Map of our African Road Trip Extravaganza

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(The map preview doesn't show all the connections between stops. If you click the link and view it in Google Maps, you can scroll down the list of items on the left and click "next page" and it will show more.)

Highlights and memorable moments

In no particular order:

• Driving 9000 km around southern Africa with no guide
• Getting used to not writing my PhD thesis
• Eating dinner under the southern night sky inside an old fort in Namibia
• The cleanest gas station bathrooms in the world (Namibia, how do you do it?)
• The way ice cream tastes in the desert
• Having it all come together despite the case of the disappearing travel agent
• Exceptionally friendly people
• Being mostly unplugged
• Having B's lost credit card returned by Minen Hotel employee who tracked us down after we left town
• Getting really, really sandy 
• Everything about the desert
• And...

Being self-sufficient in our safari truck

The way the desert goes on forever, just like the ocean

Flamingos migrating through Etosha Park and turning the horizon pink

Quiver trees!

Baby elephants that run full out, stumble and fall,
get up and do it all over again

Giraffes awkwardly crouching down to drink

Three of my favourite things together:
gin and tonic + hotel lounge + Africa
(and there were monkeys, too!)

Mongoose!

Running in sand dunes

Huge skies

Long roads to nowhere

Watching antelope run

Not getting stuck on the isolated
deep sand road in Savuti

Not getting bitten by anything larger than a mosquito

Not getting very stuck in the deep sand in Sossusvlei

Digging out the truck of Germans
who got stuck in the deep sand in Sossusvlei. . . in my skirt

Improbably large birds

Seeing a group of very rare wild dogs

Realizing that "mist" at Victoria Falls
is a euphemism for torrential downpour

Only getting ripped off once
(by the money changer/tout/fake insurance agent at the Zambia border)

Realizing we live in an easier place
than the ghost town Kolmanskop

Knee deep ponds along the roads in Moremi

Getting help from the army and the park rangers to reattach the 
front end onto the truck after the said knee-deep ponds

Weaver birds

Random children changing our flat tire

Finding a hippo in the flooded part of the road
that we were about to drive through

Being behind the safari truck
that was confronting a grumpy bull elephant

Sitting on the spare tire
on top of the truck in the dunes

Camping with warthogs in Kasane

Walking on the crest of sand dunes
to find nothing but more sand dunes

Finding a very large and creepy spider spinning its web
on the pillow in the back seat

Running on the dunes

Baobabs!

Etosha pan, which goes on forever

Zebras! Real ones!

• Oh, and did I mention that I really, really like the desert?

Animals spotted and identified...

Antelope:

·         Blue wildebeest

·         Dik dik (we think)

·         Gemsbok/Oryx

·         Impala

·         Klipsringer

·         Kudu

·         Red lechwe

·         Red hartebeest

·         Roan

·         Sable

·         Springbok

·         Tsessebe

·         Waterbuck

Birds:

·         African grey hornbill

·         African fish eagle

·         African open-billed stork

·         Blacksmith plover

·         Cappet faced vulture

·         Comb duck

·         Crested francolin

·         Egyptian goose

·         Flamingo

·         Hammerkop

·         Helmeted guinea fowl

·         Hooded vulture

·         Kori bustard?

·         Ostrich

·         Red-billed hornbill

·         Red-billed spur fowl

·         Saddle-billed stork

·         Secretary bird

·         Southern carmine bee eater

·         Spur wing goose

·         Swanson’s spur fowl

·         Yellow-billed egret

·         Yellow-billed hornbill

·         Yellow-billed stork

·         Weaver birds

·         Wooly necked stork

Bugs:

·         Baboon spider

·         Butterflies (white, yellow, African monarch)

·         Dung beetle

·         Scorpion

·         Termite (mounds – huge)

·         Tshongololo (steam train millipede)

Other Animals:

·         Black-backed jackal (+baby)

·         Banded Mongoose

·         Bush squirrel

·         Cape buffalo

·         Chatma baboon

·         Cow

·         Crocodile

·         Donkey

·         Elephant (+babies!)

·         Hippopotamus

·         Giraffe (+young)

·         Goat

·         Monitor lizard

·         Black Rhinoceros

·         White Rhinoceros

·         Spotted hyena

·         Vervet monkey

·         Warthog

·         Wild dog

·         Burchill's Zebra (+young)

·         Hartman's Mountain Zebra

Long drive to Cape Town

We reluctantly left the desert (again, reluctantly) to start the long 3-day journey toward Cape Town and our flights home. Things are much less interesting from tarred roads than from sand and gravel. We are still on vacation, but the melancholy of it coming to an end started as we moved closer to highways, cities, and airports.

Day 1: 670km from Sesriem to the Fish River Canyon
We camped at a gorgeous spot at the park entrance, narrowly escaped loosing our coffee to a resident baboon, and drove out to look over the edge. (Fish River Canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon. It didn't have the depth the colour or the size, but it was huge. The river was only a trickle and dry in many places, so the really amazing thing here was how it could have carved out such a deep, wide canyon.) The big perk of Fish River was getting to see quiver trees at close range.

Day 2: 720km from Fish River Canyon to Cistrusdal

It took 2 hours to cross the border back into South Africa, and we didn't even have any problems. That was normal bureaucracy about moving cars over the border and not taking food into South Africa. We kept driving for too long, and ended up arriving in a town at dark. I neglected to read that the campsite I picked was another 20km+ down some dirt road. We didn't have a print guidebook for the Cape, so we went to the first inn we found a sign for at the main road in town. Fortunately, it was clean, affordable, and had space - a kooky old place that felt like being in someone's grandmother's house.

Day 3: To Cape Town without a proper map or GPS
We headed off to the city, hoping we would find our hotel. Our GPS had conked out about a week ago, so we weren't sure how this would go. We were lucky. We checked into our nice (if not particularly African) hotel with a rooftop bar overlooking Table Mountain and reluctantly handed the truck back to the Bushlore rep.

With a day to kill in Cape Town, we decided to mark the end of our trip with a visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was kept for 18 years as a political prisoner. We had to go as part of a guided tour, with all the drawbacks of guided tours (such as being stuck on a bus with too many people wearing too much perfume, spending too much time on things we're not interested in and not enough time exploring what we really want to see). Still, it was moving to see the conditions these men worked in for so many years, for the sole crime of wanting to be treated as human beings.

We're now on our long way back to Canada. 2h from Cape Town to Jo'berg. 8h in Jo'berg airport. 17h45m from Jo'berg to Atlanta. 21/2h in Atlanta on account of missed flight. 2h to Toronto. 1 day in Tillsonburg. 5h from Toronto to Vancouver. Only 3 1/2 days.....