On our last day as official volunteers with World Teach, I called the Budget Rent-a-Car place to make sure our rental car would be ready the next day. They informed me the reservation had been cancelled! Did I want to reinstate it? Yikes! It had taken me quite a while to even find a vehicle I could rent, as this was high tourist season. We had been looking for a 4WD vehicle to give us access to some harder-to-get-to places, but as nearly as I could determine there were none available anywhere in the country. So we had settled on a small compact car. Fortunately, those are pretty much available as they aren't "safari vehicles". And also fortunately, it was not the rainy season. Most of the places we had time to get to were still going to be accessible.
We picked up our extended visas at the Immigration Office in Windhoek and then hitched a ride down to the Budget Rent-a-Car place at the municipal airport. We traded our bags with things we weren't going to need while traveling, like school biology experiments and good "teaching" clothes, for Bret's tent and backpacking stove, which he was kind enough to loan us. Thanks, Bret!
Then we headed back to Penduka, the women's cooperative for disadvantaged women in Katatura north of Windhoek proper. We wanted to pick up a few gifts for people at home.
All summer we had been trying to plan this trip, and even as we headed north to Joris and Liz Komens' place after leaving Penduka, we weren't sure exactly where we were going. We had started with ambitious plans and then got a bit more realistic given our limited time. We wanted to see things in the northern part of Namibia, and we wanted to see things clear down south. And a lot in-between. We knew from our two months teaching and what little traveling we had already done that distances were great in this vast country, and time was even greater. In the end we decided to focus on things in the north, and because of our limited means of transportation (a normal 2WD car) we had to leave out most of the Caprivi Strip and northern Kaokoland. We ended up doing a much-too-limited quick pass at the following places:
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| Joris and Liz Komen | Waterberg Plateau | Mahango National Park | Etosha National Park |
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| Damaraland | The Skeleton Coast | Burnt Mt. and Organ Pipes |
Petrified Forest |
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| Brandberg Mt. Nature Reserve |
This page last updated on 2015-01-30.
