On my recent assignment in northern Namibia, I drove 1000 km from Joburg through Botswana to the Caprivi Strip on the interminably long Trans-Kalahari Highway. The drive’s pretty unexciting – we crossed Botswana in a day and a half, driving through endless flat desert with not much to see. If you come prepared with padkos and entertainment, it makes the trip a lot easier.
If anyone’s about to embark on this road trip, here are my tips to help you through the drive.
1. Bring lots of music. We listened to Kings of Leon, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Amy Winehouse, Florence & the Machine, Jose Gonzalez and the Beatles. Singalong rock is the way forward.
2. Bring audiobooks. About 1000 kilometres into the trip, when the conversation dried up, we realised we should have done this.
3. Do not fight with your boyfriend/travelling companion.
4. Do not fight with your boyfriend/travelling companion while trying to dodge donkeys and driving at high speeds.
5. Play I-Spy – it helps to pass about 10 minutes of time, after which you’ve spied everything that can be spied (road, trees, donkeys, grass)
6. Do not play metaphysical I-Spy. It will only lead to fights with boyfriend/travelling companion.
7. Do not hit any donkeys/cattle/birds/jackals/horses. The road is full of them and they don’t move out of the way of cars (especially donkeys). Don’t drive at dark – animals on the road are impossible to see.
8. Take lots of padkos. The petrol station shops in Botswana are seriously lacking in edible food. Think stale rolls with two-day old “spicy chicken”. Not yummy.
9. Take a decent, up-to-date map of Botswana and Namibia – it’s useful to know when the next petrol station is. Don’t use a five-year old map like we did, thinking there was a petrol station where actually it had closed down years ago.
10. You don’t need to change rands into pula or Namibian dollars. Rands are accepted pretty much everywhere. You’ll get change back in dollars or pula though so make sure you change them back into rands before go back to SA.
