Alphabet Travel

I had my nose as good as stuck to the window, taking in my first glimpses of South Africa. For a lot of travellers, this is their first African country. It apparently gets more tourists than anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. I had studied the map and the guidebook, and each time I suggested some beautiful sounding place, Seth would hit me with a ‘been there, done that.’ Drakensberg? Done it. Cape Town? Done it. Blyde River Canyon National Park? Done it. Awesomely tacky Sun City? Done it and ‘never going back there, Louie, under any circumstances.’ (Damn.)

Having just come from Namibia, Mosi-oa-Tunya and Zimbabwe, we really had been going over a lot of his old turf from his year out in Africa back in 1999. He wanted to break free into new territory and I understood that, so I realized that I would have to make do with what scrolled past the window as far as seeing South Africa’s sights were concerned; for now, at least. We planned to get as far south as Pretoria on this first day, then bust east via Nelspruit to the Mozambique border the next. I scribbled notes on the map until you could hardly see anything but a tangle of blue biro. We’d crossed the Limpopo River to enter the country, and just a few miles in there were more baobab trees than we had seen on the whole African journey to date, bigger, too, than any of their predecessors. We passed scorched earth, and orange groves, and bundles of cut grass ready to be sold for roofing, just as in Zimbabwe. The journey continued south, crossing a rugged pass over the Soutpansberg, where cacti grew beside the road and there were striking bushes with bright red flowers. By a crowded, one-storey town, a mother and son squatted by the roadside to relieve themselves and watched the minibus roll by with bored expressions. The sun wheeled through the sky as the hours past. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. Near Polokwane, a sign by the road read, ‘Chickens for Sale,’ only to be followed soon after by the confusing, ‘Chickens Needed.’ It soon fell dark. On the outskirts of Pretoria (at which point all passengers had long been snoozing or silent), our bus was pulled over by traffic police and when the driver ushered us out, I wondered for a moment what the hell we’d done wrong. It turned out we were being offered a lift.

‘You should pay him a little something when you arrive’, our driver mumbled as we said our goodbyes and loaded our bags into the boot of the fancy police car. I’ve never been in the back of one before. The flashing neon lights temporarily blinded me as I climbed in, but I just about made out the shape of our minibus heading off towards Joburg, some of the passengers waving. Our arrival at the backpackers lodge in a police car caused excitement. It was quite a hot entrance; the owners said it was a first. It was a nice little lodge in suburban Pretoria, but when they told us there was only space in the large dorm available, my heart sank. Sleeping in dorms when you’re nineteen is fun. Sleeping in dorms when you’re twenty-nine and celebrating your seventh wedding anniversary sucks. We dumped our bags and headed out to Pretoria’s lively Hatfield district, where we sunk a few beers and had to laugh at the impossibly non-romantic nature of the day. Our hearts and stomachs led us to a Chinese restaurant that was run by a family from Haerbin, a remote Chinese city that we had visited on our Asian Alphabet. They served us amazing food in a happy atmosphere, and we returned to the lodge cheerful, even propping up the bar for a few hours chatting to the owner about Namibia. Still, when the time came to separate and head to our respective bunk beds, I felt like an eight year old. It was pitch dark but for the shining lights of mobile phones – travellers texting internationally. Between the tapping of tiny keypads and clearing of throats, an eerie silence filled the stuffy room. The ceiling was so close to my face that there was a high chance of concussion come morning, should I forget where I was. This kind of claustrophobia is only worth it if you’re staying in a capsule hotel. At least then you score high on the kook factor and get your own coin-op TV…

It was early afternoon by the time our minibus set off for Nelspruit. While we waited we made friends with a young woman who dreamed of moving to London to earn some money and an old gentleman salesman who kept popping over to chat in between potential customers. The young woman had bought her son a new bicycle and was taking it home to Nelspruit.

‘What’s the town like?’ I asked.

‘You know, boring,’ she smiled.

The scenery was forever changing – at first we drove by fields of tall, butter coloured grass where cattle grazed, then suddenly there were signs saying, ‘Hijack Hotspot’ and ‘Crime Alert: Do Not Stop.’ The driver sped up and everyone was quiet. I tried to see what was so different between this area and the one we’d just left but couldn’t tell. There are many complexities that can’t be glimpsed by a passer by from a window.

Further on there were pretty hills and a river, and trees adorned with pink blossom like cherry trees. The late afternoon brought with it an incredible quality of light. A lone ostrich stood in a field. Train tracks ran alongside the road. There were hitchhikers stood by the roadside, sports bags at their feet, woolly hats on their heads. Nobody seemed to be stopping for them.

We could have headed on to Mozambique that evening, but the thought of arriving in its capital, Maputo, after dark was unappealing. Instead we stayed over in Nelspruit, its new stadium standing proud for next year’s World Cup.

‘SMILIES!’ I said to Seth the next morning as we studied a breakfast menu in the restaurant beside our hotel, ‘They have SMILIES!’ I had not encountered these smilie potato heads since Sunday brunch at boarding school, all of eleven years previously. Part of me really thought the school cooks had kind of invented them, and yet here they were, on a South African menu. Seth shook his head and chuckled, an affectionate acknowledgement that his wife may be a bit deranged. The waitress and the kitchen staff found my excitement equally bizarre but they all glanced over happily as I tucked in, grinning. There were green wood hoopoes and weaver birds flying from tree to tree in the garden outside. I knocked back a strong cappuccino. We had borders to cross and letters to hunt. Our ‘X,’ Xai-Xai, was almost in reach.

The bus journey from Windhoek to Livingstone was one of the smoothest, most sanitised, most organised journeys we had taken in Africa, and we hated it. Carrying 90 per cent tourists, running to an actual schedule, making toilet breaks that weren’t just pit stops by the side of a field, it was a highly efficient affair. Gap year backpackers chatted and flirted and swapped travel stories as our double-decker coach roared through tiny villages. I wrote in my notebook, ‘Good God get me of this f**king bus.’ The girl in front of me was one of those great people who fully recline their seat for the entire (24 hour) journey, occasionally readjusting it in order to catch me by surprise with a sudden recline, smashing my knees further. ‘We’re in Central Africa!’ the girl next to her kept saying, when we had crossed into Zambia, ‘We’re in Central Africa!’ I smirked. I think this journey was bringing out the worst in me. The couple opposite us had a shiny gold bag that kept falling out of the luggage compartment above them and plummeting to the ground with a thud, generally clouting the guy on the head on the way down. It happened about three times and was perhaps the most entertaining thing about the whole killer journey. When we arrived in Livingstone, we shouldered our packs and ran away down a backstreet. Having deduced that almost everyone on the bus was staying at the same backpacker hostel, we chose a small motel that was new and appeared in none of the guidebooks. Really, it was nothing personal to our fellow passengers. The problem with the intercape mainliner was, we had been independent travelers for so long, and in some seriously untravelled territory, yet in the blink of an eye we were catapulted onto the tourist trail, herded into immigration offices like sheep and riding on transport with as much local flavour as a KFC bargain bucket. It had been a bit of a shock.

Everyone comes to Livingstone to see Mosi-oa-Tunya, (Victoria Falls), the incredible cascades of the Zambezi as they plummet into a long gorge, partly in Zambia, partly in Zimbabwe. The Zambian side at Livingstone actually has a smaller section of the falls, but the instability of Zimbabwe means Livingstone now gets almost all of the Mosi-tourist-traffic. Since our next destination was Zimbabwe, we would be lucky enough to see both.

Livingstone was a surprise. I had expected a hardcore tourist town, along the lines of Agra, Jaipur, Marrakesh for hassle, but in fact the place was calm and pleasant. There was a bakery near our motel that sent out great wafts of delicious bread all day, and the locals complemented the local Shoprite supermarket by setting up vegetable stalls opposite, their produce much fresher and more tempting than anything it had to offer. At a bush bar we met a fascinating Zambian called Paul, who had traveled to many African countries and had met Mugabe in the days before he was so infamous. For evening’s entertainment, we took in a Bollywood movie at the refurbished 1930’s cinema, ‘The Capitol Theatre’, and talked with its owner about all the work he had done on this classic, old-fashioned place. In the interval, ushers in sparkling crisp uniforms sold pots of ice creams from trays around their necks. A surreal evening, in ‘Central Africa!’ no less.

As for the falls, rounding that first corner and catching a view of them, your heart swings like a pendulum. On the Zambian side, visitors can stand close to where the water plummets over the edge of the gorge, then follow a path along a rock promontory opposite the falls for sweeping views. It was August and the flow was not at its fullest, yet we were still soaked by sudden gusts of rising wet mist, leading to lots of camera juggling and to many of us looking like drowned rats, if happy ones. Bright rainbows jumped out of the frothing water and cut across the gorge to brilliant effect. Baboons strolled around, oblivious to the tourists (less oblivious to the goodies they left behind in bins…) We stayed for hours, and when the path took us as far as we could go, we looked out towards the Zimbabwean side, intrigued. The news had been full all year of the depressing politics of the place, the recent cholera epidemic, and the state of the economy there, and we did not really know what to expect. Research and Seth’s own conclusion was that we did not have to worry much about our own safety; it was the Zimbabweans who were, as ever, having a hard time. It did not look to be a risky place to travel through, just a difficult one, and very likely a sad one. We could expect infrastructure to be a mess. Train travel looked to be out of the question. We planned to make the town of Victoria Falls (named after its chief attraction) our ‘V’, then head south and east, to Bulawayo, Great Zimbabwe and a ‘W’ Seth had chosen, West Nicholson. I did feel apprehensive. Travel had gotten very comfortable since we left the Congos and Angola behind, and I wasn’t really hungering for troubles, difficulty, a land punished by a cruel leader, travel with a great big question mark hanging over it… Yet the tourist bus from Windhoek to Livingstone had been a nightmare, and I knew we would leave the swell of fellow travelers behind the moment we stepped into Zimbabwe. For Seth it would be a pilgrimage, returning to the country where he lived and taught ten years earlier for the first time. Most importantly, travel is not supposed to be easy. It’s nice when it is, but for depth, value and dimension, you need to marry rough with smooth.

It was a hot bright day when walked between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It has to qualify as one of the world’s best border crossings, as you stroll across Victoria Falls bridge and see below you the churning water of ‘the Boiling Pot’ and, out to the side, the falls of the Eastern Cataract. (I swear I read somewhere that hippos sometimes get swept over the edge of the falls, and their bodies surface in the twisting waters of the Boiling Pot. I can’t quite nail the image of a hippo falling over Victoria Falls in my mind…too bizarre…)

The immediately striking thing about entering Zimbabwe was that everyone wanted to trade – we were carrying with us our blanket (aka. Der Schnoofler), the one that had kept us warm on Namibian nights, and several hawkers selling souvenirs expressed a keen interest in it, offering to exchange their necklaces and statues for it. ‘Anything to trade?’ became a key phrase we heard again and again. I think we could have even paid for taxis by giving of the contents of our rucksacks. When we had checked in at a camping complex, we unpacked our bags and looked for things that we might reasonably trade with people. It all made absolute sense in a country where the economy had completely crashed and burned, where (worn out, ancient) American dollars had become the official currency, where life savings had disappeared overnight. The problem was, the people who wanted to trade with us were selling souvenirs we didn’t want, and couldn’t carry. Our clothes, too, were in fairly miserable repair.

This, Victoria Falls, was our ‘V’. Seth walked beside me remembering things with a rare air of nostalgia. It’s normally me you can count on to get all warm and whimsical about things gone by, but in Vic Falls, Seth was positively glazed over with recollection.

‘I…I can’t believe that Wimpy has closed down,’ he said, ‘I sat in that window and wrote letters home.’ We now got our second dose of Mosi-oa-Tunya (phrased like that, it sounds like a disease…)

While on the Zambian side, a corner of the falls had been accessible, what you have on the Zimbabwean side is a kilometer long walk along the cliff opposite the main falls. There was a very soggy viewpoint in the rock face opposite the Devil’s Cataract, where every visitor is treated to the most awesome view imaginable and at the same time totally drenched, destroying any hopes of looking glamorous in any of the millions of portraits taken there on a daily basis. With great gusts of wet spume sweeping in, this must be the graveyard of many a Nikon camera.

We left Victoria Falls the next day and made the serious error of getting up at the shockingly late hour of 8am. Our cab driver shook his head knowingly as we arrived at the bus stand and found it, of course, empty. Every bus to Bulawayo was long gone. ‘You can try to hitch?’ he suggested, ‘Or flag down a combi bus?’

‘Is hitching safe?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it’s safe.’

I really didn’t want to. Thankfully a combi pulled up within half an hour of our roadside wait. The driver was a little drunk but a good guy, and 29, like us. He had a shark-like extra layer of teeth and a protruding lower lip. His T-shirt advertised a pizza house. For much of the journey he tried to convince us to buy him a return flight to the UK. Meanwhile I made friends with the road police officer beside me, who was very interested in my Paul Theroux book and who announced that he would support Leeds United from now on. Our driver complained about the road. I couldn’t understand it because it was a smooth, tarmac dream. Huge ground hornbills skulked by the road. Seth and I were excited, having never seen them close up. The driver dismissed our excitement.

‘These birds – too big to fly!’ he said, with exasperation, and did a full armed impression of them, which thankfully did not send us veering off the road and into the trees. It was great to be on the road again. The scenery wasn’t up to much, but the people were interesting. Food hawkers came to the windows selling bananas, oranges, boiled eggs, leeks, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots and biscuits. A journey that should have taken five hours took eight but it didn’t matter. It was dark when we arrived in Bulawayo, and we had an uncomfortable moment when our taxi ran out of petrol at some traffic lights. The apologetic driver ran down the road to fill an emergency jerry can while Seth and I sat in the car at the side of the road, me trying to erase the foreign office warnings about carjacking at traffic lights from my mind. Funny how three minutes can feel like eternity.

Bulawayo was strangely charming. I had expected to see boarded up shops and much misery on the streets, but people were getting on with life and even the souvenir vendors had set up stalls beside the park, despite the lack of visitors. People we talked to about the current situation spoke about their country affectionately and sadly, knowing it was riddled through with problems and carrying with them a well-toned air of hanging-in-there. Most people had lost a lot of money when the currency had collapsed – and in the weeks before its collapse, inflation was so insane that you needed to take a wheely bag with you to the bank to make a withdrawal. There was concern about poaching in the national parks, too. One thing that was very clear was that Zimbabwe was feeling the loss of its tourism and that made us especially glad to be there – which is why the money problem was all the more frustrating. In Vic Falls, it had been impossible to withdraw any cash at an ATM, or at the bank. We were advised that to do so, we would need to return to Zambia, do it there, and then come back again! We had hoped that in a big city like Bulawayo, the situation would be easier, but when we toured the banks and foreign exchange offices, there were no ATMs that would give us money, nobody who would change our traveller’s cheques and nobody who would give us an advance on our credit card. Likewise, paying for anything on credit card was out of the question. It was all about how much cash we had and how much longer it would last us. The ruins of Great Zimbabwe were crossed off our itinerary. Likewise, attempting to travel all the way east to the Mozambique border with limited funds was a bad idea. We would have to head south to South Africa more or less immediately, picking up our ‘W’ on the way.

We went to a little restaurant and ordered beef and spinach with sadza. Sadza is sticky cooked maize, bright white and quite tastey. We ate with our fingers, looking out onto the street, feeling pissed off because both of us were glad to be in Zimbabwe and didn’t want to leave. We had barely even arrived. Seth had arranged earlier for us to go on a trip to the Matobo National Park the next day. Only 35km from Bulawayo, it was home to incredible rock formations and ancient rock paintings. He had camped there during a storm when he was 19. My ears had pricked up at the mention of rock paintings, and Seth’s nostalgia was calling him to return to the place. By taking a tour, we would be putting some much needed dollars into Zimbabwe’s tourist industry. Now, we thought we probably couldn’t even afford to do that. We counted our dollars. It was a really close call. We could either play it safe, cancel the tour, and head towards the border with South Africa or even Mozambique (risky), or… we could go to Matobo, make a real day of it, then spend the last of our money on tickets south to the South African border. It had to be the latter. We didn’t make the choice to travel to Zimbabwe at this time only to race out of it

It was a brilliant day. Our guide was intelligent, informed and good fun, and was determined that we should have a great experience. We were his first tourists since March. It was just the three of us, in a big minibus that we accidentally got stuck in a ditch in the middle of a nature reserve. The guys pushed while I desperately tried to remember how to drive, stepping down hard on the accelerator and showering them both in dust. Thankfully, the wild animals waited until we were back on the road before surfacing, and we saw rhino and zebra. At lunch, rainbow colored lizards tried to steal our eggs and sandwiches. The huge smooth rocks that the national park is famous for are very striking. The whole place looks like someone took a sledgehammer to a mountain range, and some of the formations are traditionally regarded as sacred. We found the place where Seth had camped in the storm, opposite a lake where a family of hippos were eyeing us cautiously. The shrieks of baboons echoed from a gorge as we headed to the woods, to look at the rock art. One of the paintings we looked at showed hunters chasing wildebeest. It was a very sophisticated image, capturing not only a sense of movement but the likenesses of the animals perfectly, with stylish simplicity. This was the work of San Bushmen, as at Tsodilo Hills in Botswana. The oldest paintings at Matobo are dated at 13000 years.

That night we sat in a pleasingly gloomy bar called ‘Cape to Cairo.’ When we tell people we’re traveling from one end of Africa to another, most expect that this is what we mean – the Eastern route from South Africa to Egypt or vice versa. There are not many people who take the Western route, not yet anyway. We always look online and hunt in bookshops for accounts by people doing a similar route to ours. I wonder if, one day, it will be just as popular. The Eastern route crosses about 8 or 9 countries. The Western one varies on how much you choose to include, but ours totaled at 23… you could probably get away with 18. Given the lack of political stability in so many African countries, there’s far more potential on the western route for countries to turn sour and block your way. Perhaps for this reason it can never be as popular with overland travelers.

As we left Bulawayo, I noticed that while most graffiti had been removed or crossed through, some anti-government statements – perhaps too fresh to be erased – remained. It was exhilarating to see. A very different form of rock art. People are resourceful. They will find a way to be heard.

The minibus was heading to Johannesburg, South Africa, but our fellow passengers did not mind stopping briefly in the Zimbabwean town of West Nicholson, while the two strange foreigners jumped off for alphabetical reasons. It was a tiny place. It had a bottle shop, a grocery store and a stretch of railway line. Some men on a donkey cart trundled by, the very life of the place. I ran into the shop for a trinket while Seth snapped photos and the patient bus passengers stretched their legs. The only suitable product I could find was a small paper packet of tea, produce of Zimbabwe. We were back on the road in five minutes. When the border formalities were done, there was still a long day ahead of us. We hadn’t even had a chance to acknowledge that this was our seventh wedding anniversary. Before we could celebrate in style, we would need to travel a further 350km, getting our first glimpses of South Africa along the way. We would reach Pretoria in a police car, and find our only accommodation option on so romantic an evening was a big shared dorm… but in our blissful ignorance, for now, we bid goodbye to Zimbabwe and settled in for the ride.

It’s a very cold night and we’re sleeping in our car. I’m beginning to realise exactly how small this Citigolf actually is as leg cramp sets in. Blanketless, its all about wearing as many clothes as you can put on, and snuggling up. We both look a bit like manatees. I feel like I missed something in the paperwork – nobody warned me that Africa could get cold like this. At least we have enjoyed a big braai (bbq) of chops and boerewors, and have Castle Beer warming our veins. This tiny town is called Solitaire. I say town but I think there are more springbok than people. Namibia, I’m told, is the world’s second least populated country. It has two other world seconds – second largest canyon, second oldest desert – but the country certainly doesn’t feel like a runner up, to any extent. We have already seen the plains of tall cream coloured grass, the craggy, clefted Naukluft mountains and earth that sparkles with minerals. After months of trees and jungle that appears lifeless from bush meat hunting – knowing the animals are out there, but that man has scared them off – we are suddenly seeing big baboons running across the road, and warthogs snuffling in the grass. Seth has been here before; when he worked in Zimbabwe for a year, he visited Namibia with his brother Baz. He knows what its like to see elephant, rhino, giraffe, lions… for me it’s the first time on this journey that such sightings may be possible, and I’m beyond excited. We have planned to stay in Etosha National Park. I feel like I’ve earned it, like a little African safari is a good reward for the hardcore travel we have just completed through the Congos and Angola.

Public transport in Namibia and Botswana is scant. Locals hitch, but it takes too much time, and we both feel we’d rather wrestle a hippo than join a bus tour. We figure by hiring a car we can reach our alphabet letters R, S, T and U, take a loop around Namibia and Botswana, and take in the desert, the canyon, the Okavango delta and all the adventures in-between. Unfortunately our car doesn’t like us very much. We have called it Pumba, lovingly, after the warthog in the Lion King. It does grunt like a warthog but it roars like a lion. The radiator whirrs like the car itself is about to take off, the breaks squeak, the gears grind and the alarm system is impossible to decipher. Whenever we leave her parked up, she waits for us to walk a significant distance then starts beeping the horn at us continuously, flashing her lights, shocking passers by and utterly destroying the classic serenity of sweeping Namibian landscapes. We take it in turns to run back, shame faced. We’re hoping to tame her soon.

In the morning, we are both creaky and bleary, sleep having proved elusive. It will take something very impressive to wake us up, so we hit the road for the famous sand dunes of the Namib Desert, at Sossusvlei. The first treat is a gang of ostriches running across a field. I have never seen them before and grin from ear to ear. Beyond their bulbous bodies and gangly legs, a world of red comes into view – the dunes have begun. We drive past springbok and oryx, walk out among the dunes to what is known as ‘Dead Vlei’ – I have seen photographs of this strange, desolate clay pan with its dead trees (too dry to rot) a thousand times, and I feel like I know it already. Seth has been here before, and yet we are compelled to wander for a long time, absorbing the place. We last saw desert back in Mali; the Sahara, three months ago. The dunes there were creamy coloured, smooth. These in the Namib are much redder, and are so huge that photographs don’t do them justice. We crane our necks trying to take them in. Some are said to be 300 metres tall. My head can’t quite process the idea, even as I stand there.

Hoping not to sleep in the car again tonight, we head south and east. The map seems to promise mountains, the word ‘Pass’ filling us with hope, but the absorbing beauty of the dunes allowed the day to while itself away; it will soon be dark. Two small bat-eared foxes cross the road around dusk, and disappear into the grass, their large ears giving away their location as they slink off into the night. Seth is doing all the driving. I have a license but haven’t driven in nine years. I also don’t have an international driver’s license for the trip, so sharing the burden is impossible. I try to make up for it by navigating, scouting for wildlife, room-hunting when we overnight in towns and sandwich making, but the guilt is there.

There is very little traffic on this gravel road, and we come to a ditch filled with water. I climb out to test its depth and to guide Seth and Pumba through to the shallowest part, but as I do so I feel suddenly very uncomfortable, as though there is a presence behind me in the bushes. Instinctively I turn and nothing, nobody, is there. There are goosebumps on my forearms as I climb back in the car. It is fully dark and we are crossing the pass. This place looks more like the bleak moorland of Yorkshire than the terrain we are used to.

‘That felt really creepy out there, and I’m not sure why’, I confess.

‘I know what you mean,’ says Seth. ‘There’s absolutely no one on this road.’

I look at the map. The town of Maltahohe, where I’m hoping we will find a hotel, is still a long way off. Around us the silhouettes of lumpy hills look across the terrain. Suddenly there are headlights in the distance behind us. It adds to the creepiness. When the car overtakes, we see black fumes belching out of its exhaust.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ says Seth.

‘What would we do,’ I ponder, ‘if a few miles down the road, that car pulled over, and the driver tried to flag us down. Would we stop?’

I’m only thinking about it because I’ve read somewhere that it’s a trick carjackers and bandits use to get you to slow down. The spookiness of the place is starting to get my imagination working.

‘Do people do that?’ wonders Seth, but he doesn’t elaborate because both of us are distracted by what we see ahead in the road. The car with the black exhaust fumes is at the side of the road, the hazard lights switched on. There are people sat inside and one who is stood by the car, waving us down. This person has their hood up. It is hard to see in the dark whether it is an adult or a child. We slow a little, but instincts and split-second decision making make us err on the side of caution and we keep driving, on the grounds that it is late and dark, that it is a known trick, and that the coincidence is too creepy to be ignored. We know that the breakdown is probably genuine, but instinctually stopping feels wrong. A mile on we see a farmhouse with lights on, and it makes us feel a little less guilty. After securing a draught beer, a cosy room and a hot dinner in Maltahohe, I tell Seth there are not many places in Africa that have made my skin crawl the way that bleak wilderness did.

Fish River Canyon lies in the far south of Namibia, just above the border with South Africa. We’re not yet ready to delve into that country – we want to travel through Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique first – so a trip to the canyon is way off our route. We do it anyway, driving for multiple miles and hours and roaring onto the splendid scene an hour before sunset. Seth runs from point to point with his cameras and tripod. I gaze at the great sloping depths of the canyon. The Fish River winds through, thin, almost a trickle, totally dwarfed by the stupendous walls of stone that surround it. Glossy black birds with orange eyes are roosting here at the viewpoint, and they try to ignore us unless we get too close. Pumba waits for us to get a suitable distance from her then shatters the gorgeous peace with her penetrating beep-alarm, the sounds of the horn echoing through the canyon and disturbing the handful of fellow visitors we are sharing the spectacle with. The birds eye us crossly. I run back to Pumba, cursing her, and battle to stay awake as we drive back to Keetmanshoop and cook the sleepiest braai in history. It is a wonder that neither of us falls asleep in our burgers.

Our next destination is Botswana. We’ve got a long way to go to reach it. On the first day, we break up the driving by visiting a Quiver Tree forest and Seth manages to get lost at a group of rock formations called ‘The Giants Playground.’ For almost an hour, I baby-sit the beeping Pumba, wondering how to explain that I’ve lost my husband among a giant collection of rocks that look like super-size rabbit droppings. If there’s a record for grumpy sandwich eating, I break it on this day. I’m unsympathetic when he finally arrives panting, telling the dramatic tale of his disorientation. There is hardly any traffic on the back roads as we head north. Pale chanting goshawks perch on telegraph poles and huge sociable weaver nests hang in the trees, home to hundreds of birds. We spend the night in an empty hotel in a deserted town, and as we eat dinner the resident grey parrot attacks Seth’s bag and bites his shoelaces under the table.

Alphabetically, we are doing well. We got our ‘R’ in Rehoboth, a quiet town south of Windhoek. We want our ‘S’ to come from Botswana, and can see a couple of contenders near the Okavango Pan Handle. The border crossing is easy, one of the quietest we’ve ever had.

‘Did you notice the Botswana flag?’ says Seth as we stroll out of immigration with our stamps.

‘No,’ I admit, ‘I was too busy looking at that painting of the tiny village with the giant chickens. Either the artist has a few issues with perspective or villages in this country are going to very interesting…’

It seems a very bad omen when asmall deer, a duiker, runs out in front of us and we knock it down. Seth is absolutely mortified. We are driving slowly, in the dark, and it appears at the roadside, dithers, then suddenly shoots out in front of us. It is not until we are at a garage in Ghanzi the next day, having the broken headlight re-fixed on the ill-fated Pumba, that Seth begins to cheer up a little about the whole sad incident. We have come to Botswana in the hope of seeing wildlife, not killing it. The creatures of Botswana seem especially suicidal, and we spend much of our time shrieking at shrews, owls, hornbills and rock dassies that scuttle into the road as though they have death wishes.

We overnight in Sepupa, but decide it will not be our ‘S’ on account of experiencing only a waterside camp on the Okavango river, where bored South African teenagers on holiday amuse themselves by throwing stones at our tent.

‘Ignore them’, Seth advises sagely, as he rests his aching arms and legs after a full day’s driving, ‘they’ll get bored.’ They don’t. I can hear these boys giggling and sneaking up with the stones.

I’m getting annoyed. We didn’t just travel through the fricking Congos to be targeted by spotty fourteen year olds in a bloody campsite in Botswana. A big lump of hard mud smacks the top of the tent and shatters into pieces. Muffled hysterics from the bushes outside. That’s it.

‘F*ck’s sake, stupid children, grow up! Why can’t you do something interesting? Get a life, go and play somewhere else! This is so BORING!’ Absolute silence. Seth looks scared. My speech seems to echo around the camp ground – I think I’ve even surprised myself a bit. But the kids shut the hell up and there are no more stones all night.

Seth decides that the best way to give a little something back, having received so much kindness from strangers as we’ve traveled through Africa, is to pick up hitchhikers. I agree with him in principle but sometimes feel lazy about it – making sure the back seat is tidy, that I’m dressed decently and not being able to mess around and sing puts me off slightly, but he’s right – every time we do it, we feel good. Memorable are the old couple with the incontinent dog, an old man on his way to the doctors and a lady who worked on a farm who we drove out of our way to drop off especially. When she gets out of the car she says, ‘Thank you; you have taken our roads as though they were your own.’ Seth and I look at each other. It’s a poignant moment.

We drive to the Tsodilo Hills on our way up the Okavango Pan Handle. Seth has seen the place on the map and urges me to read about it in our guidebook. I find the description underwhelming but as soon as we arrive in the area, I’m under its spell. In the car park there is a gang of velvety grey birds with fluffy tufts on their heads. They are Grey Louries, ‘Go Away’ birds, silly and fabulous in equal measure.

The hills are sacred to the San people of the Kalahari, who believe this is the place of Creation. We walk for hours with a guide called Summer, visiting ancient rock paintings of giraffe, lions and rhinos. There is a special air to this place and I feel excited and inspired the whole time I am there. The ancienthills and crags are layered with foliage and the rock is almost rainbow coloured in parts. Seeing such old art, depicting familiar African creatures, it is strangely comforting to know that there have always been artists; that human beings have always wanted to externalize and share.

Our ‘S’ becomes Seronga, a tiny town at the bottom of the Okavango Pan Handle, on the Eastern side of the river. Our trinket is a metal cow bell, and we take an overnight trip into the topmost part of the famous delta to see what all the fuss is about. Our guide, C, is also our boatman, and the three of us glide through the marshes in a fiberglass mokoro boat. The reeds and grasses that grow in the delta are tall and strange spiders fall in our laps. C stands at the back, paddling, pointing out kingfishers, egrets, elephants. We set up our tents on Kau Island, beneath some trees which have had their bark stripped by elephants. Big piles of elephant poo nearby confirm the popularity of the place. Before sunset we venture back out in the mokoro, in search of hippos. Loud gruntings and snufflings come from among the tall reeds and I start to feel slightly vulnerable as I realize the sounds actually surround us. When we paddle suddenly into a clearing – a large pool surrounded by reeds – what we are rewarded with is fantastic as well as alarming. Three hippos – two parents and a baby – are at the opposite side of the pool, their heads visible up to the nostrils above the water. The three of us stare at the three of them. They are about twenty metres away. Suddenly the father decides we’re not welcome. I thought hippos could only really charge on land, but I am proved wrong. After a few huffs and puffs, he rears up like a bucking horse and plunges head first into the water. There are ripples where his body has hit the water but he is nowhere to be seen – because he is under the water, coming for our boat. My heart is somewhere in my throat, like I might choke on it. Seth is saying, ‘Shit. Shit. We’re dead.’ C is rowing like a madman. For some reason all of us are smiling too, and laughing, if nervously. It’s like we know if we have to die, death by hippo is at least a fairly interesting way to go. A spider has chosen this same moment to crawl up onto my stomach and raise its front legs at me in a threatening posture. At any other time, it would disturb me greatly. Right now I brush it aside, thinking, ‘yeah, whatever, hold that thought.’ We pull in behind a little wall of reeds and see the male hippo emerge right beside the point where our boat had been. He sees us behind the reeds and snorts. We wait and he waits. The sun sinks lower. When he has swum away and it is safe to move, we make a race for home against the dying light. For me this Okavango sunset, out on the water, is one of those African moments I am going to keep with me for life.

By the time we return to land the following day, I have seen my first herd of zebra and wildebeest. Our sleep has been disturbed by the groaning of hippos in the bushes by our tent, and I suspect the noises have inspired all three of us to remember the haunting image of the diving hippo. To me, it seems like a whole new side to Africa is opening up; the continent has been peopled and landscaped from the start, but only now am I encountering it’s famous wildlife on a daily basis. It’s dark when we re-enter Namibia. Our Botswana jaunt has been brief, too brief, but in my memory I know I will go walking in the Tsodilo Hills often.

The loop we have driven with Pumba is nearing completion. We head to the town of Tsumeb, our T, and meet an unusual, hyperactive woman running a coffee shop, who puts a bright red blob of strawberry ice cream in Seth’s coffee. She also owns a large cat with a grand, triple barreled name, and she charges us an extortionate amount for our drinks, though we hardly notice under the fire of her incessant talking. We emerge, dazed, but she is really the most interesting thing about the sleepy town. We head to bed early after buying supplies for our trip to Etosha National Park the next day. We plan to leave very early the next morning, before the sun comes up. Tiptoeing softly out of the guesthouse so as not to disturb the other guests, we creep into the car park, slide open the gate and reverse softly out of the driveway. Pumba, ever the trouble causer, beeps loudly and randomly as we pull away. How can our hire car hate us this much?

Within an hour I have seen my first giraffes, and my first lion, a hunting female prowling through the grass. There are hornbills and rollers in the trees, and Seth is overjoyed when we find a group of elephant playing at a waterhole. The rotten water stinks like off-chicken as the gorgeous big beasts roll in it, but it’s impossible to care. Animals in this park are so used to cars that we sit unnoticed for an hour while babies run around their mothers’ legs, splashing in the mud and showering themselves with dust. A little later, we drive Pumba down a road littered with sharp thorns, thinking her wheels will be tough enough, and ruin one tire entirely.

‘Great,’ says Seth, changing the tire outside the petrol station in Okaukuejo camp as I stand by, impressed, the picture of the useless wife and the macho husband, ‘who said hiring a car wouldn’t be an adventure?’ Later that day, we stop to help some American tourists who are stranded for the same reason. Their spare tire is the wrong type, sunset is approaching and they are outside of their car beside a waterhole – and in an area known for lions. Worried about them, we give their daughter, Michelle, a lift back to camp. She carries the punctured tire on her knee and three of us are treated to the sight of a pride of lionesses walking through the grass as we rush back to camp. It feels like the lions are a nice reward for helping this sweet family out. Pumba, too, positively thrives in such circumstances and behaves herself like a good Citigolf should. Perhaps our travels with Pumba are teaching us something?

Both Halali and Okaukuejo camp have floodlit waterholes, and at both we watch the dramas of animal nightlife. A group of lions gang up on a lone black rhino, and for a while it really looks like a dangerous situation. I had expected such huge, armoured beasts to be tough and confident but the rhinos are nervous under the gaze of so many sharp toothed felines, and rightly so. Just a few sips of water can be a life or death affair out here. The elephants behave like big bullies, the warthogs are comedians, the zebra and oryx fight among themselves and love to cool their bellies by wading deep into the water. Black backed jackals slink around the waterside, scaring off the guinea fowl. Giraffe are paranoid and run at the tiniest of sounds. You can watch these living scenes for hours, and we do, wrapped in blankets and sipping Castle Beer. It would be hard to be much happier.

As we leave Etosha, I know even without experience that it has to be one of the world’s best national parks. I am very happy to have seen a martial eagle, its chest speckled like a chocolate chip cookie, its brown wings huge as it sails away from our first waterhole. Seth is still bowled over by the lions:

Having slept in the car at Okaukuejo camp, we rise early and are out in the park for sunrise. A family of giraffe walk silhouetted against the glowing orange sky as we drive north to visit a remote waterhole. Wildebeest chase each other into the road and kick up the dust. A little way on we slow down, realizing we are driving alongside three large male lions. Our windows are wound down and it’s too late to really do anything about it without making any sudden movements. The nearest lion is three metres away. He looks at us with bright yellow eyes, briefly assessing us. He’s beautiful but I feel a shiver. I think to him, we look like potential dinner but in an inconvenient white tin. He licks his lips but keeps walking. The other males are his friends. As they pass one another, their tails curl around each others backs. Together they walk quietly through the grass. The ground is uneven and they stumble once or twice, even with those incredible large paws that we have just glimpsed close up. We drive slowly alongside them, completely in awe. It’s another of those moments. I realize someone might need to give me tranquilisers to get me on a plane back to the UK. I don’t see that I will ever be ready for it. There’s too much out here I want to experience, want to know about.

Having left the park, we try to stop expecting to see animals at every turn. We head towards the small town of Uis down a series of scenic roads, stopping for lunch in a bakery in the quaint town of Outjo. Inside the bakery, tourists eat expensive cakes and meals. Outside, a soldier with a massive rifle keeps an untrusting eye on the general public. This is a familiar sight in Namibia, along with fortified houses and hotels with mean looking fences. It’s still new to me but Seth remembers such scenes from South Africa and Zimbabwe. It gives a lot of the little towns an edge of hostility than undermines their otherwise quaint features.

Seth almost falls asleep at the wheel and I try to help by fixing a coffee with sun-warm water. It tastes pretty bad. My singing does not help much either, but luckily the scenery near Uis suddenly becomes incredible. First a troop of elephant trample down a fence and cross the road, leaving us gawping and wondering if we really have left Etosha after all. Then the mountain of Brandberg appears in the distance, looking like a cross between Ayers Rock and Kilimanjaro, and turning a lovely shade of ochre in the dusk. Seth stands ankle deep in the soft grass, taking photographs. I look at the scene and think it couldn’t get any more picture-book-Africa if it tried.

We drive on to Uis, our ‘U’, check in to a cosy room and feast on noodles. Tomorrow we will return Pumba to her depot. We will miss her, however awkward she can be. We have tickets booked on the evening coach to Livingstone, Zambia, where we hope to see Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders, (Victoria Falls), before heading on to Zimbabwe, currently a contender for the least likely tourist destination in Africa due to the horrendous year it has just had. I have no idea what state we will find poor Zimbabwe in, but I am very excited to see the country Seth fell so in love with ten years ago.

When the last of the DRC officials had checked our passports and waved us on, we found ourselves in a big dusty square, where a group of guinea fowl pecked the remains of a soldier’s sandwich, and a few sleepy shopkeepers eyed the newcomers. The Angolan immigration team were friendly, if serious, and they taught us how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Portuguese. I had not really turned my mind to the practicalities of travel in Angola. For days my brain had been awash with will-we-won’t-we get the Angolan visa, will-we-won’t-we make it through the DRC without incident… now we had, and we were here, and it was a bit like waking up after a strange dream.

As taxi drivers made their furtive approaches, reality suddenly hit home. We had been granted five-day transit visas with which to cross Africa’s seventh largest country, in which decades of civil war had left a practically non-existent infrastructure. When we had told people that we planned to cross Angola by public transport, little smirks had raised the corners of their mouths. This was a poor start to our first day, too – the clock began to tick as soon as our passports were stamped, and yet our delays in the DRC had rendered this, day one, almost useless: we would make it only as far as the nearby settlement of Mbanza Congo, and would be lucky to do so before sunset. Perhaps we should have tried to bum a ride with the Belgians we met while applying for visas in Matadi? They had a van and were overlanding. I felt sure they would make it from border to border within the five-day time limit, but how much would they see of Angola and its people? And would they have wanted two freeloading backpackers on board in the first place? Our way was riskier – dumb, even – but I hoped it would have its rewards.

The share-taxi to Mbanza Congo rattled along bumpy roads, past the shells of old cars, pretty hills and small villages. In one, both the driver and our fellow passenger jumped out and ran to a shop. They came back with a bottle of beer each.

‘Local beer!’ grinned the driver, slugging his back as we hit the road again in the glowing afternoon light. Within minutes the bottles were empty and were flung out of the window.

Seth and I smiled at each other, thinking ‘these guys are characters’ but this turned out to be classic behaviour when on the road in Angola.

The passenger recommended a cheap hotel in town, and we were glad of it. Waving off our beer-mad buddies, we headed inside and found simply a bar full of plastic furniture, with a row of dark rooms situated behind. A young guy, surprised to see us, stuttered that um, yes, they might have a room, he would check. Meanwhile a reclining woman on a moth-eaten sofa seemed to be doing so in a way that deliberately accentuated her curves and her eyes had an odd-combination of try-hard ‘come-hither’ and glazed over exhaustion. Her friend, reeking of whisky, ran over and began pawing at Seth. We were out of there in a shot, the young man calling after us; did we not want the room? We began a fruitless tour around town with a moody driver, looking for a hotel that was not a brothel and finding everywhere full because of a government visit. We ended up in a dark hotel on the outskirts of town. There was no electricity, no water, no toilet roll in the communal bathroom and the window didn’t close properly. They charged us £50 for it. People had told us Angola was pricey, but this we had not expected.

‘At least it’s not a brothel,’ I said to Seth, as we sat in the bar eating a disastrous self-made dinner of bread with stock cubes and onions.

Our fellow guests were welcoming, cheery men, who had not moved from their tables in hours and were enjoying a prolonged liquid dinner of watery Skol beer. After we crawled into bed and some hours had passed, women’s voices echoed in the corridors. There was giggling, and the noises of rooms occupied, then deserted ten minutes later. More giggling, more door slamming. In the morning, we demanded a discount and left. The sun shone over the yellow houses and shacks of Mbanza Congo, their terracotta coloured roofs giving the town a jaunty look deceptive of our experience of the place. The friendly women outside their little farm houses, speaking to us in a language we couldn’t understand, as well as the smiling shop keepers who greeted us as we walked to the station helped soften our hearts a little as we searched for a minibus that would take us on the long journey to Luanda.

It was about 8am, and the conductor of the minibus had a sachet of whisky hanging from his mouth. We smiled at each other, thinking ‘at least this guy’s not driving’, and chatted to the various friendly characters who approached us while the bus was filling up, one of whom spoke very good, if formal, English. (When we said goodbye, he gave a little bow and said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ which I thought was fantastic.) Another fine English speaker was a gentleman we shall Mr. Y for the sake of privacy, because he was with the Angolan secret services. How secret these services were, and what it really meant, was ambiguous, because the other passengers eyed him with caution and he had noticeable influence at the police checks we past along the way when we finally set off. He too enjoyed sachets of booze, his preference being for Amarula, a creamy liqueur. Again, we looked at our watches and couldn’t quite get our heads around it. These locals knew what we didn’t though: how bad the roads ahead really were, how long it takes to get anywhere in Angola, how very far Luanda was away. In my notebook, I have called this ‘the minibus of doom’ and have written in block capitals, THIS JOURNEY SUCKS! We left Mbanza Congo at around 10am. The driver, the conductor and Mr. Y sat up front. Another bus boy, mainly responsible for the loading and unloading of belongings and passengers, sat by the sliding door. He was lecherous towards me, very creepy and overly physical with all of the young women on board. I was glad to be tucked away on the back row, although he did enjoy coming to the window to beam in at me. When we had been on the bus for an hour, the boys pulled over to buy a bottle of whisky from a stall. Now it was passed along the whole front row, the driver enjoying a few slugs between navigating the dips in the red road and dodging monkeys. The family in front of us were sharing a carton of fruit juice. On closer inspection, it was a box of Sangria. The father was in the military and he showed us his papers with lofty intensity – ‘ZAIRE’ was printed next to his picture. He was a giant of a man, not someone to be on the wrong side of. We smiled and nodded nervously, not really sure what we were supposed to say. He was on his second box of sangria by the time the boys bought the whisky. It was midday and the whole bus stank of booze and sweat. Police checks came and went. At one, a man was softening up the officials with an amusing bribe of sangria, laying the cartons down beside the reclining officer. We couldn’t help but laugh at the bizarre spectacle. Hours and hours were passing, yet we seemed to be getting nowhere. The bus had to stop every twenty minutes so that people could pee, or buy more sachets of whisky. We contented ourselves with the fact that the driver was at least sparing in his slugging, whereas Mr. Y and the other bus boys were going for gold. The closer we got to Luanda, we told ourselves, the better the roads would get. We had not considered the possibility of the minibus not even reaching Luanda that day. Late afternoon, we stopped at another bar. Seth and I sat at a table with Mr Y as he sucked on a sachet of Amarula.

‘It’s good that you’re not driving,’ Seth pointed out, ‘You’ve had quite a few of those.’

‘Yes!’ said Mr Y, ‘It is good, South African liqueur! It’s my day off.’

We walked to a little shop and bought a few supplies:

‘A tub of laughing cow, a coke, and one of those boxes of sangria, please.’

We figured, better roll with it. Maybe our fellow passengers were on to something. A bit of booze to numb the senses and calm the nerves – a chance to care a little less about putting your life in the hands of a group of maniacs.

At sunset, the bus pulled over for a police check. It did not move again for several hours. A wheel needed changing. The boys had headed out to secure more whisky. Mr Military Zaire was on the beer. He was getting quite chatty with us as his sobriety reduced. A fight started a little way down the road. Pricking up his ears, he headed off to get involved. Seth and I could hear the shouting but I didn’t even want to look back to see what was happening.

‘This blows’, I kept saying, ‘This journey… this journey sucks so much.’

Mr Creepy was grabbing at one of the female passengers who, to my surprise, was responding flirtatiously.

‘Do you think they’re together?’ I whispered to Seth

‘No, she’s travelling alone with that toddler,’ he replied. I put my head in my hands. (This sucks sucks sucks.)

Outside, an old man was playing with fire, literally. He was leaping around it, sticking his hand into it, running it slowly through it. The owner of a nearby petrol pump was scolding him, but didn’t seem too worried about a potential explosion, nor injury. I do not know whether the old man was drunk, drugged, mad or traumatised by what he seen in his lifetime, or maybe all of those things. Our small experience of Angola so far seemed, to me, depressing. Twenty-seven years of insane civil war, this country had seen. We had talked about getting through Angola and getting visas, but I now felt hideously naive. It was becoming one of those rare times on the African Alphabet trip where I was questioning what we were doing and why. Finally, the wheel was changed. The passengers flew into a fury, however, when the bus boys decided not to hit the road but to visit a friend’s house for dinner. They left us all parked outside a house while they went in to enjoy food and hospitality. Mr Military flexed his muscles and strolled around the courtyard shouting. The boys returned at last, then drove us to another mechanic – there was one more wheel that had to be changed. At this point, Seth and I climbed out of the bus, leaned back against it, and opened our carton of sangria. The whole journey suddenly seemed so ludicrous as to be funny. The sangria tasted just like it does in Menorca. I thought fondly of holidays I went on with my friend Sarah when we were sixteen, seventeen, drinking sangria in beachside restaurants, talking about boys…
It was very late when the bus boys finally decided to get us back on the road. The unthinkable happened – Mr Y, who had been drunk all day and all evening – took the wheel ‘to give my friend some rest.’ He drove stupidly fast, narrowly skirting potholes and other vehicles, and the chances of ending up in a ditch were seriously high. Seth’s eyes were big and shiny as he stared at the road ahead in alarm.

We’re going to crash,’ he kept saying.

This went on for hours. I tried to sleep but the woman next to us complained that we were taking up too much room when I rested with my back against Seth. I was disappointed in her – she had been a grump all day, and I had helped her carry her bags of fruit onto the bus. I was not taking up much room at all and yet she was holding out on me. So I did not sleep that night and neither did Seth, and the horror of being driven by a drunk man continued into the early hours. When we reached Luanda at the break of day, the bus stopped not in the city centre but in a township. Mr Y’s house, in fact.

‘Stay here at my house,’ said Mr Y, ‘the boys will drop the other passengers at a nearby station, then the bus will come back for you and we will drive you to your hotel.’

I was reluctant. It seemed like nonsense. There was no choice. We sat in Mr Y’s living room, where his sister lay asleep on the floor and his wife and baby emerged from a curtained room. More family members strolled in and out, but they are blurred from my memory. The TV was on. A silent film about monks in a mountain monastery was playing. I remember thinking that watching it felt a bit like sliding down the long tunnel into death. Having not slept for 24 hours, enduring the worst journey ever, and finding myself in a stranger’s house in a township nowhere near central Luanda, I thought, ‘I’m going to cry.’ We talked about finding a taxi. The only one we could find wanted to charge us about eight times too much. We sat outside Mr Y’s house. Toddlers were playing in the dirt. I stared at a smashed CD trodden into the earth. A mouse ran under the fence and disappeared into a pipe. Four hours passed.

Mr Y was a good guy, even with his passion for Amarula and secret agent slyness. He eventually got the boys, who had gone on a joyride (booze mission?) to return the minibus, and drove us into Luanda, via many poor townships. Spotting Mr Y as we waited in a traffic jam, a man approached the window and called him a bastard. The traffic cleared, and with obvious relief, Mr Y sped away. I wondered, is there any end to this nightmare? When he dropped us near our hotel, Mr Y asked for no money. We smiled and shook hands, and within an hour were smoking cigarettes quietly, desperately on a hotel balcony. Having eaten only biscuits, peanuts and laughing cow for the past day and a half, we went for a pizza. I almost fell asleep in mine. Next, we tried to apply for a visa extension and were told to try in Benguela, the next city on our itinerary. I was so tired I thought I might collapse on the street. The sun felt overwhelming. Luanda is on the sea, and it was the first time we had seen it since Cameroon, but all that really mattered was sleep.

That night, after some rest, we accidentally ordered chicken giblets in a restaurant, and broke all the rules of conduct by walking around Luanda at night. It did not feel dangerous. Maybe we were cocky, but surviving the minibus of doom made us feel untouchable – or like Angola had done her worst, and we were now on friendly terms with her. We made the mistake of relaxing. Thinking we could extend our visas in Benguela, we enjoyed another day in Luanda, Seth taking street photographs of basketball players, both of us watching movies and finding we were able to see the funny side of some our recent experiences, with the luxury of reflection. When we went to catch our bus to Benguela, a young jogger stopped to show us the way. In Angola, this happened frequently – people taking you under their wing. It’s my most positive memory of the place. At the bus stop, chaos reigned, of course. Bus boys fought over us, one knocking hot tea all over another one as he grabbed Seth’s bag and ran ahead with it. Obviously, despite the early hour, they all had bottles of beer in their hands. I settled into my seat and groaned inwardly, expecting a repeat performance of the same old routine. Seth sat on the seat in front of me and attracted the attention of a man whose crazy eyes gave away his drug abuse. He spoke a million words per second, and in French, so Seth could understand. Nervously he played with the long sleeves of his jumper as he begged for money, and told Seth, ‘My name is Edward… we’ve had lots of war here. Lots of suffering. There’s no money. There are no jobs.’ He ran away, and when the bus was ready to depart, he ran back.

‘God is black,’ he said, ‘and he lives in Mbanza Congo.’

With that, we left. Both of us waved at Edward. He had lesions on his forehead. Not for the first time in the past few days, I felt very sad.

The bus followed the coast south. There were baobab trees, such a classically African sight, and the sea was the richest royal blue. Phil Collins sang ‘Another Day in Paradise’ for the fiftieth time since we touched down on this continent. Everyone had to pee every twenty minutes. The busboy slugged down his beer, but we reached Benguela at sunset. Our hotel had a hot shower and two resident fluffy white dogs called Molly and Mookie. In the morning, we went to extend our visas. And we were told, sorry but no.

No?

This was day five. The last day of our visa. In Luanda, we had been as good as assured that an extension would be possible. Now we had been refused, and were liable for a 150 US dollar fine, each, per day that we overstayed. This, and we were about 450kms from the Angola-Namibia border, in a country where public transport meanders at best. Worst of all, Angola was the country we had hoped to secure our ‘Q’ in. Indeed, Qs are very rare in Africa, Somalia and Botswana being the only other known options (the former not really an option, when you think about it.) Now we were rushing out of the country, how the hell would we get our Q? We had to get onwards ASAP, and I had excruciating menstrual cramps to add to the fun. We found a bus bound for the southern town of Lubango, and had to wait two hours for it to set off. Between us and Lubango, we knew there was a small town called Quilengues. Would a bus full of strangers mind if the two foreigners wanted to stop and get out, just for a moment or two, in Quilengues? Just because it began with a ‘Q’? It is real testimony to the folks of Angola that they not only didn’t mind the mad photographer and woman with the notebook jumping off the bus in two different parts of Quilengues, but that they were amused and even excited about it.

‘Take my portrait, too!’ said one of the passengers as we climbed back on board, having stopped to take pictures in a small market (at 10pm), and buying whisky sachets for our models, as well as one for our ‘Q’ trinket. We even stopped outside a pretty church, lit up in the darkness, so that we could appreciate it. Would you find such kindness and understanding among a group of travelling strangers in Europe? Bet your arse you wouldn’t! At Lubango, it was too late to hunt for hotels, so all the passengers slept either on the bus, parked up in the station, or the nearby waiting room. I was physically and mentally exhausted, still in pain, and longing for Namibia. Come morning, we had one more bus to catch – one that would take us to the border. We sadly watched the hills of Lubango disappear behind us.

‘We have to come back here one day and see this, ‘said Seth, emotionally, ‘I love this part of Africa. I wish we had more time.’

‘And money,’ I pointed out. Central Africa had cleaned our pockets out somewhat.

‘But Angola is amazing. I’ve got some of my best photos from the whole trip in the few days we’ve been here, ‘ Seth sighed. I knew what he meant. The intense travel had been enriching. But I was making a tally in my notebook of all of the huge, rusting tanks we past along the roadside, and the fact that when we stopped to pee, nobody could go into the bushes because of landmines, made this a country that could only really make me feel sombre. There were moments when it was truly beautiful though; mountains, cliffs, palm trees, towns that clung to hills and sunsets that fell behind silhouetted baobab trees. The people, too, aside from the young male drinking cult, had been warm and approachable. But in all honesty, I wanted to leave, and I didn’t really want to come back. That we might end up paying 300 US dollars to leave was an unhappy thought, and as the bus rattled slowly along the bad road to the border, it seemed like we might not reach it before it closed. Cows with bells around their necks minced across the road in a way that seemed knowing and deliberate.

‘Come on, cows! Bloody cows!’ said Seth with white knuckles, as the closing time crept closer. I smiled and videoed them as they loitered at the roadside. Fate would have to do its thing.

We arrived at immigration with just minutes to spare. Handing over our passports hopefully, we rode the wave of chance, hoping the expiration date might go unnoticed. Not so. We were called to a back room. Heads down, we slunk in, both of us knackered and thinking, ‘damn.’ Seth now underwent a remarkable transformation. His basic Spanish, learnt while we were living in the USA in 2002, suddenly made him able to kind of speak, and understand, Portuguese. He had managed a little so far in Angola, but this was impressive. I looked at him as though he was a Martian just dropped down from space, and thought, ‘Man, he really is some kind of genius.’
The officials looked at our details on their computers and told us we were a day overdue, and owed them 300 dollars. Seth said, very politely, in this new, miracle Portuguese, that the circumstances were totally beyond our control, that we’d been given misinformation about extensions, that we had rushed all the way to the border as soon as we had found out, and couldn’t some exception be made? A senior official took us to a back room. Here, things worked in our favour. You see, it was either we pay the state/government the classified 300 bucks, or we line the pocket of one individual and the problem would disappear. Ah Africa. So much talk of corruption. But honestly, it sucks you in, and you do become part of it. We had already had to pay bribes, and we knew it was no good thing, but in this situation it saved our skin. Forty US dollars and we were out of there. We felt bad to have played the greasing palm game and hoped we would never have to do it again. It happens to most travellers in Africa, and I admire the ones who stand up to it as much as possible. As we stepped out of Angola and into Namibia, I could not suppress a feeling of huge relief.

‘You need a ride to Ondangwa?’ asked an official outside the Namibian immigration post, ‘I finish my shift in a minute. I’ll give you a lift.’

Seth and I smiled at each other. We had come through Central Africa. I had dark circles around my eyes, like a big racoon, and there had been too many pilchards and stock cubes, too many bribes, too many nightmare journeys – but it had been the travel experience of a lifetime.

We cross the Congo River. Seth is dreading immigration because he has read we may be turned back if we cannot produce an Angolan visa. Why the DRC officials would need proof of our wanting to leave their country is beyond me – the proof will be right there on my face as they scrutinise our passports. It’s not like we want to emigrate. In fact, my heart is full of doom. What the hell are we doing here? I know the troubles of very recent years have been near the Rwanda-DRC border, in Goma, far east of us, but there is something about coming to the DRC for recreational purposes that doesn’t sit well with me. I feel like we’re taking the piss a bit. Like the people here have seen so much, and here we are, travelling through oblivious. I know my folks will be worried sick. My friends, too, though I’ve tried to brush over the DRC part of our plan in conversation. Ultimately, I worry that doing this makes us look naive and arrogant. I worry, too, that it’s dangerous, and wonder when I’ll next feel safe.

The officials behave well. It’s Sunday and they are chilled out. Seth charms them and I stand around smiling like a guppy, and looking quite pale. Kinshasa is deserted. Official taxis don’t exist – a little worrying – but we do find someone to drive us to our chosen hotel. It is too expensive when we reach it. We check in anyway. The courtyard is full of exotic plants and a single baobab. Everything about the place is green. It’s like the jungle in a Rousseau painting. The place is stuffed with journalist types, poring over paperwork with specs on. I’m glad it’s an intriguing place to stay because I have no inclination to go walking in Kinshasa. Seth goes out once, in search of some food supplies and bus tickets to Matadi. He discovers the bus will leave early the next morning. That night we sit in the leafy hotel jungle, drinking Primus beer but too broke to eat dinner. In our room, we eat biscuits and eggs instead.

This little slice of the DRC that we have to cut through to reach Angola is the country’s slimmest section. When we ride to the bus station the next morning, I am seeing Kinshasa properly for the first time. I like all the billboards, and cannot believe how many of them advertise Skol, the type of watery beer you get pissed on as a teenager and a totally bizarre import to Central Africa, in my view. There are lots of open spaces, and there is lots of trash. There are even paths that go through the trash, shortcuts that the locals have trodden down. But the city is not the haven of doom and gloom I had expected. It’s lively, and its outskirts seem to stretch for many miles, like one long bustling market. They have extra vegetables here that we have not seen elsewhere so far – cabbages and leeks – and in one town the locals go crazy over the cassava, sold in bundles of leaves. I relax as the hours pass. There is a nice atmosphere on the bus. We are on the back row, and the man next to Seth is wearing a flat cap. He is friendly. Included in our ticket price are glass bottles of Coke that are handed out by the conductor. A bottle opener gets passed around. The bus goes quiet as we all drink. Flat cap smiles and says to Seth, ‘it’s just like on an aeroplane.’ Towns are small and busy, almost pretty, very green. The countryside is something else, though, and not at all like I expected.

‘It looks like Yorkshire!’ I say to Seth, ‘It looks like the moors.’

The hills are bumpy and a little brown. The sky is overcast and pylons run for miles in both directions. Men are working at the side of the road, cutting grass. I did not think the DRC would look like this. But what did I think it would look like?

We are heading to Matadi, a port city on the Congo River, close to the Angolan border. This is the only place in Africa where we have even the slimmest chance of securing an Angolan visa, and even then it will only be a transit visa, valid for five days. Five days to cross one of the continent’s biggest countries – I don’t think about it because we don’t yet know if we will be issued with the visas in the first place. Like Nigeria’s, the visa for Angola is crucial for our journey. If we can’t get it, we are forced to fly again. Having to fly once was bad enough. I am hoping that I haven’t been having these sleepless nights for no reason.

The road follows the edge of some beautiful steep hills and finally arrives in the city, which looks like an Indian hill station such as Shimla or Darjeeling, in the sense that its buildings seem to tumble down steep hills on all sides. It’s very picturesque, in a scruffy way. Even in such a setting, there are miles of suburbs – shacks that function as bars, shops and houses cling to dusty precipices above the river. It is one of those moments in life. I’m thinking, ‘It’s the DRC. We’re in the DRC.’ And it’s quite beautiful.

A local lady helps us find a hotel, and even helps us take our bags up to our room. I like it straight away because it has a poster of tropical fish on the toilet door, and we have an ante-room with a big TV and the kind of sofas you can curl up in. The best thing about our room is the view though; straight out onto the wide brown Congo River and the port. The window faces west, so we get to see a rare glimpse of the sun in the evening, when it suddenly materialises from the clouds, drops like a big red tomato behind the hills, and is gone. It may be the season, but Central Africa has been a little dark and gloomy; we meet a man that evening who can’t believe how pale we look. He is also a big believer in theories of David Icke and an expert in the subject of the Egyptian Gods. When he finds out Seth’s name, his face drops – he is seriously disturbed.

‘I never in my life thought I would meet someone with this name,’ he confides, frowning, and looking Seth with apparent reassessment.

‘It’s Jewish,’ says Seth, ‘It’s in the Bible. Third son of Adam and Eve.’

‘Maybe,’ says our new acquaintance, ‘but it is also the name of the god of evil and chaos. Hmm.’

What can you say to that? It’s a bit of a conversation killer.

The next day the people who normally work on the boats are on strike. We hope that it will stay peaceful, and it does, but what we are left with is a town full of heated young men with nothing to do, and for the first time in ages I feel quite uncomfortable on the streets. We do a lot of walking on this day, because we are applying for our Angolan visas. We walk to street side photocopiers, and to and from the embassy, and on every street young men make comments to me, very close to my face, especially if I am a few steps in front or behind Seth. It’s an unpleasant atmosphere, and very un-African. By midday, I am feeling frazzled, but the hours we have spent filling out application forms, chatting to fellow applicants, being interviewed and hanging around on plastic garden furniture pay off – we have Angolan transit visas by late afternoon. The urge to hug and kiss the staff at the embassy is huge. Now all we need to do is get to the border.

It rains the next morning as we wait for our bus. It leaves two hours later than we were told to expect. We know that this means we will not get far into Angola tonight, but it is out of our control. On the bus, it’s time for another round of communal coke drinking. This time we are also given sandwiches with a slice of pink rubbery meat in the middle. I discreetly put the meat in a plastic bag and slip it in my satchel to throw away later. (I then forget and find it, squelchy, a week later.) (It will go up there on the list of bizarre/gross things I have had to carry across borders with me over the years, which would also include a bottle of my own pee that I had to carry into Vietnam. That’s probably not the kind of thing to share on the internet, but in my defence, my only other option at the time was bladder rupture. Seriously.)

We are dropped off at a junction where an immigration official takes us under his wing, helping us flag down a ride and accompanying us to the border. There we are looked after by another official who takes our passports and gets them stamped for us. Music from the Bollywood movie ‘Love Story 2050’ is playing in a nearby shop and I can hardly believe my ears. Two boys on bicycles – yes, bicycles – want to ride us over to the Angolan side of the border, several kilometres away. They are expecting us to ride, with our rucksacks etc, on the handlebars. I am not at all keen, but there is no other option. I’m trying to brace myself for yet another country recently torn by civil war; one where landmines pose a problem even now, and where public transport is said to be slow and arduous. We have only five days. Entering Angola balanced on a teenagers bicycle in serious pain seems a fitting way to start out in what could well be one of the most challenging and rewarding countries of our journey.