's Witnesses to Evangelicals, Presbyterians to Catholics, Baptists to the Church of Enlightenment. I guess Livingstone started a trend, but the small schools next to the villages in the middle of nowhere were a good sign. For a country where 80% of the population lives on less than US$1 a day Zambia felt organised, clean and well-managed, with working communities full of people with a purpose. Zambia was the white foam of Victoria Falls, where water came at us from all sides and in all forms, creating magic light from the sun and the moon. It was the women along the road carrying every conceivable item on their heads, from carrots to oil drums, all the while lugging a small child in a sling across their backs. It's the boys on bicycles, some of whom could barely reach the pedals, and some dressed to the nines on their way to a night out. It was elephants munching their way through the camp site two, three times a day, vervet monkeys stealing pears, hippos grunting at night and the silence of crocs pretending to be logs. It was Lusaka's crazy traffic and friendly car park attendants, the laundry rip-off and Harry Potter 6, an escape to another, more standard lifestyle for a few hours. It was the chaos of border towns: Kazungula's ferry, Livingstone's bridge to Zimbabwe and Chipata's long rows of trucks waiting to cross, dodgy money changers and insistent souvenir sellers, and too many baboons living off human leftovers.

Pig in shit part 2

Tonight we have acquired a kitty to sleep in our tent. Much more purry and less smelly than last night's occupant. Not Stuart, the dog.

Lions!

Hopefully below you will be able to see some cool lion photos Stuart shot in the Okavango Delta (if they managed to upload). If not, head here.

Pig in shit

We have acquired a night time companion for tonight. One of the camp
dogs made friends with Stuart, which was a good move, as he is a lot
more susceptible to cute sad dog looks than I am when it comes to
bedtime, so he now gets to sleep at the bottom of the duvet. Lucky dog!

Our pudding

Thank you Merryl!

Month One roundup

I didn't get a chance to post a Namibia roundup, or a Botswana roundup, so here is a Month One recap:

After the mad dash through South Africa Namibia seemed like a dawdle, we stopped in a bunch of places for two nights or even three. this gave us time to get our heads together and sort out the car, and just slow down to consider how we want to travel. We made some rules (which frequently get broken), like not driving more than 300km in a day or if we do, stopping for two nights; like making sure we have breakfast before we leave and that we stop for lunch; getting to the camp site before dark with enough time to put up the tent; etc.

Namibia was a long straight road, lined by high yellow grass bending in the wind, occasionally with mountains on the horizon that never seemed to come closer. It was cold mornings and hot afternoons that cooled down drastically as soon as the sun went, specially in higher altitudes like Naukluft. Namibia was German and cake and a time warp to the 50s and neglected towns that are still the pride of the locals even though they will be nothing like they were ever again. It was Kudu crossing the road at dusk, jackals circling our tents in the dark, hearing my first hippo snort and elephants having testosterone tiffs at the waterhole. It was our first theft and having a wisdom tooth extracted and falling off a horse. It was making eggs while watching the sunrise over Fish River Canyon, doing the washing up in the Namib desert, and paddling on the Orange river.

I was very clear about the places I wanted to visit in Namibia, even though we didn't get to all of them. When we reached Botswana I felt myself beginning to be vague. The only place I really wanted to see was the Okavango Delta, but we soon realised that the lodges deep in the delta were way out of our range of budget, plus they were only reachable by plane. Thanks to some people we talked to and the Bradt we found two camp sites that were reachable by car (Guma Lagoon and Moremi Third Bridge), so we did get to the delta. The rest of the places we visited were kind of incidental, like Tsolido Hills in the Northwest and our three day stay in Maun. We really spent time at each camp site, so it felt a lot more relaxed when there was time to get the hang of a place. We consolidated our travel routines, specially after having made some more space in our luggage, and gave up on some ambitions like capturing footage as we go along and editing little films for your delectations. Between keeping a diary and blogging and mapping and calendaring there would be little time left to really see the countries we drive through, so that is going to have to wait.

Botswana was green and wet and dry at the same time, with swamps and channels of water and dusty shrubby plains spreading across the base layer of the Kalahari. It was calm and relaxed and a little fuzzy. It was driving through deep sandy tracks, wading through the occasional flooded channel, flying over the maze of water and reeds in a plane and swishing through it in a boat, and wondering if I am going to get eaten on the way to collecting firewood. It was begging dogs at the dinner table, baboon attacks, fluffy donkeys and big horn cows by the side of the road, lions making out, grumpy crocs and smooth baby elephants, and the eternal harrumphing of the hippos at night. It was Andy the civil engineer turned hotel proprietor and his tales of plane crashes, KT the reticent Tsodilo guide, Greg of Postnet giving us extra bandwidth in Maun, Phil and Clare who were stuck in Moremi and then they were not, the angry Boer who tried to drive his caravan into the swamps, and the idiot Italians who left their rubbish for the baboons.

Kazungula Ferry

Stuart has decided we have finally arrived in Africa. The ferry across
the Zambesi from Botswana to Zambia is a little boat the size of the
Pahia ferry, only a lot crazier. Agents try to sell their services
with dogdy forms and everything is done with cash and slowly
handwritten receipts. It's hot and dusty. But we are now in Zambia!