The Plan Changes

I left the Olea Caravan Park, after a very basic breakfast, eaten in a dilapidated room bordering the empty and neglected swimming pool area… I headed for the local Spar where I had arranged to meet Allan, who was motoring up from Windhoek. We had agreed that if possible, we would ride together until Lusaka, where he intended to follow the route to Malawi, and I would go on north to Tanzania. He was supposed to have left early in the morning so that we could ride on to Rundu in the afternoon, where I had booked accommodation for us… I sat at the little coffee shop in the supermarket, making notes for my diary and listening to my I-pod. The manager, Jacques, kept me company, advising on the general state of the nation since independence, and also making a few calls to Katima Mulilo, to find out how bad the flooding there had been…

At 11.00am, I received a text message from Allan to say that he was 300kms away but making good time… It had been raining in Windhoek, and he had waited for the weather to clear before leaving. I realized that he would only arrive in Grootfontein well after lunch, and made arrangements to be accommodated in Grootfontein again that night. I was not keen to revisit the sub-standard caravan park that I had stayed in the night before, and after a few calls, found the “Courtyard Guest House” where I was met by the owners and immediately made to feel at home…

The Courtyard Guesthouse in Grootfontein… Highly recommended…

I settled into room No: 7 and waited for Allan to arrive. I spent the time washing some of my kit, as well as the bike, and left it all out in the sun to dry. The weather had improved from that of the day before, and the sun shone brightly for most of the day.

Allan breezed into town at about 4.00pm, and was happy to stay over in Grootfontein, as he had driven in rain for part of the way, and had not eaten anything on his 490km trip from Windhoek… After checking in, he discovered that he had left his digital camera in his hotel room back in Windhoek, and the rest of the afternoon was spent trying to locate staff members who might have found it…. I had my doubts whether he would ever see that camera again…

Allan Karl of California arrives on his trusty BMW 650GS Dakar…..

Dirk, the owner of the guest house, who works in Angola, advised us that there had already been over 2 000mm of rainfall in the Angolan highlands since New Years Day!! We had heard that Katima Mulilo was flooded, but the roads there were still fine… We had to rethink our plan of going through the Caprivi, and decided not to take any chances, by heading south to Maun in Botswana, and cut north for Kasane and the Kasangula Ferry over the Zambezi…

We located the name of a bush camp on the Kavango River, which was close to the border post with Botswana, and decided to overnight there the following day. Allan’s camera was located, (I’m still amazed!!) and DHL in Windhoek contacted to arrange to have it sent to Audi Camp in Maun. Our destination was now fixed and there was no getting out of the “Botswana Detour”…

We walked down into town, a few hundred metres away and had chicken burgers for supper, washed down with Coke, as the coffee house had no beer, and could not replenish stocks as it was a Sunday and all the suppliers were closed…. We bought about ten litres of bottled water, and walked home in a light drizzle, which turned into very heavy rain as soon as we were safely indoors…

Later that evening, we sat under the lapa drinking beer bought from the guesthouse, and with our maps spread out on the tables around us, tried to plan overnight stops for the next few days. I had decided that it would be better to ride with Allan, in case I had hassles with the flooding and wet roads in the near future. Our landlady supplied us with regular updates on the weather, and my sister Charmaine sms’ed with further news about the flooding in the Tete Province of Mozambique, as well as Zambia and Zimbabwe….. This was not good news, considering that the bad weather lay directly in the path that I had originally chosen. Botswana was the first real detour that I had had to make, and I hoped it would be the last…

We planned our trip through Botswana in more detail than Allan was used to. I could tell that he moved at whatever pace his current circumstances dictated… He seemed to have all the time in the world. I on the other hand wanted to plan our future path in detail… His only agenda was to get to Istanbul in Turkey, by the end of August 2008… I was to discover that at the speed he rode, and the distractions he continuously fell prey to, he would probably need all of that time to get to Istanbul!!

We found that we had many interests in common, and settled into a long conversation to find out more about each other. Squadrons of mosquitoes eventually drove us indoors where we continued to chat until, exhausted, Allan went to sleep in the middle of a sentence about a ride he had made through Brazil…

Before falling asleep, I mentally counted the days it would take for me to get through Botswana, into Zambia, and up to Dar es Salaam, and then back to Lilongwe to meet my friends in time for the “Lake Trip” The first seeds of doubt that I would make this rendezvous were sown on that night in Grootfontein…

The lapa where we made our plans for the “Detour through Botswana”…

© 2008 TBMH