Arrived in Namibia – Plan C

We’re doing it hard on the Final Continent Expedition. Had head winds all night, didn’t sleep much, sore backs, but managed to make good ground. We did about 1600km in 20 hours. Impressive eh? Yeah, we were on an overnight bus. Was great seeing the landscape that we had planned to cycle through. Basically the photo below shows what all of the South African route was like, and the Namibian side was slightly more desert like. I spent the whole time looking out the window thinking “we could have camped there, that would have been a good place to have lunch, could have gotten water there.”

We arrived in Namibia’s capital Windhoek this morning at 5.30am. It was rather chilly, but as the sun rose so did the temperature. First impressions are of a really lovely city, blue skies, clean, organised, kinda of what you don’t expect an African city to be. If I was on Facebook I would “LIKE” Windhoek.

We have now moved onto plan C, we will not be staying in Windhoek as previously thought. Michael, the man behind BEN, Namibia is out of town so there is nothing really for us to film here in Windhoek (we’ll be catching up with him in Katima further down the track). Plus we are rather eager to get on our bikes and start pedalling. We will be catching another overnight bus up to Rundu on the Namibian/Angola border. We arrive there early tomorrow morning, will do some couch surfing, get the bikes built up, buy our food supplies, apply Vaseline (NB to self, still have to buy vas), then hit the road on Thursday, finally!

Michael has given us four bike shops to visit along the Caprivi Strip where we hope to be able to pitch our tent and do some filming. The Caprivi Strip is the ‘pot handle’ of Namibia, the thin strip of land between, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Katima Mulilo the destination of the container is at the very end of it. It will be at least a 500km bike ride from Rundu to Katima. We plan to be in Katima on the 9th of July as the project is kicking off on the 11th.

Really excited to finally be kicking this little bike trip off. Woo hoo.

Here are a few photos from Mandy’s and mine trip down the Cape of Good Hope below (Cheers Brev our great host for the use of his car).