That Long Awaited Bush Trip
Back in 2019, we started to plan a six week camping trip in 2020 through Botswana and Namibia, spending as much time as possible in the bush. It involved working out a route and then booking campsites for each night. Not easy to do in Europe, but much more difficult in Africa. A combination of emails, messages and phone calls are needed, plus a deal of optimism and patience.
Then Covid came! We had to postpone the trip by a year, and went through the laborious process of re-booking. We had been due to be joined by Annemarie’s sister and her husband for part of the trip, but that sadly that wasn’t to be this time.
Forward a year, and we had to repeat the whole exercise again, thanks once more to Covid.
But September came, and with much preparation, Cape Town was left behind. We had decided to try and keep daily distances at a sensible level wherever possible, and so arrived in Calvinia the first night.
Calvinia is in the Karoo desert, and as we found out after, not too far from Sutherland, the coldest town in SA.
Bearing in mind we were travelling in T-shirts and shorts, it was a huge shock to find how cold it was there, to the point where there was ice on the tent in the morning!
Rapidly getting back on the road, and with only a pancake breakfast break in a small town on the way, we passed through Upington and into the Kgalagadi Trans-frontier park. This is a shared reserve between South Africa and Botswana, and we immediately did the paperwork on arrival to formally leave SA and enter Botswana. Crossing a border is a matter of going to Customs, then immigration, and sometimes Border taxation to leave one country, and then repeating the same to enter the next. This will sound very familiar to sailors outside of Europe 🙂
Freebooter 