It was a lovely morning as I bade goodbye to the Zambezi and started out on the long straight road west through what is known as the Caprivi Strip. I had always heard it referred to as the Namibia ‘pot handle’ which works well when you look at a map of the country.
Though what is little known outside of this region is that this land is being claimed by a small insurgency group who maintain that it should be independent of the rest of the country. There have been tourist kidnappings, police clamp downs and several arrests and jailings over the past few months.
I was told however that I would be perfectly safe and should be more concerned about elephants and lions which populate about three hundred of the five hundred kilometres which I had to ride through. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
What actually concerned me more was when about fifty kilometres after leaving Katima Mulilo one of the warning lights started to flash on the dashboard. It was a low pressure warning for the front tyre. Tyres are the one thing that always niggle at me subconsciously because they take the most abuse on a trip like this. I carry a mini electric pump and a repair kit but it’s somewhere that I just don’t want to go.
I had previously noticed that the rear tyre had already started to square but the warning on the dash right now was for the front one. I thought about returning to Katima Mulilo to have them both checked but decided to press on until I would reach a small hamlet just before the wild animal stretch. My sat nav was telling me that I could get petrol there and I just kept my fingers crossed that they would also have some form of tyre maintenance facility. It was, after all, the last ‘garage’ for three hundred hours kilometres.
They did thankfully have an air pump but that was it. And the entire area, including around the lone petrol pump, was all soft sand. Even moving from the petrol pump to the air pump was a struggle. Of course I had gathered an audience who would have got great entertainment if Simba dropped in the sand.
All of this was further exacerbated by the fact that, even though it was still early morning, the temperature was already 37 degrees. I gave the guy Nab$50 to help me and between us we agreed that there was no puncture and I topped up the air while he struggled to hold the bike upright.
Moving on from there into the three hundred kilometre wilderness I kept a very close eye on the gauge. Thankfully that was all that there was to it.
The road was just long and straight the whole way and there was not a person to seen. Even the traffic was negligible.
Passing through game reserves in the past has never bothered me but, because of the distance and hours that it took to get through, this one was was different. So I was glad to see the Okavango River in the distance which marked the exit out of the park area.
Once I crossed that bridge it was only about another hundred kilometres to Rundu.
But about fifty kilometres on I had another run in with the law. This time it was for failure to stop at a road block. The joke about this particular incident was that I did stop at the roadblock, otherwise we wouldn’t have been having any conversation.
The young policeman who stopped me took my license and told me that I had to report to the senior officer who was enjoying the shade of a nearby tree. They didn’t even have a car. I approached her and spoke with usual deference as I tried to impress upon her that I had stopped, as was evidenced by me actually standing there.
She was a sparky young woman in her early twenties and was determined to do me for something. She had already produced a book outlining various road traffic offenses and pointed to the more serious Nab$1,0000 fine for not immediately stopping at the direction of a police officer. The conversation bordered on farcical but once again I had little choice.
I handed her the money which she instantly went to place into her pocket. I immediately demanded that I was entitled to both a charge sheet and a receipt, as was also written in her book. Straight away she changed her tune. She looked closely at my driving license and then asked me what age I was. I told her that I had crossed a new decade recently and she suddenly flipped.
She demanded to know why I was riding a motorcycle at my my age and said that she was very unhappy that I did not drive a car. She further demanded to know what my wives and children thought about my senile behaviour. You have no idea how difficult it was for me to keep a straight face at that moment. I told her that my wives understood why I did this and that is how it is in our culture. My children were reared not to question the authority of a parent.
She agreed that this respect from my wives and children is how it should be but that she, as a police officer, was very angry with me for not driving a car. She then handed me back my money and driving license and instructed me to go and purchase a car.
Only in Africa…….
ZIGZAGGING AFRICA BY MOTORBIKE 