We’re travelling east, towards the Caprivi Strip, although it will take us a few days to get there. After a lovely dust-free night at the Kunene River Lodge, we chatted this morning with fellow campers who gave us lots of great advice about where to go and where not to go in the areas we’re travelling to. Then the proprietor warned us that we’d have trouble finding a campsite tonight as this area in the Far North is the most-populated in the country. He was right – people and villages and shops and cars and donkeys and goats and mostly 60km speed limits for most of the day. He recommended the Ondangwa Airport Lodge, but they are full tonight as they have conference guests, but the receptionist there phoned the Protea Hotel and we are now luxuriating in a room at the Protea. Nothing flash, but it has carpet which makes a nice change from dust, the Wifi is good and there’s electricity. Sometimes it’s just the little things, isn’t it?
But wait! We have to tell you about what we did today. We walked to Angola. Really. No stamps in our passports or anything official like that but we have some selfies so that’s proof, right? There is a waterfall downstream from a dam on the Kunene River, and it’s possible to visit it by crossing the Namibian border into a sort of no-man’s land before reaching the Angola border control. There’s a derelict power station near the falls, and lots and lots of steps down to see the falls, where we stood on the Angola side of the border. Then climbed all those steps back up. We didn’t realise it while we were there, but the power station buildings were damaged by mortar shells during the Namibian War for Independence.
