Zambian “industrial break” means that everyone goes off before Christmas and comes back middle of January. Luckily there is KTM Zambia and they agreed to come out on the 28th to help me fit the electric starter clutch (for the 3rd time) and see if there is anything we could do about the bomber exhaust. Kotilda is leaking exhaust where the pipe is connected to the engine. Not only does it scare the animals and villagers, it is so loud it is hardly hear my own thoughts when riding.
Category: Africa travels
In 2009 the Käärmann brothers crossed the Sahara, in 2015 they continued from Nigeria to Gabon, then on to Namibia and the 4th stage have taken them to Dar-es-Salaam on the Indian Ocean. Where next? Ethiopia, Sudan and the Nile valley are waiting.
Interlude: Juka goes solo in Zambia
It is 27th of December and it was a productive day. In the morning I ordered a fresh Estonian passport and picked it up at 3pm. In the meantime I found a new rear tyre for Suusi – Michelin Anakee Wild was the overwhelming recommendation and at the same time the only option available.
Zambia: hard to get to even harder to leave
The minute we enter the border zone, we’re surrounded by a couple of assistants. They were easy to shrug off on the Botswana side as we stamp out of the country in a civilised manner. A queue of trucks had started many miles back and led to the river front, where two platform-ships were ferrying the trucks across the Zambezi river one at a time. There is a lot of shouting and hustling to pack as many human-porters and the two bikes around one of the trucks. The whole atmosphere is getting tense fast as we set sail on our 3 minute journey across the river. I’m asked to pay the fee – which is quoted 70 pula (6 eur) per bike. This smells high, and there is no price list, so I hastily hand over the 70 pula that I have for two bikes and speed off the ramp as we’re already unloading.
Botswana: rules in safariland
There are 3 rules in motorcycle travel: never ride in the dark, never ride in the rain and never take the short route. We learned something about two of those rules in Botswana. Bechuanaland is a cool place. Its currency is called pula, which means rain in the local setswana language. The whole country is semi-desert with Kalahari in the middle. Everyone, who is not involved in mining diamonds is growing cattle and for them rain is money. We saw ourselves how the dry stone desert turned into a grassland in Namibia only a few days after the rains had started.
Namibia: the African ranch
On the second attempt we succeed in crossing the Namibian border and have agreed to stop a few km outside the border town. While in Angola it was at times hard to find a bar-shed or a cafe-shed, now the problem was opposite. In every village of 10 sheds, 8 of those sheds were bars with cute names.
The first impression couldn’t have been more wrong. 100 km into the country the bars disappear and are replaced by long straight roads with perfect tarmac, bordered by endless fences. Namibia could be mistaken for an African Bundesland or a German version of Arizona. The Ordnung is everywhere. Having been through the chaos of Nigeria, Congo and the places inbetween, the western-like orderliness of everything in Namibia was unexpected. Read More
Angola: less dance more work
Once the crazy Lagos-like traffic of Luanda clears, the road going south is good tarmac and 50km out you can hardly see any other cars on the road, just endless straight lines through much less vegetation than the north. The scenery changed quickly, the steaming rainforests of Gabon gave way to patches of savannah in Congo and now the plains of angola remind of southern Spain. Read More