My Travel Adventures

Originally, our plan for our last full day in Namibia had been to visit Twyfelfontein and at least one of the petrified forests farther north. We made such good time the day before, however, that we checked off everything on the list and found ourselves scrambling for ideas. We needed to reach Windhoek by evening to return the rental car and check into our hotel, so we could not travel too far, like Etosha or the Hoba Meteorite in the north or Brandberg in the southwest. There was also the added pressure of money. Our cash reserves depleted much faster than we had expected, and once we had paid for our hotel (we could not use our US Dollars or credit cards), we were left with little more than four hundred Namibian Dollars – barely enough to fill half a tank.

We began the day bright and early, departing Swakopmund well before eight o’clock. Before leaving the city, we made sure to fill up on gas, but we only checked the pressure in the tyres on a side road leading to one of the beaches, as we were afraid that re-inflating them would make too much noise. The wind was strong, and the waves beat down with a fury, pale blue against the pale grey morning sky and the pale yellow beach.

Today was one of our more leisurely days: I spent only about four hours driving, which is less than half the time I spent behind the wheel yesterday. Taking full advantage of the day’s undemanding itinerary, we woke up at seven o’clock and were in no rush to eat breakfast, check the pressure in our car’s tyres (we had to refill two), and refuel at the only gas station within one hour of our hotel. We left Solitaire a little after eight.

When we arrived at our car rental at eight in the morning, I did not expect to leave a full hour later, but there were a lot of things I had to learn before I could be unleashed onto the roads of Namibia. Very patiently, the rental owner showed me how to change a tyre, how to deflate and inflate a tyre, how to unfasten the second spare tyre from the bottom of the car, and how to put together all the implements necessary for these operations. During the process, we found that the nuts on the wheels were tightened so fast that I could not budge them at all, so our first point of call was a service centre where we had an employee slightly loosen them. This way, if we needed to change a tyre, we would be able to do so.

After a few minutes’ worth of calculations, we managed to spend all our remaining Pula buying snacks at the airport in Maun. Hoping to see a bit of the Okavango Delta from above during our flight, we asked to be seated on the right side of the plane, but instead of lush green forests parcelled out by dark blue waterways, all we saw were dry riverbeds in a sea of greyish brown.

We were picked up for our trip to the Okavango Delta at half past seven in the morning and arrived at our destination – one of the mokoro stations at the NG32 Concession – some two hours later. The journey was not particularly pleasant. Our car was one of those large vehicles with open sides, and the wind chilled us down to our bones despite the blankets out driver gave us. Once we had left Maun, there were a few occasions that filled me with anxiety, like when our driver had to shift gears to pull through a particularly sandy part of the road, or when we slowed down to cross a narrow wooden bridge.

While Air Botswana offers a direct connection between Kasane and Maun (pronounced, as I found out at the Kazungula border crossing, “Maoon”), this flight is not operated every day. With my packed itinerary, I decided I could not wait for the following day to fly, so I opted for a flight from Kasane to Maun with a layover in Gaborone. In the few days leading up to this journey, Air Botswana bombarded me incessantly with announcements of scheduling changes, but the layover time remained more than sufficient at almost five hours instead of the original seven or eight.