A CLOAK OF GREEN

IN REHANA'S WORDS

25 January

The Botswana I imagined was not what I saw through the window of our car as we headed towards Gweta in the centre of the country. The sky was unremittingly grey and rain swept sideways across our windscreen.

When we arrived last Friday, Botswana met my expectations exactly. The sun blazed down on our early start. I was so glad we had reassembled our car’s air conditioner in Nairobi. We were going to need it.

The door to the Botswana customs office had a note stuck to it: “closed on account of air cornditioner”. The penciled cross over the “R” did not hide the mistake. The office was a welcoming fridge.

The first Batswana I saw wore tight black denim jeans and long-sleeved sweaters in heat that melted my skin. I spotted several jackets. Some women wore sensible hats, large enough to shade their swaddled torsos.

I expected Botswana to be cattle country but was unprepared for the beauty of their beasts. Without exception, they look sleek and happy. Many are a rich red, matching the soil of their northern neighbours. Thousands of cattle, horses, donkeys and goats sensibly sought the abundant shade under the canopy of trees that flanked us from Divundu in Namibia to Maun in Botswana.

Preparing to camp in Maun, we programmed the Garmin to take us to the Spar supermarket – now that we’re able to shop at supermarkets instead of hot, dusty, fly-infested markets we do. Guess what we found? The first Woolies food since Maputo – ten long months ago. 
I did a little jig when we walked in. I wanted to buy one of everything, settled for wanting to touch everything and eventually left after we put a few things in a basket.

Happiness is ...

Once again, we camped at a hotel. Once again, we had a tiled shower with more than enough space to hang a towel and a change of clothing. There's nothing worse than having nowhere to put your clean clothes and your towel when you have a shower. We had plenty of hot water and another stainless steel sink to wash our dishes.

The swimming pool at Sedia Hotel was bigger than our previous four, but tiny compared to Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. Sedia Hotel had the kind of pool I liked – no eina eina at the edges for 15 minutes before I am brave enough to go up to my knees. It was a bath and I slipped in like a boiling eel.

Bliss is …

We met people in Maun who became lifelong friends within minutes. Mike and Carol, who we had travelled with on some of our journey, said friends of theirs wanted to meet us. Within minutes of hearing we were in town Christiane, Monica and Hilary came to visit us.

We met Christiane and Monica again the next morning at Hilary’s coffee shop and some of their friends. Jules and I cooked for Christiane and Monica on Saturday night (chicken kalya, Woolies had everything we needed) and on our last day we had breakfast with Christiane.

Sunday we spent in the Okavango Delta. I wished I had eyes above my ears and at the back of my head because two was too little to take in the small smidgeon we saw of it.

I fell in love with water lilies in Hermanus two years ago. I was invited to a 10-day writing workshop at Volmoed – an Anglican Church retreat in the mountains above the town. It had a waterfall and stream running through it, with rock pools filled with water lilies.

The Okavango Delta is enveloped in the delicate scent of millions of water lilies. Purple and blue dragonflies dart from white lilies to purple ones and rare passionate pink petals. Frogs plop off their islands of leaves at the approach of our boat.

Picture this replicated a million times

The lilies lift their stems out of the water as they twist their bright yellow faces towards the sun. Sue Grant-Marshall is on my mind all day long as we drift among the lilies. She had ancestors who were part of the Volmoed community and Botswana is her birth home.

Sue had primed me for dust – which she claims she loves – but we have seen very little of her prize. The Okavango Delta was a vibrant array of greens. Never before in my life have I been so taken by grass. Never before have I seen so many varieties in one place – each one as pretty as the next.

Elephant bones bleached white in the grass

We spent a day in the delta; ten thousand days would not be enough, I reckon. We explored a smidgeon of it in a canoe and on foot under the excellent guidance of Cross, a young and very knowledgeable local. 
We didn’t choose the options of a (haha) small plane or helicopter flight across the delta and I am so grateful. The canoe took us silently down waterways at eye level with the water lilies, reeds, frogs, dragonflies and two hippos.
Cross told us about a mishap with a group of Chinese tourists two weeks earlier. A hippo had charged at their canoe and one of the tourists panicked, tipping the vessel and sending everyone overboard. Fortunately, the hippo retreated and the tourists were spared.
We were very grateful Cross paddled rapidly across the hippo pool, we lowered our gasps of amazement to whispers until we were clear of them.

After a short break for lunch we set off on foot across an island. The weather was kind. It was overcast and a few fat drops occasionally struck our hot heads.  The rainy season is not the best time to visit the delta, the water floods into it from the north after the rains end. 
There were very few animals, which we only saw through binoculars from a distance, but boy was there a lot to see.

The grasses in the delta appeared to be of every shape and colour green – long and feathery; short, yellowish and skin-slicing, tall and reedy and green topped with delicate pinks and purples.

Eyes on stalks of grass. Click to enlarge

We returned to our hotel at about 5pm and collapsed. Not for the first time on this trip, the sensory overload of a day in a magnificent landscape drained every last joule of energy from my exhausted cells.

After Maun, we set off for Gweta, gateway to the Makgadikgadi Pans. Again, my expectations were proved to be completely wrong. As we drove through fat puddles of rainwater towards the Kalahari, Africa kept spreading a thick green cloak under our feet (the wheels of our car?). 
In a landscape empty of buildings and people all we saw – for hours and hours – were trees.

VOTE ZEBRA FOR FREEDOM

IN JULIA'S WORDS

30 January

“We were approaching the end of our long journey. […] We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to camping life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a city was not agreeable, but on the contrary, depressing.”

So wrote (with a few tweaks) that word-wizard Mark Twain in his hilarious gem, Roughing It. I’ve never read his work before, but here in Gweta, Botswana, lying with Rehana in a hammock-for-two under the vast baobab I’ve nicknamed Oom Die Boom, it was a chortle and guffaw every half-page. And it gave me that lovely tingle that you get when on a page written in a very different place and in a very different time you eerily read what you right now are feeling.

I am in deed by long habit a city mutant, so I know the ropes – the ones that bind, the ones to swing on, the ones with which to hang yourself. But – predictably I suppose – this Big Outing in the Big World has awakened a sprite in me that doesn’t want to again be pinned and wriggling to the rigours of concrete and crime. Albeit the conveniences – a reliable hot shower, easy electricity, wonderful Woolworths – do have their attractions, I’ll not deny.

Thankfully I have a bit of time after we’re back in SA’s borders to reassemble headage before once again biting the work/city bullet (and hoping it doesn’t break all my teeth).

But here’s a few reflections on things I’ve learnt that I hadn’t known I would. Like about animals and things. I’ve learnt to be less afraid of snakes: they still give me grille when I see one, but I’m quite sure they’re intent on slithering off, not attacking me. 

Monkeys, on the other hand, I’ve learnt to be very wary of. Yes, they look so cutesy with their sprouty whiskers and mini-adept fingers and their babies are a riot to watch, but what pesky thieves they are! And their snarly defiance!!

At the campsite in Livingstone, Zambia I decided to do the “top monkey” routine just to show them I know their foul tricks, and that this territory – that would be the BRC – is strictly out of bounds. With a touch of aggression and what I thought to be unmatchable “I’m boss” confidence, I marched towards the trees where a big daddy (with blue gonads and livid red dick) and two young males had just retreated after an attempted foray into our food supplies.

But as I stood beating my breast and boldly scolding them in my most convincing Monkey, instead of scampering away under the sheer force of my dominating gaze, they instead stood their ground and in unison bared their teeth in the most formidable way. 
Images of them leaping on me and tearing me to bits (and infecting me with rancid rabies) caused me to panic; I swirled and ran back to the car with my proverbial tail between my legs, howling pathetically to Rehana, “Help me, help me, help me, the monkeys are after me!”.

Oh, the relentless lessons in humility!

Then there’s the roaming game to consider. I am now more than ever a complete devotee of the zebra. It’s not just their enthralling zig-zag pyjamas, chunky flanks, proud heads and graceful power that gets me; nor their patient cohabitation with those daft and ooogly jokers, the Wildebeest. 
What’s most wonderful about them is that, unlike the horse and the donkey, they’ve declined to be tamed – or “broken in”, as the horse-folk would say – by humans. Freeeeedom, they exude. 
How often I’ve wanted to become a champion of donkeys – especially those condemned to living in Ethiopia – and organise them to liberate themselves to live with the zebras. Because what those poor belashed donkeys have been forced to endure, a zebra never would. 
In fact, I’m sure that the ones that humans experimented on – to “break in” and domesticate I mean – were thrashed until they were a bloody, dead mess. But unbroken! Viva zebras, viva!!! If I were ever foolhardy enough to start a political party, it would have to be called Zebra.

Free and cannily camouflaged on a pan

Zebras there were in abundance in the wonderland we’ve just got back from: the Makgadikgadi Pans.
This was the second of our generous friend Prospero’s wedding gifts to us: two nights at the way-fancy pan hideaway, Jack’s Camp.
Which is just as well, because what it cost to stay there was equivalent to what we would usually live on in 6 weeks.

Jack's Camp luxury tents

It was all languid desert-tent style with mopane wood floors and the kind of décor that’s just too classy to be swanky; we ate, drank and were merry in the company of a most fine retired Italian couple, Manuella and Roberto.
Manuella had been a journalist/speech writer/ghost writer and raised their two children; Roberto, with his white handlebar moustache and swept-back white hair, had ended up president of several corporate corporations (making sure us consumers were never short of absolute necessities like Cote d’Or or Philly cream cheese).
Now retired, he sure has the bank balance to prove it – Jack’s was not even a blip on his financial radar. I mean, back home in Geneva, the man drives a Bentley 4x4!

But – that would be despite their incredible wealth – they were, well, you know, like, really nice humans. And it was extremely fine to stretch the eyes from green to horizon to storm to horizon of the pan with them.

Roberto and Manuella flew off to their next lavish destination on day three, and Rehana and I were happily reunited with the BRC to drive the 50-odd kilometres out of the pan and back to our campsite just outside Gweta. As our “escort” on the bad roads, we had the company of a small man with skin-exceeding character from Jack’s Camp called Ditsa.

It had been teeming with rain through the night and some of the morning, and the pan was awash – the water table is so high that new rainfall has nowhere to go and lies murkily around as shallow lakes. Even driving along the tracks with their middle-mannetjie sounded and looked a lot like being in a motorboat with the wake we created.

About 30kms into our wet-whoosh drive out of the pan, Rehana (who was driving) made a split second and dreadful decision: she took the track less travelled which arched out from the wet, more travelled one, and before Ditsa could finish his sentence, “Be careful here, watch…”, we were wheel-high in pan mud. 
Our trusty L4 gear couldn’t budge us. And so Ditsa became our most recent hero, as he bustled around in the black morass collecting branches to put under our thickly embraced tyres.

The view from the least mired side

First try just further embedded the BRC; and then Rehana and Ditsa got our very, very, very nifty sandtracks out from the car and lodged them under the back wheels (I was playing cheerleader and chronicler with the camera, not feeling for a mudbath). Et voila!
A mere handful of minutes later, and Rehana was oozing and splattering the BRC out of the mucky sludge and back on to the waterlogged road.

This, too, I’ve learnt: I don’t much appreciate offroad driving nor getting stuck, but there is a certain thrill when you finally get unstuck.

MUGGED IN NAM

IN JULIA'S WORDS

22 January

Katima Mulilo, Caprivi Strip, Namibia: HO HO HO (now slap a sticky thigh in hilarity) H O T, and HE HE HE (now slap the other one) H E A T. Hits me so hard, all I can do is meekly laugh, at this unfunny, beyond the pale, muggy benoud.

We were standing on baked, cooking bricks that surrounded the blue, cooling-cool pool, having just dipped in, so hot that steam came off us when first we plunged in, when I said to Rehana, “I wish for a huge storm – when we’re in our tent at bedtime – the kind of storm that makes you think you imminently face maiming or death, but then the wild thing passes and you’re still okay.”

 “Eahiiiiiaaaa,” replied Rehana, not listening as she slid through the fine becooling aqua-blue water.

This is the pool at the Protea Hotel, no less, which remarkably offers comfortable camping on the banks of the Zambezi river. 

The view from our tent

It’s all starting to feel very South African again – sweetly because we’ve missed what we’re used to, and not-so-sweetly because the yucky limitations of what we’ve been so used to are once again evident. 
Like the décor – whyyyyy? Who came up with the interior design formula for such places that’s so unbearably fusty, uber-naff “Afri-ethno”? Oh yes. Those people. The ones who know best what Mavis and Mike Middle like, give it to them slick and proper, and rule the world because they make pots of money doing it. Sigh. And why the moskos, why?

But back to our damn sticky day. There were sweaty potholed roads through Zambian Greenland, then a sweaty two border posts (but both fairly hassle-free) and then selecting the most shady spot possible on the stretching green grass, right on the Zambezi, on Protea’s very good camping ground. 

So thus refreshed by our dip in the pool, bumping again into our lovely Swiss friends in the Combi, we went through what is now our thought-free drill of setting up our camp: I climb on the roof, hand Rehana a gas cylinder, undo the tent’s covering and then heave it, with Rehana helping at ground zero, until it’s its wonderful Swiss chalet self.
Then we stretch out the awning, unpack table and chairs – all the while witnessing with some trepidation and some slight awe the rumbling and grumpy black clouds of a storm approaching.

As it arrives, I light a cigarette, thinking I will watch the ruckus under the protection of the awning. What a joker! I manage one drag before it becomes quite evident that this isn't so much as storm as a !*!#!^! STORM!*!#!^!
The blend of a thrashing wind, roaring sky and crashing rain sends the table and chairs flying, the awning collapses, and I swiftly retreat with Rehana and my sodden cigarette to drip on the front seats of the car. 

Just a bit later, I decide to relocate to the nearby shelter of the ablutions (such an awful prison-sounding word. This one was more like a lav), the better to see for myself how the tent is faring being rippedslappedthrashed as it is. 
It all looked very touch and go - but then the storm rushed off across the river to tear apart the village there, and miraculously all the bits on the tent held. Rehana, who had remained in the car, later told me it felt as if BRC was being lifted off the ground.

The moral of this story, of course: be careful what you wish for.

Leaving Katima, I began to feel the tell-tale signs of getting sick: the sick of the sinus kind, when chunks and shards seem to occupy what should be clear spaces in my face.
Just to be sure, I did a malaria test, but it was negative (and I was suffering none of the headaches or fever that comes with that). A cold/sinus thing the erupting snots must have been.

And so the lovely Divundu, here on the Okavango River, which floats by like greasy French Onion Soup of the most sedate kind, became my place to lie down to sneeze and wheeze. 
It’s really crap having a cold in such a hot place, but there’s also something tremendous about lying in our stuffy tent feeling blahed with a view of tangled trees through the green gauze, and nothing to do other than to lie around in a half-daze waiting to get better.

Lying up in the branches with the snots and the birdies

Our campsite on the banks of the Okavango River

Best is, in that demi-coma of heat and cottonwoolhead, listening to the birds – the squawk, shriek, coo, chatter, warble, and occasional fish eagle’s outrage, all mixed up  to form an audible skynet over me.
In my half-sleep each of their sounds acquired a colour – a colour from the palate of all the birds around this place, a slash of bright red, gleam of serious yellow, flash of burnt orange, iridescent blue, squirt of lime, every shade of grey. So it seemed as if the skynet was embroidered in a fantastic multicolour display, an incredible dreamweaver.

Mine was an odd dreamweaver, though. If its work was to filter dreams, somehow one starring me as an undercover diver on behalf of some clandestine force, slipped through. A Purdy look-alike was just telling me to take off my sweater in favour of a black bodysuit (ooh, I was thinking) before I got back in the night water with my diving gear to tackle the foe, when a bigger birdy outburst woke me…

Two-and-a-half days of lying down, and I’m as right as rain. The rain this place isn’t getting with the drought it’s going through – apparently in some areas of Namibia for the past four years. 
Reports say somewhere between 400 000 and 800 000 have hit the towns seeking food because of the drought. Other reports are of cholera epidemics in places where boreholes have dried up and shit is mixed up in the puddles people are resorting to drinking.

Last night a big storm harried again our tent (not anywhere near as spiteful as the Katima Wild Thing), so perhaps the rainy season's easing. Inshallah, and the rain goddesses…

SWIMMING IN SADC LAND

IN REHANA'S WORDS

16 January

We’ve been driving through thick green forests since we left Tabora in Tanzania the week before Christmas. In soft, moist air. Enjoying well-spaced, drenching and cooling rainstorms (except for one that misbehaved). 
Puffy white clouds shield us from the harsh summer sun on most of our driving days. When the sun pours through the windscreen it burns our knees to a near crisp.

On the drive to Lusaka farms occasionally broke through the woodland. Not the hardscrabble subsistence plots we’ve been passing for months, but huge enterprises with large-scale irrigation, fences and gated entrances with the name of the farm on a board. 
Stalls on the side of the road sold butternut and potatoes by the sack; no more groups of women trying to flag their small piles of tomatoes and miniature onions. The mushrooms people sold in buckets and tubs at the side of the road were ginormous – it be very wet under those trees.

South African seed companies must be making a pretty penny in Zambia; their placards dominate the tilled fields and advertising billboards. They’re all here, from Pannaar to AgriSA to Karoo Landbou.

Bakkies with South African plates whizz along the highway, two-tone shirts are everywhere, Landbou Weekblad is on sale at Pick n Pay and there’s a secure supply of biltong and boerewors.

We met a couple in Livingstone, Maryna and Flip from Brits, who were being financed by HSBC to grow mielies in Zambia – for the South African market, nogal!

Land is cheap in Zambia. You can get a 99-year leasehold and financing from an English bank if you want a piece of virgin forest. Please don’t clear it to plant mielies. If you develop a campsite we’ll come visit often, I promise.

We drove to Lusaka without stopping, passing through towns with familiar names like Kabwe and Kitwe. Comrades in exile in the 1970s and 1980s often passed through there, stayed a while or forever. There wasn’t much to see as we whizzed through the towns, except the names of their businesses. Where else but Zambia will you get a Melodious Melody Supermarket?

All the way to Lusaka a procession of pylons poked out of the woods like metal giraffes. Electricity seems to be endemic in Zambia, unlike in Tanzania where it is endangered.

There was traffic on the way into the city, trucks and cars slowed down by interminable police roadblocks. Other travellers warned of “road taxes” but the police officers who stopped us were only polite and professional. The most they asked of us was proof of third-party insurance. Still haven’t met one corrupt person at a roadblock - and we've been through hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Been a while since we've been in a city with dual carriageways, traffic and billboards

We spent only two days in Lusaka, arriving on a Friday afternoon and leaving Sunday morning. As usual with our city sojourns, first stop was a mechanic. Fortunately, BRC’s latest niggle, an airconditioner unit that shakes and rattles, can wait till Joburg for repairs. We seldom use the aircon but we’re nervous of tackling summer in Namibia and Botswana without it.

We had a fantastic host at the Apogo Guesthouse. Oumo is a Ugandan exile and a political scientist with a doctorate who kept us up way past our bedtime. But like everyone else we spoke politics to on our trip, he maintains that our African neighbours can’t rise up against their wealth-amassing and heartless leaders because brutality will be the result.

I argued that our police are pretty brutal too, both before the end of apartheid and now. That doesn’t stop South Africans from taking to the streets, especially when demanding better service delivery from politicians. Oumo had heard about Marikana but not our other shootings. Two days later Maryna told me police had shot and killed four people in her hometown, Brits.

What really gets me is that people will take to the streets at the behest of politicians to commit the most appalling violence against their neighbours and friends, but they refuse to participate in a peaceful protest because they fear violence. 
They bury babies and children because there’s no doctors or medicines but they won’t risk teargas or batons to demand decent health care. People have to be held responsible for their own oppression sometimes; doesn’t matter how many millions of pounds or kroner NGOs spend.

There wasn’t much to do in Lusaka, we wiled away a few pleasant hours in the Botanical Gardens. The entrance fee was steep but it offered pleasant shaded gardens and no less than two swimming pools. There were braai areas and lapas and only one party setting up loud music, just as we left.

Kirstenbosch could do with one of these?

We stopped at Pick n Pay to buy ludicrously expensive groceries and bumped into Canadians we had met and liked at Lake Shore Lodge – Steve, Carolynn and their daughters Madeline and Gabrielle. They were driving through southern Africa for three months.
We went to their campsite for a long visit. Parked next to them was the Swiss couple we had met at Kapishya, with the bright orange Volkswagen combi much older than BRC.

I don’t think I have made lifelong friends among the locals we met on this journey. It’s because of the way we’re travelling. We’re not volunteering with an NGO. We’re firmly rooted in the tourism economy – most of the locals we’ve met have been lodge owners, managers, waiters, barmen, drivers, cooks or guides. Some remain in contact. Chacha in Dessie, Ethiopia sends regular, sweet emails.

Our relationships with our fellow travellers are short-lived but intense. They’re very affirming; you’re not alone in your insanity – setting off from a comfortable home to make life difficult. I’ve only met one fellow black traveller so far. In the campsite at Dar es Salaam there was a Kenyan driving from Nairobi to Cape Town. Most long-term travellers are elderly Europeans stretching pensions made meagre by their failed economies and banking systems.

The cyclists we meet make me feel especially good. Compared to their miserable existence, our journey is positively bourgeoisie personified. Steve, the cyclist we met in Malawi, again in Nairobi and planned to catch up with in Ethiopia, contracted typhus at the same time I was in hospital and flew back to the UK for treatment. 
I’ve just heard that he is back on the road, currently in Saudi Arabia. He plans to work there for a few months then he’ll cycle across the Middle East and Asia before crossing into Canada and travelling south to …?

Dave, a cyclist we met at Katima Mulilo in Namibia, told us Steve’s latest news. Can you imagine cycling through Namibia in January? We met Dave again at Ngepi camp after he had cycled across the Caprivi, sleeping at night at the side of a road in a game park where he spotted a leopard. His skin is baked and his brain is fried. 
We make at most, especially here in SADCland, 120km an hour. For a cyclist, that’s a day’s lonely toil. Can you imagine the endorphin rush before the day’s pain hits? Eckhardt, a greyhaired neighbour in a huge Mercedes camper in the Katima Mulilo campsite told us he’d love to cycle across Africa but he’s scared because he’s heard it’s addictive.

But I’m getting way ahead of my tale. I’m in Namibia already and I haven’t told you the last of my Zambia story. Our last stop was Livingstone. We camped at a rather swish place, the Zambezi Waterfront. Other than a plague of monkeys that got away with a head of broccoli (yay! Back in the land of Pick n Pay); safari vehicles that revved needlessly at dawn and helicopters and microlights that took off constantly, we were pretty comfortable.

We’re still managing to catch 11 hours most nights, and I almost always wake up drenched. I’ve googled “artists with TB” and the list is pretty impressive. I’m considering a relapse so I can do something with those kaleidoscopic dreams that come with my nightly sweats.

Like Forest Inn and Kapishya, the Zambezi Waterfront campsite met our stringent SADC standards. Plenty of soft green grass, an abundant supply of hot water in the clean showers, internet (not free, though), DSTV and two (icy cold because they are shaded by trees) swimming pools. And it didn't cost a fortune. 
Despite the coldness of water I managed to while away many hours on loungers next to the pools.  And when I got tired of that I whiled away hours on the deck next to the mighty Zambezi river – that we first met months ago in Tete, Mozambique.

Back on the mighty Zambezi again

My first selfie, taken on the deck at Zambezi Waterfront

Jules doing a Dolly Rathebe photobomb in my second selfie

Jules and I walked into the game park next door to get a photo of the sun setting on the Zambezi and spotted a fat crocodile on its surface.

Tony and Marley, a Dutch couple who crisscrossed Africa for three years on motorbikes, were camped next to us. They warned that the Victoria Falls was a wet walk. We decided to strip down to our cossies when we visited it and stash our clothes in a plastic bag. I couldn’t think of anything better than being slightly damp while we walked in the heat that had surrounded us for days.

The heat disappeared the day we went to the falls. It was grey and wet and cold in places. Julia stripped just before I did. My T-shirt was drenched in a minute and never recovered. Both of us had seen the falls from the Zimbabwean side but Zambia offered a very different proposition.

The walkway alongside took us very close to the falls, where the rainy season deluge was in full throttle. I thought it was raining but it wasn’t. The fat drops beating down on our heads had first been smashed on the rocks below the falls; then they soared high into the sky and came down seeking a soaking.

It was an enormous show of strength. The hydropower turbines must have been whirring at capacity. We only stopped our marveling when we blinked blindly in the water cascading down our foreheads into our eyes.

Then we walked down into a rain forest, edging nervously past vicious-looking baboons.
I had started to warm up nicely when we reached the bottom of the forest and stopped to admire the swirling water emerging out of the chasm.

Then the rain came down. It rained for hours and eventually I had to admit I was chilled, although not cold.

We walked across the gorgeous Livingstone bridge to visit Zimbabwe for the second time on this journey. All that was required was a small piece of paper with a date stamp on the Zambian side on which an immigration official handwrote the number 2. 
No-one was interested in the damp paper when we returned. We took our best photo of the falls at the bridge:

Our four-day stay in Livingstone was mostly about lolling in a posh resort that also catered for cheapskate campers. When we left we travelled west along the Zambezi, crossed it, entered Namibia and parked on the southern banks of the river.

We spent two nights at the … wait for it … Protea Hotel in Katima Mulilo, the biggest town on the Caprivi strip. They had a warm, crystal blue swimming pool – wet and warm is far better than not wet when it’s verging on 40 degrees in the shade. 
The ablution blocks in their campsite, on the banks of the Zambezi, were what you’d expect from an en-suite room in the hotel, gleaming white tiles in the shower with not a trace of grey mould. For the first time in what seemed like forever we had hot water and a proper stainless steel sink for our dishes. Their internet was on the blink, alas.

We went shopping when we arrived in Katima Mulilo. Pick n Pay and Shoprite (we went to both) had everything we needed, except meat, chicken or fish that looked fit for human consumption. Going to have to be vegetarian for a while longer. 
We found fantastic creamy yoghurt and we’re back on fresh milk since Lusaka – yay! No more longlife yechiness with the excellent coffee we've been drinking since Mozambique.

The town was quite scary. It was broiling and the sour smell of unwashed bodies was more pungent than usual in the queue at the supermarket tills. White sand crept onto the road from the edges and the centre line has disappeared under the fine silt in place. In the enervating heat it was easy to imagine that a nearby desert was encroaching.

We did nothing else at Katima’s Protea Hotel except walk to the pool – a huge distance of about 300m – loll next to the pool and dip in occasionally. It was hard, hard work. But we managed. Finally, we are on holiday, and we’re loving it.

Now we’re at Divundu our last stop in Namibia. We're at Ngepi campsite along the banks of the Okavango River, which has a much faster flow than the Zambezi. The crocs and the hippos are much more visible, it's much shallower than the Zambezi. 
Saw our first hippo ever on this trip on our walk at dusk yesterday. It was waking up on an island in the middle of the river. I saw its pink gums when it yawned, but it didn’t come out of the water before it got dark.

Ngepi camp is as well appointed as the other SADC places we’ve tasted. We’re now getting used to clean, hot showers (now that we’re in boiling heat), fancy toilets (haven’t seen an eastern one for a while) and campsites with green grass and swimming pools. 
Ngepi’s pool is in the river and some of its toilets are in the bush.

Kak in die bos

Loved the sign coming in

And the one when we left. We didn't see a wild dog, we were whizzing on SADC's tarred roads

The road on the three-hour drive from Katima Mulilo was lined with trees, but it does seem to be thinning, finally. We’re following the Okavango to Maun so I expect a green curtain all the way. But then we’ll have to bid farewell to the thick green belt that’s accompanied us all the way from Uganda. Africa’s lungs seem far more healthier than mine.

We could drive to Joburg in four days from here. It’s only 1 500km away. But I’ve never been to Botswana and it’s only a few minutes from here. Heaven (a lamb chop or two) can wait.

WOODLAND WONDERLAND

IN REHANA'S WORDS

7 January 

We tried, and failed, to stick to our repeated vows to drive short distances slowly, on good roads where there is sufficient traffic to help us in our times of need.

We left Lake Shore Lodge at a very sedate pace; took three and a half hours to drive 150km to Sumbawanga, our last stop in Tanzania. More than half of that drive was on the gravel road on which we had our spill.  The rest was on a slightly better gravel road.

The road to the border looked promising as we headed out after a one-night stop at Sumbawanga. The Chinese had come and there was new tar with wide verges and neat public transport stops. But the promise faded after a few kilometres and the rest of the trek to the border was on a one-lane gravel track.  The only traffic we encountered was three cars, one motorbike and a handful of bicycles.

The gate to the Tanzanian border post was locked and the offices deserted. I can’t explain why we haven’t lost our penchant for crossing borders at weekends when officials have to be summonsed from their homes to assist us. The immigration officer arrived sharply but we had to wait a while for the customs official – a Seventh Day Adventist at church on Saturday.

As I smsed my family with the happy fact that we were entering Zambia – a massive leap homewards – I received one from my father with the news that his sister Dawn had died. That’s two aunts gone since we left home, both huge characters who leave a massive hole in the family.

Zambia’s border gates were also locked but their officials came quickly and were very efficient. Bad news, however, we had to go to Mpulungu for customs administration. It is 30km from Mbala, the first town after the border. But there’s tar from Mbala – strong grey tar flecked with iridescent black gravel – and nary a pothole.

Mpulungu is a harbour on Lake Tanganyika. We had hoped to make it our port of entry into Zambia, on the MV Liemba that has been in service since World War 1. But the crane fees to load the car on the ferry were horrendous.
None of the three banks in Mbala were online and neither was the only one in Mpulungu. For the first time since we left home we couldn't pay the carbon tax in US dollars. The Zuma lookalike official was more interested in picking me up than collecting the fee. He waved us on after I gave him a fake cellphone number and agreed that we could pay it on the way out of Zambia. 
We had added an unnecessary 160km to our journey.

Making lunch on the southernmost shore of Lake Tanganyika

We said our final, unexpected, goodbye to Lake Tanganyika and set off for the next town south, Kasama. A scant two days after we left Lake Shore Lodge with our hearts in our throats and our feet pressing gently on the accelerator we drove 370km in five hours. I hope Jules and I are better at keeping our wedding vows than we are our driving vows.

Barclays at Kasama was generous as usual – or so it seemed until we realised that the rand was still freefalling. There’s a huge Shoprite in town, right next to Pep, which drew me like a magnet. First thing I spotted on its generous shelves was cherry Halls – which I have kept in constant supply for years but last purchased in Zimbabwe, eight months ago.

The supermarkets in Sumbawanga the day before were adequately stocked; I found Appletiser for the first time since Maputo. But as usual we did most of our shopping at the market, traipsing through puddles of mud, waving away hordes of flies and inhaling through our mouths to keep out the reek of piles of dried fish.

SADCland has airconditioned supermarkets and it may not be long before I find Woolies food. A dietician we met at Lake Shore Lodge recommended that I eat plenty of cranberries and grapes while I’m on my TB meds, then she laughed with me as I fantasised and drooled. I haven’t been able to find a probiotic for months, let alone a grape I can afford. 
The nectarines at Shoprite in Kasama were the equivalent of R15 each. I left with my cherry Halls, carrots and a bunch of broccoli. 

We are racing through Zambia, feeling very bad about our haste and promising to return one day. In the north of the country there is very little tourist infrastructure outside of the parks and accommodation costs are high. Petrol is R20 a litre – the most we’ve paid since we left home and the Big Red Car is a thirsty beast. No wonder there’s very little traffic on Zambia’s excellent highways and most of the vehicles we’ve passed have Tanzanian number plates.

We left the smooth highway soon after we left Kasama (a one-night stay) heading for Kapishya Hot Spring Lodge, which an Italian couple we met at Lakeshore Lodge had raved about. The deserted gravel road slowed us down again and I enjoyed the forested view while Julia clutched the steering wheel and poked her head over it, all the better to see the next donga.

The land has been spectacular since we left Mwanza three weeks ago. We’ve been driving mostly alongside indigenous forest and Zambia’s is far more lush and extensive than Tanzania’s. Boy is it rainy season: it comes hard and heavy every day, a welcome break from the heat. And it leaves the softest, gentlest air in its wake.
At Thorn Tree Lodge at Kasama I finally had what I had last been able to order in Durban eleven months ago: A toasted cheese sandwich. Aaah, SADCland.

The lush garden at Thorn Tree Lodge in Kasama

Kapishya Lodge was expensive and pretentious (we could visit the owner’s manor house for $20 per person or have a dinner there for a mere $40 per person).
Its campsite was a gem and we had it mostly to ourselves. There was a laager of GP registration two-tone shirt campers but they left soon after we arrived.
We admired the 70-something Swiss travellers driving through Africa in a 1973 Volkswagen combo, orange and white and speckled with a few yellow daisies.

We had the most fantastic walk through Kapishya's forest

The hot spring, a teeny-tiny walk from our campsite, was addictive, especially for a bathaholic like me. The water bubbled through the sand floor of the natural pool after being driven up seven kilometres underground.
It was far too hot during the day to linger in the spring, I spent hours in the tree-fronded pool every night.
The water was a comfortable 38 degrees Celsius and had not a whiff of sulphur. It made my skin and hair silkier than it had been in yonks.

Happiness is … a spring in a forest

It rained the first night I went in, sending plumes of steam into the air. I had great company, Anna – a Yugoslavian who had lived in Zambia for 30 years. She was full of fear, her mother had battled TB for years and Anna was convinced that the hot water was no good for me.
But she knew the disease 60 years ago, when people died after coughing blood despite being fed 300 tablets a day. She was convinced that TB was the perfect ailment for artistic types; she said the night fevers are inspirational. (I’m going to check on that)

It stormed on our second night in the pool. The raindrops fell on the water like bright sparkles. We left the water and covered ourselves in long pants, thermal underwear, thick sweaters and rain jackets, preserving the heat that had penetrated our marrow. 
These springs are ideal for our arthritic parents, we thought.

Julia's foot is stuck in a tube of hot water bubbling up to the surface

Then another long haul; more than 500km to Forest Inn outside Mkushi. It has a grassy patch for campers between the indigenous trees.
It’s right on the highway and the occasional passing Tanzanian petrol tankers sound like a waves on a beach to an exhausted traveller. I slept eleven hours last night and Julia slumbered for twelve.

Lusaka’s next.

The forest on the highway

IN JULIA'S WORDS

9 January

Serene as a woodland-clad Reclining Buddha northern Zambia unfolds herself (sorry about that Buddha, Zambia wants to be a she). Blue expanses of escarpment stretch to beyond the reaches of my eyes, here and there interrupted by the curvaceous hips or shoulders of hills, or a sharp heel or elbow of a koppie.

She plays, as I gaze in a driving glimpse-way, winkingly on my heartstrings – tunes like “Stay, just a little bit longer”, and “I love you to the end of the world”. I croon back, “Woodlands to the right of me, woodlands to the left, here I am stuck in the middle of you”. 
The grey clouds organise themselves edge to edge above us in the shapes of rolling and unusual pastry, ready to blaaah down their contents in sheer sheets at any time. 

A small glimpse of gorgeous Zambia

Like a steadfast older sister, Zambia knows how to keep her secrets, and yours. She’s so much surrendered to uncultivated expanses, she's hardly bothered to learn to speak Human.
But kindly she accommodates the locals’ little homesteads, the dirty-blond thatched roofs of their round huts as plat and shaggy as the hair of a rural barefoot South African white boy’s (probably called Willem).

These good and empty roads allow mental space for that kind of Zen non-thought that shit or busy roads do not; I feel safe, the way Zambia’s taken me by the hand.

Safe driving on Zambia's smooth outstretched roads

Zambia’s the 10^th country we’ve visited on this trip, now 9 months in, so there’s a memory bank of details demanding comparison. What, no whipped donkeys or starving horses trudging the crumbles that pass for roads?! 
And where are the veritable roadrunning chickens, the hordes of cattle and goaties adding their bit to the dust and chaotic melee? What a brutal culture shock this would be for Rwandans and Tanzanians and Kenyans and Ethiopians, these be-paved and tranquil throughways that pass, unpotholed, through land unterraced, hardly cultivated at all and breathing free!

Besides what’s not, look what is! Rehana and I gawk at proper metal road signs with legible inscriptions that indicate direction and distance to places. We hark at the Yellow Pages which we’re given in Mkushi so we can investigate costs and places in Lusaka before we get there; and the bread - that industrial, mass-produced stuff, stripped of most nutrition but so handily bagged - causes us a homesick cackle.

Some roadsigns are sweet

What’s true of home, and has been everywhere since, is true here too: the utter dejection of the many, very poor, making their hand-to-mouth slow-motion non-way. It fucking breaks your heart, how person after threadbare person sits listlessly on the road’s edge, selling the SAME blerry things, mangoes or tomatoes or onions or charcoal. Except – our first here in Zambia – mushrooms the gigantic of flying saucers.
We’re one of 3 cars which will pass, in either direction, this half day – and to see the young scragsters, waving us unsuccessfully down to buy a little something, is plain torture.

That’s one of my expectations of this journey that’s been spot-on. We’re a continent of the poor peasant ruled by squint, but canny, hyenas, in thrall to their drooling multinational-corporate-cannibal friends.

How looooong, Africans, hoooooow long, will you let this be!?!

Especially since abundance is your actual heritage.