Second Overland Adventure: The Honeymoon
First published in the Overland Expo Sourcebook
“Miles and miles of bloody Africa!”
That was my dad’s refrain from our 1983 crossing of the Kalahari by Range Rover, documented in the 2022 edition of the Overland Sourcebook: First Overland Adventure: Fences Through the Kalahari.
Fifteen years later, living in Colorado, and about to marry my high school sweetheart, Connie, I became fixated on the idea of showing her the land I grew up in, and, more specifically, showing her what made me fall in love with overlanding in Africa. My ulterior motive: I had presented an idea of driving from London to Cape Town; I had to prove that it was not crazy and that Africa was safe.
I decided that our honeymoon should be a redo of that 1983 trip. That I had not returned to Southern Africa in over 10 years made no difference; this was a honeymoon and it had to be done in style, which for me included crossing the Kalahari desert by Land Rover, to the Okavango Delta.
While we had used the family Range Rover in 1983, I decided a Defender 110 would be better for this trip, because that’s what I planned to use for London to Cape Town if it ever happened. Scouring the internet revealed a company in South Africa that would rent a Defender110 for two weeks at $140 per day including camping equipment and a roof top tent. Deal done.
The wedding went well despite the pouring rain and, the day after (still hungover) we flew to Africa.
The Defender was delivered to a bed and breakfast I had arranged in Johannesburg. After a quick inventory of the equipment (including maps, lamps, stove, fridge, sleeping bags, water jugs and a bottle of champagne) and a demo of the roof top tent we took possession.
This was my first time back to Africa after the dissolution of apartheid, and this is exactly when my youthful confidence and arrogance began to crack. I had made no bookings, investigated no campsites, and generally made no plans other than to rely on my 15-year-old memories as a ten-year-old to cross the Kalahari. As we drove I was doing my best to hide my new trepidation from my new wife.
By early evening we had reached the border and we crossed into Botswana where we met some Italians in a rented Land Cruiser. I casually asked them where they planned to stay the night and they gave directions to a camp site.
We drove into Gaborone, the capital city, and immediately became aware of the lack of road names. There were plenty of streets, and plenty of poles, but no names on the poles. This created a new navigation problem that proved to be a recurring issue in Botswana, but in this case made our campsite directions hard to follow. Luckily we came across the Italians again, broken down at the side of the road. We followed them to the camp site and offered to take them to the Toyota dealer the next morning. That evening we traded stories learning that several years earlier they had crossed the Namib desert and were now back to do the Kalahari. It was here that we discovered that the game parks in Botswana require camping permits at reserved sites, rather than the free-for-all I recalled from fifteen years ago. My trepidation was morphing into something worse.
After dropping the Land Cruiser off at the dealership, we loaded the Italians into the Defender and headed to the National Parks office to make reservations. My plan, based on 1983, was to head out of Gaborone north-east to the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and on to Maun and Moremi Wildlife Reserve. This route skirted the central Kalahari to the east and north but was as close to what I remembered from 1983 as I could find on the new maps. Unfortunately, at the Parks Office we were told that there were no camp sites available in Moremi, Chobe, Makgadikgadi or the Central Kalahari Game Reserve for the rest of the month.
‘Something worse’ was now morphing into mild internal panic.
Checking the map we decided we would head south-west to Gemsbok National Park (which had reservations available) and then north through the Kalahari to Maun and the Okavango. I still wanted to go to Moremi, so we decided we'd just wing it and hope for a cancellation when we got there. This route was more off the beaten path and involved more off-road driving, but I was comfortable with that. We reserved six days at the Mabuasehube Game Reserve on the desolate East side of Gemsbok National Park.
By this time it was close to lunch but the Toyota was still not fixed. We decided to leave our Italian friends and hit the road. As we did, they took the only picture of both of us on our honeymoon. As a side note, I later got an email from the Italians detailing all the car trouble they had on their trip, including a broken radiator a leaking battery in the middle of the desert and a fuel pump that expired just outside the Toyota dealership in Maun. Our Defender never skipped a beat . . .
Most of the afternoon was on tarmac, and uneventful. The Kalahari is a scrub desert and all around us for as far as the eye could see was yellow grass and the occasional mopane tree. By evening we pulled off the road on a sandy track to camp and sitting on the roof rack the silence and sheer expanse of the wilderness was impressive, if not daunting.
By early morning we made it to the turn off to Mabuasehube, turned onto the sandy two-track and dropped into low range. As we came over the low dunes we could see the road disappearing to the horizon in a straight line seemingly forever. At Goa village the road suddenly blossomed into many tracks, none with a sign. We chose one and chose wrong; it ended at a fence. The village itself was deserted. We went back and chose again, this time picking direction by the sun. We reached a pan with a herd of cattle on it and two indistinct tracks crossing it. Again we chose by the sun and crossed the pan, but wouldn’t know we chose the right track until we reached the perimeter of the park four hours later. For lunch we just stopped in the road under a tree.
The the park boundary was marked by a sign and a road, but no fence. The sign gave instructions to check in at the scout camp 13km further on. Here the sand was really soft and deep.
When we checked in, the park ranger told us there were three other vehicles in the entire park. Our first camp was at Mabuasehube Pan where the silence was so complete that Connie became really unnerved, and I saw my London to Cape Town plan slipping away.
We spent several evenings laying in the tent with the door open watching wildlife on the pans through the binoculars by moonlight. Mainly gemsbok with the occasional jackal, one of which visited us at dinner time, no doubt attracted by the smell of bacon. During the day we visited the other pans in the park. Wildlife was not all that abundant, but we saw gemsbok, ostrich, springbok and a few wildebeast. Jackals and vultures were also easy to find. Connie discovered that living in the desert involves being dirty most of the time. She threatened to rebel, and so we went to the Scout camp and used their ice cold but very welcome shower.
By the third evening we were getting low on diesel, and decided to cut our stay short and head north to Maun. That evening the silence unsettled both of us and there was a nervous energy in the air so we went to bed early. The following morning we broke camp and, driving out, discovered lion tracks on the road not 20 feet from where we were camped. When we checked out at the scout camp we were told that the lions had come by just before dark the previous evening which would have put them at our camp just after dark, right when we went to bed.
The drive north out of the park was long and very dusty. We got fuel at Hutkuntsi and picked up the paved road for Ghanzi. At Ghanzi the tarmac turned to graded dirt and we discovered several hundred kilometers of severe washboard. It was a bone jarring, tooth loosening ride of the sort that Africa is legendary for. After a a long day we finally came to Maun with its glimmering cooking fires and thick smell of smoke. I remembered some of the names from my childhood visits — Riley's Hotel (which is now a Best Western) and Crocodile Camp. Riley's was full, so we stayed at the Sedia Hotel, a beautiful old building left over from the colonial days where we sat by the pool drinking gin and tonics as the sun set. My mild panic over lack of plans had now completely vanished, and my London to Cape Town sales pitch was looking good.
The next morning we picked up supplies and stopped at the Parks Board office to try to secure a camp site in Moremi, again, without luck. The only thing we could do was to stay in Maun and drive the 70km in to the park every day which, unfortunately, eliminated the two best game viewing times in the park — early morning and late evening. We could not enter until the sun was up and had to leave before it set. I had been looking forward to spending some quiet evenings in the park watching wildlife, but we had to live with it. Leaving Maun we crossed the veterinary cordon fence, which brought back memories of the traumatic scenes from 1983.
It was on our second day in the park that we finally saw lions. Connie had begun to believe that wild cats did not really exist and that the park rangers went out at night with special boots to make paw prints to fool the tourists. We came across a pride on Paradise Island, lying under a tree sunning themselves. Later that same day as we crossed Dead Tree Island, I devised a plan to get a picture of the 110 crossing some deep water. We found a good spot, and the plan was to drive through, drop Connie off with the camera and I would drive back and return. We went through, and Connie was about to get out of the car when she spotted a lone lioness lying under a tree not 10 meters away, quietly watching us. We abandoned the picture taking idea and turned the camera on the lioness.
On our last day in Moremi, we did the south-west side of the park in a long slow tour, and by evening exited at North Gate. I knew we couldn't camp because North Gate Camp was all booked up, but there were three lodges listed on the map in the no-mans-land between Moremi and Chobe parks and it seemed likely that we could find something. So with night fast approaching we stopped at Tsaro Lodge and were told they were full. We went on to Kwai River Lodge, but no one was there. The table in the lodge was set for dinner, and there were drinks around, elephants were playing in the watering hole, but not a soul to be seen. At Machaba Camp we were offered a room for US$500 each, way above our budget. The lodges all cater to rich guests who fly in and fly out for private safaris. We were advised that camping in the area was forbidden because it's all private, but confidentially the manager said we could if we weren't caught. So, given that advice we went off into the bush to find a bushcamp. We had no idea what the penalty would be if we got caught, so it was a tense night, not helped by the elephant herd that spent the night around the 110 munching loudly and trumpeting now and again.
We broke camp soon after the sun rose both feeling much better when we were back on the road towards the Chobe gate. Chobe is more arid than Moremi, as it is not part of the Delta, and the tracks follow deep sand that can be extremely difficult to traverse. Without a camping reservation, we could only get a one-day transit permit so our plan became to cross the park and exit at Kasane close to Victoria Falls. Little did we realize how ambitious a plan that was; 244 kilometers of deeply rutted and very soft two-track with no GPS for navigation and no road signs as they had all been vandalized. In the end Connie navigated by the sun and the odd landmark. It worked well, though we were never really sure where we were. We didn't see any other traffic on it all day except for the wreck of a Land Rover Series II Forward Control that had obviously been abandoned long ago. A wreck we were to see again in 2019, 21 years later, as we came back through Chobe with Jonathan and Roseann Hanson.
By late afternoon we were still pushing north, hoping to catch the highway to Kasane and the border. We came over a sand dune through some acacia trees and suddenly there was a brand new paved road in front of us. Half an hour later we were in Kasane.
We had a wonderful meal in a typically British Colonial setting, though Connie had problems with the monkey-gland sauce on her steak (actually chutney, not a part of a monkey!).
For all my trepidation, everything turned out well, and Connie fell in love with Southern Africa and agreed to come with me on a 9-month adventure from London to Cape Town; even more ‘miles and miles of bloody Africa!’