Bulungula

Our travels have taken us to some pretty remote places.  We’ve told you about driving around the Irish back country, making our way to the edge of the Moroccan Sahara, and making pasta on an Italian farm.  None of those places were nearly as remote as Bulungula.  If you ever want to go to a place where cell phones and blackberries usually don’t work, where you can’t be found unless you want to be (and maybe not even then), this is your place.

A Primer On Driving In South Africa

Apparently, the government of South Africa had the great idea of setting up a webpage with advice for foreigners driving on its roads and highways.  It certainly has some good tips for getting your bearings on South African roads, but I think it’s a bit incomplete.  So, I thought I’d add a few additional tips of my own.

Soweto

After our crazy adventures at Victoria Falls, we returned to South Africa.  We just had not spent as much time traveling in South Africa as we would have liked. Truth be told, we could probably have spent three months exclusively in South Africa and still not have seen and done everything we would have liked.  While we don’t have that kind of time, we added another two weeks to see more of South Africa.  Our return from Victoria Falls took us through Johannesburg, and we decided to spend two days in Soweto before heading out to the Wild Coast.

Come On A Safari With Us

Ach, internet in Africa is hard.  If you’ve been checking in with us for the past two months, you know the posts have been pretty sporadic.  When we’ve been able to get on-line at all, it’s really slow, unreliable or both.  But now we’ve moved on and we’re in a place with an totally awesome broadband connection.  So, it’s blog catch-up time.  We have 3 or 4 more Africa-related posts to put up here, and then we’ll start sharing our travels through Turkey and the Middle East.

One thing I’ve been dying to do is share some of our safari pics.  I know we’ve used some already in posts here and Kara has put some up on Facebook, but my favorites are here in a set on Flickr.  Enjoy!

Cooking, Zambian Style

While staying in Livingston, Zambia, we had the opportunity to take a cultural tour with an emphasis on Zambian markets and cookery.  The morning started out with a trip to the local food markets to buy our supplies.

Blowing Your Mind At Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls well deserves its place on the list of natural wonders of the world.  Even in the dry season, you can hear the thunder of the water well before you see the falls themselves, and your first sight of falls is likely to be the huge clouds of mist that billow up when the water crashes into the river bed below.  On our first day in Victoria Falls, we checked out the falls from the Zimbabwean side.  We were suitably impressed.

Make Mine A Mokoro

After a rocky start to our tour (let’s just say, some of our fellow travelers were – uh – less than welcoming), we had a pretty good reprieve from riding around in Nomad’s overland truck.  Instead, we boarded an old Mercedes safari wagon and set out on a three-hour drive to a mokoro station in the heart of the Okovango Delta.  A mokoro is a dug-out canoe made from the trunk of an African sausage tree.  It is similar to a gondola, and is piloted by a poler, who uses a three-meter long pole to push the canoe along the river.  We had a two-hour cruise by mokoro on the first day, and it was fantastic.  The peaceful silence of the river is only disrupted by the occasional snorts of hippos and the sotto voce chatter of the polers.  You can lean back and watch the tall reeds and papyri rustling in the breeze as you float by, or you can lean further back and fall asleep until your poler whispers down to point out an elephant grazing nearby.

Flying High In Botswana

One of the things I really wanted to do in Bostwana was to take a scenic flight over the Okavango Delta.  When booking our safari, we were disappointed to learn that the affordable fly in safaris were booked solid.  However, we did find a good overland tour on which a scenic flight could be arranged if there were a sufficient number of people interested in taking one.  So, we signed up, crossed our fingers, and hoped that we would be traveling with like-minded folk.

Cooking For Tourists And Other Guide Skills

On our Namibian adventure, we were guided by two great guys, Martin and Franz.  When it comes to tours, the guides make all of the difference.  A good guide can overcome equipment problems (our truck sucked) and smooth out group dynamics (fortunately unnecessary in our case – we had a great group).  A good guide keeps you safe, on schedule, and helps you make sense of all that you are seeing.  Martin and Franz were good guides.

The Wild Life: Etosha

Before daybreak, all the tents and bags were on the truck and group stood huddled around a hot water kettle on a camp stove, clutching hot cups of coffee or tea.  As the last items were loaded on the truck and the final preparations were made, the participants were ready to take on Namibia’s Etosha National Park in search of wild animals.  We would spend the entire day within the relative comfort of our 15-passenger panel van in search of the biggest and baddest animals Etosha had to offer – including four of Africa’s “Big Five.”*