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Botswana We spent a few days at chameleon backpackers in Windhoek while we stocked up on supplies (read beer, fishing rod and lures) and decided where to head next.  Afrikaans is a funny language. We met a Dutch couple that translated the Afrikaans word for Chameleon into Dutch (from where Afrikaans originated as a farmers dialect) and then into English. The literal translation ended up being “a little man who can change colour”. Both Jacinda and I found this incredibly humorous. I suppose you had to be there. We decided to change our plans somewhat and head back up to northern Namibia and spend some time on the Caprivi Strip at a place called Ngepi Camp - a few km’s south of Divundu. This is a magical spot set right on the Kavango River. The campsites have grass; a Namibian rarity and they have a wire cage in the river that you can swim in without fear of Hippos and Crocs. They had a 5m croc a few weeks before give the cage a good nudge in an attempt to get to some swimmers inside. It survived, the cage and the swimmers, so I thought that we would be pretty safe. The highlight for Jacinda however was the ‘loo tour’ to see the varied individual showers and toilets. As you can see from the photos they are quite creative. We met a really great bunch of South Africans – Eugene (Eugene if you are reading this send us an email you slack bastard), his son Whistling Willie, Nicco and his wife and Nina and her husband, . Eugene is heavily involved in Nandos, Nicco owns a Land Rover dealership in Pretoria and is supplying Eugene with a defender to join Kingsley Holgate in Kenya as he drives around the outside of Africa delivering one million mosquito nets. Nina’s husband is a funny guy. He is the only one who didn’t drive a Land Rover; he had a Pajero instead, and had to listen to days of Land rover worship. We met them on the sunset cruse and they invited us around to their campsite the next night for dinner. The subject to the Boar War came up and Nina’s husband suddenly piped up and said “we (the Afrikaans) kicked the English’s buts during the Boar War and sent them packing back home from South Africa but they had the last laugh on us, they then sent us the Land Rover…”. A man of few words for sure, but you have to admire someone who gets so much mileage with so few words. Even the hardened Land Rover lovers had to smile. I caught my first Tiger Fish at Ngepi from the edge of the croc pool. These are superb fighting fish and while mine was only around 1.5kg, it put up one hell of a fight. Imagine the love child of a Piranha and an Atlantic Salmon that has been fed nothing but steroids since birth and trained by the Jedi Master that trained Yoda and you get the idea. The things strike hard and their first instinct is to leap out of the water in order to throw the hook. It rates as one of the best fish I have caught and I am keen to have a crack at a bigger one to see how much line I can lose. Jacinda took the rod the next morning and tried her luck. Just as someone from the landing asked her if she had seen the buffalo across the river, a Tiger Fish attacked her spinner and she lost it. She blames the distraction of the guy on the landing and when I reminded her that she always insists that women can multi task and do two things at once she muttered something under her breath and gave me ‘that look’. Many thanks and a big hello to Duncan with whom I shared my fishing experience along with a few tales and a few more cold beers. That’s the thing about travelling you meet the best people and Duncan is one bloke who I could be great mates with. We are trying to see who can land a 5kg Tiger Fish first and email the photo to the other. I suspect that he might win this one, if nothing else due to having the opportunity every day and knowing a lot more about (especially fly) fishing than I do. There is always luck on my side though… We met an English couple who had been living in Zimbabwe for several years until they were booted out. They lost everything, their business, property, money, house, everything. They ended up opening a bar in Spain instead. There is more on Zimbabwe later. We got news that Geelong had one the AFL grand final. Congratulations to John Reddan who has been a long-suffering Cats fan for many years. Very reluctantly we had to drag ourselves away from Ngepi and we crossed the boarder into Botswana on the way to Tsodilo Hills. One thing you begin to see in this part of the world is the classic mud or straw huts with the thatched roofs. It is a bit of a clique and something Jacinda didn’t actually think she would see. Obviously the locals have not heard the post modernist propagandist fable of the three little pigs and the virtues of the western brick house over the third world mud and straw house. The irony is that it is pretty much an illusion. The more you have the less happy you become. We have what we can fit in our car and life is much simpler and less stressful, except crossing Zambian boarder posts perhaps, but more on that later. On the way to Tsodilo Hills we noticed a huge bush fire on the track on the way in. Smoke was blanketing the area so we decided to push on and head straight for Maun and Audi Camp. The campsite is a bit of a dust bowl, but the bar area is a big redeeming feature of the place. Jacinda found an area of grass and we though we had a great little spot until we were surrounded by some fifteen caravaner’s from South Africa. There were power cords running everywhere, a generator was cranking and we felt like we had joined the circus. We ending up running into these guys several times along the way over the coming few days. We tried to book with the DWNP for Moremi and Chobe but were told that all the parks were fully booked. We had arrived during South African school holidays. We formulated our usual plan which involved intensive bullshitting to worm our way into the parks. We arrived at South Gate and tried to book accommodation at third bridge. The parks officer said he could only give us a spot at North Gate on the way out. We headed in and managed to talk our way into a site at Xakanaxa. We have found that even if fully booked they will always find room if you turn up late enough that you cant drive out again. At North Gate the next night the parks officer tried his best to make life hard for us but we stuck to our guns and ended up with a site to camp. Moremi is an amazing place. At it covers a large section of the Okavango Delta and is only accessible by 4wd along sand tracks. We heard of several safari vehicles (they were Toyotas, we promise) that got bogged and we saw a few tourists that we think might still be there given how they were struggling through the soft sand sections. Moremi is a total contrast to Etosha in Namibia. There are no formed roads, just sand tracks through the bush. There are no artificial waterholes, just the delta. It feels more of an authentic wildlife experience and given that the wildlife is fairly well spread out, when you do see something it is more of a special experience. We finally got to do a few water crossings in Moremi, which made a nice change from crossing the dried creek beds in Namibia. The camping is also best described as wild camping. There are no fences, you camp with the animals and at night we saw elephant and hippo graze below our tent literally a few feet from the car. You do not walk to the ablutions after dark unless you are a little crazy. After a few days we ended up at Kasane, and stayed at Thebe camp site and then Toro Lodge. We would definitely recommend Toro to fellow travellers as Thebe cannot guarantee your booking except on a day-to-day basis. We went for a game drive through the Chobe Waterfront and noticed a fuel leak coming from the top of the fuel tank. It got progressively worse and necessitated a GPS based shortcut to a main road and a trip into town to find a fix for it before we lost too much fuel. We ended up at XXX who quickly diagnosed the problem as a ruptured fuel line from the fuel pump to the injectors. What had happened was when the long-range tank was installed the fuel breather pipe was held in place with a cable tie and the sharp edge where it was cut rubbed on the fuel line. Over time and many corrugations it cut through. A quick joiner and we were on our way. We were only charged 50 Pula (about $8AUD) but we paid 100 Pula instead as we felt as though we were ripping the guy off. That afternoon we went back to the Chobe Waterfront for a game drive. You wouldn’t read about it, a gust of wind came up and blew our parks pass out the window, right at the time we were parked a few metres from a lion den with several large and hungry looking lions inside. The permit blew a few metres from the car towards the lion. I could see it now, the park gate would not let us out without paying again and the guard would say “don’t tell me, it blew out the window right in front of some lions…” realising that the truth was actually less believable than any story I would invent, and before either the lions or Jacinda could work out what was happening I was out of the car, grabbed the paperwork and was back in the car again. We decided that we would cross into Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe side. We tried to fuel up before we left Kasane but the one fuel station (the other one blew up several weeks ago) had massive queues that stretched for a few hundred metres. As we had enough fuel we decided to give it a miss. We had spoken to several people whom had been to Vic Falls recently and we decided that it was worth crossing over to Zimbabwe. We were glad that we did make the effort for a number of reasons. Firstly the falls are definitely better from the Zim side than the Zambian side, especially this time of year when the water levels are lower. The people in Zim are pretty amazing as well. Given all the hardships that they face, they are incredibly positive, friendly and respectful of people’s safety. While we were hassled to buy things, we felt totally safe there. We were actually treated better in Victoria Falls than in Botswana. It was an incredibly valuable experience to see what is happening in Zim right now with our own eyes. You hear how bad it is, but it doesn’t seem real or possible until you see it for yourself and speak to the local people. Zim was the most beautiful, friendly, economically stable and safest place that I visited last time in Africa, so seeing the state of the Victoria Falls town was hard to take. It is almost a tourist ghost town now with most tourists electing not to stay more than a few hours, which is a real shame. The standard of the crafts here are incredible and while shopping was draining because of peoples desperation that we spend money with them and the fact that we were almost the only tourists there so there by drawing all the attention that would normally be spread pretty thinly, we picked up a few good bargains. Jacinda became quite good at striking a fair but well priced bargain. She can add that to her new found navigation skills. She is getting pretty good at reading a map and combined with me knowing our GPS heading and route log we seem to always know where we are – well most of the time anyway as we have found that the maps are not always right. It is recommended that the shell maps are used in Namibia and Botswana, but they are no way near 100% accurate, so if you use these do not trust them with your life, always know where you are. Crossing over the boarder our first bit of news was the increase in the official Government imposed and therefore standard bank rate of exchange between the $Zim and the USD. The rate had gone up from 250:1 to 30,000:1 which may sound like a lot but the black market rate was some 400,000:1, making a mockery of the governments attempts to cap the damage caused by rampant inflation. The shops are bare as well. The government imposed caps on the price of many goods, the reality of which meant that people had to sell goods for more than they had cost them. Rather than lose money, most shops just didn’t stock their shelves. It is strange to see a supermarket with bare shelves except for some mineral water, a few spirits and a few tourist t-shirts. We were not able to take any photos as the police had bailed up a few tourists for taking photos of the empty shops and goal time didn’t really sound as comfortable as our roof top tent (speaking of which we now have it down to some four and a half minutes each way to erect and to take down – we think this is down from around twenty minutes before we left Australia). We tried to break that record and were on target for a well under sub four minute time when I got over excited and almost fell off the roof, pulling the ladder off its slider in the process which cost valuable minutes. The food situation even in restaurants is pretty severe. The burger place had only chicken and coke. The local café had one item on the menu and only water and orange juice. People here are starving and can only get food on the black market. A typical salary, for those with a job, is around US$8 per month which equates to around Z$5,000,000 (although by the time this is posted it might only be around Z$4,000,000). People can only get food on the black market with a 10kg bag of maize flour costing around US$2. Take out rent and utilities and these people are barely surviving. People are keen to get their hands on USD, but equally keen to trade carvings for clothes, shoes, toothpaste and the like. They wanted my shorts, my smelly thongs and of course my sunnies. It is really hard to help everyone, but we gave what food and spare clothing we could. You feel so helpless seeing how people are forced to live, especially considering how well off Zimbabwe was just a few years ago. One thing that amazes you is how positive the people are. You would expect them to resort to robbing tourists but they don’t. In fact they treat you with more respect than any other African peoples that we have met so far. They were grateful that Jacinda and I treated them as equals and as human beings. Apparently there are many that don’t. Our costs for Zim were US$25 for the car, single/double entry visas are US$30/45pp, and park fees to see the falls are US$20pp. We went on an elephant ride safari that set us back US$90pp. camping for two people and the car was US$22pn. We also gave away some money, food and clothes. We decided to see how the other half live (those paying US$360) to stay at the Victoria Falls Hotel complete with its colonial furnishings and stuffed animals on the wall. We walked in to get a coffee, which we think was free for guests of the hotel. You sit in the gardens and a silver service waiter comes up and takes your order. We had an orange juice and a filter coffee each and escaped before they realised that we were not guests of the hotel but blow-ins from the Victoria Falls Rest Camp. We figured that we had earned many karma credits since being in Zim so we had a few up our sleeve to exchange here. We had a quick exit through the Zim boarder post (except for the secret police guy dressed in civilian clothes who wanted Jacindas passport – to her credit she bailed him up and asked why he was not in uniform, I said to the other guy on my side “try being married to her…”), but had a more ‘traditional’ African experience getting into Zambia. You arrive at the gate and it is utter chaos and confusion. As you get out of your car you are hit with people wanting to exchange money and saying, “you need to pay carbon tax and you can only pay in Kwacha, I give you a good rate” – “A good rate for you or for me” should be the question. You go in and have to push through the queue as you soon realise that people will push in front of you if you leave room. You get your passport stamped and then get a scrap of paper (literally a piece of hand torn coloured paper) with your car rego on it and a stamp. You go to customs and they look at your carnet in confusion. They finally work it out and then say you must pay carbon tax and insurance. “Can I pay in USD”…“no only Kwacha”. You push through the masses again to go outside to find the little con artist who wanted to exchange kwacha for USD when we first pulled up. “What rate are you going to rip me off with”. “3,500:1, it’s a good rate”. “You have to be kidding, a good rate for who? I can get 4000:1 up the road”. “This is a good rate for here”. “I know I am being ripped off, I will have to take it but I want you to know that I know that you are ripping me off”. We go back inside and pay the carbon tax after pushing through the line and guarding against pick pockets (150,000 Kwacha) and then find the women who takes our money for insurance (110,000 Kwacha but don’t try to make a claim on it) and then we try to get through the gate except trucks and cars have blocked it. I talk to a local guy who is also stuck, we find the driver of the car who blocking our way and we weave through the masses of confused cars and trucks and try to get through the gate, only to be stopped by a young guy with an AK-47. “Let me see that” he says pointing to the carnet. I had it over and he gives it to an official. “Big problem, you cannot use this, it does not say Zambia on the back”. Before I can tell him it is listed on the inside cover he goes inside. We wait and he comes back and says “it is inside, see here, it is listed inside”. We can now go. We gun it and get through the gate before they can invent anything else to hold us up with. TIA – This Is Africa. We are now at Jolly Boy’s in Livingston for a few days before we head through Zambia and into Malawi. This hostel is a little oasis in a sea of chaos and confusion. I said to Jacinda that we are in the real Africa now and she replied “its not that bad, anyway its not a holiday, its an adventure”. That’s probably going to be the motto for our trip I suspect. Africa is hard to travel through, it is chaotic and somewhat draining, although at the same time incredibly rewarding. You find that you stay somewhere, a little oasis in the sea of confusion, rest up, and then head out and face the real world, the real Africa, again. We are now off to see Zambia and then Malawi.