We call ahead and ask about road conditions to this hot springs after the monster storm – the connection isn’t great but how bad can the road be? We’ve been driving up river beds posing as roads as it is.
This area is known as the Green Kalahari and agriculture makes good use of the Orange River. If you guessed they are growing grapes, you are so right. The Orange River is the eighth longest river in the world and it seems every drop is feeding vines. Many signs read “Empowerment Farm” and I’m curious as to who is being empowered. And what will happen when such a huge monoculture is struck by disease or when the grape market does a dive. Or as Jim comments, when the water dries up. Meanwhile, there is plenty of water today.
Someone is looking out for the Riemvasmaak tourist district, it’s plain to see. The road is nicely graded and then turns to pavement for a short way into the town. There are well-tended gardens, a large new clinic, a school, and fresh paint everywhere in a town of maybe 500 residents. Still, there is no real grocery store. Kids ask for food. We buy rocks from them and hand out granola bars.
Following the signs to the hot spring, we go deep down into a canyon and meet up with 
Henry and his friend – these are the “guys” at the springs.They tell us we have to drive across the Molopo River, running now for the first time in two years, pouring red mud over the rocks. For a river crossing it isn’t too severe and by the next day the water has stopped running.
The hot springs themselves are simply perfect – clear water, not a hint of sulphur and the temp is 90+, ideal for soaking. Three pools are developed and one is hidden in the rocks with cooler water. The stars are superb, the hooting of an owl echoes up the red walls, and we are all alone.
Pofadder is pronounced like the snake, Puff Adder. A nasty, disagreeable snake, common all over southern Africa and the snake most likely to bite to people. Garden workers are often bit – this snake doesn’t even pretend to avoid people. Pofadder the town is small and has a desert charm. Lots of mining in the area; South Africa is endowed with great mineral wealth, little of which seems to trickle down.
Fueling up in Pofadder, the shy attendant smiles and says “we don’t get much rain here” – her words and voice making me think she’s lived here all her life and has never seen rain. We skirt the huge black clouds; the front of the storm creates a horizon wide dust tornado and instead of a bath the Beagle is drenched in sand. 
Driving lights are necessary. Plans need to change, there’s no camping in this sandstorm. We aim for the Kalahari Guest Lodge and Camp in Augrabies town and the skies open up as we arrive. Camp is up and dinner (soup again) is ready in 20 minutes. It’s a nice place, for being right on the road. And it’s been there a long time, judging by the size of the plants. There’s two dogs, a cat, and the camp manager has a gorgeous orange parrot on her shoulder. We are the only ones there.
Should we go into Augrabies National Park? The fine folks we met on the western shore said the Vervet monkeys were bold and intrepid – nothing was safe from them. Jim has a sling-shot – Gary told him he’d need to pack his own rocks as well, there weren’t any left at the Augrabies campsite. Vervet moneys are notorious in camps and towns all over the southern hemisphere. The males have turquoise blue balls but the cute factor ends when they make off with dinner.
There is a hot springs on the map. Can’t resist a hot springs even when it’s 88f out and about the same in humidity. We skip Augrabies and head that way.
Huge round granite mountains line the road to Springbok, oceans of granite that appear to be the mantle of the earth holding down the roiling magma underneath. 
This is not so far-fetched a feeling; Africa is the oldest and most stable land mass on the planet. John Reader’s Africa: Biography of a Continent is a fantastic resource and we carry a copy in the kitchen. He talks about how 3,600 billion – yes, billion – years ago rock was formed that today is the mantle of earth under Africa.
And yep, Springbok is hot. We have no way to measure the temp, but we aren’t out of line to assume it is well over 90, pushing 100. There are people everywhere on the streets; big Afrikaner farmers, fishing guides, laborers, ladies, kids; it is Friday midday and the grocery store is absolutely packed. Everyone is pleasant and the different clothing, hairstyles, skin colors, and languages make grocery shopping feel like a big carnival.
We fill the Beagle with water, food, and fuel, and drive around looking for a shady spot to put all the provisions away.
Judging by the day the solar shouldn’t have any problem keeping up but we are filling both fridge and freezer, giving them a workout by heading off into the blazing interior. The surface of Mercury aspires to be this hot. The landscape is a unforgiving as can be but of course there are goats – and surprisingly, horses. Lots of horses, and of all colors. Who’d’a thought?
We find an oasis at which to camp, actual green grass next to the river. Not a soul around. It’s hot and humid. On day two a herd of goats comes by to drink, followed by the three herd dogs . As dog besotted as we are, and as cute as they are, there’s no petting them. We didn’t get the rabies vaccine. Fireflies come out on the last night – what a marvel they are. Did you know many different species communicate by their blinking lights? Fantastic.
Baboons wake up late. Somebody is grumpy and picks a fight, the screeching and howling is a caveman’s nightmare. Birds are more subdued. It’s a special place, happy to have found it.
If you are keeping track (Marlene!) we are on a heading due north, with plans to wild camp until we get to Gronesriviern and the Nampqua National Park. We proceed with four navigation devices – five if you count intuition. 
Camping at this 1994 shipwreck I imagine the captain being totally fed up with his GPS and running aground just to get it over with. For us the urge to throw the ipad out the window and run over it has passed, for now.
I am writing this while sitting on the sand in front of the Atlantic Ocean, watching its remarkable foam tide. We’ve never seen or heard of anything like this foam. I’ve seen what’s called spin-drift, that soft cotton candy foam that the Pacific offers. This foam is something else all together. 
Yesterday afternoon, the waves were like meringue, thick, viscous and pure white. They pushed ashore miles and miles of foam, moving under the piles of it like undersea monsters. Meringue coated the rocks as if someone dumped paint on them. This morning, the fancy white foam all up and down the beach has deflated and what’s left is smelly grey-green stuff. But more is on the way, I can see it off-shore. What is it exactly? I’ll have to find out.
We enter Namqua National Park from the south gate, the only place where staff is posted. Flamingos graze the estuary nearby. 
The SANS Park staff are friendly and knowledgeable – they tell us they’ve seen many snakes. The Cape Cobra is famous in these arid parks; its bright orange color unmistakable. I would love to see one preferably from the (closed) truck window.
Namqua is a land of contrasts. There’s the open Atlantic Ocean on one side and as far as you can see, shrubs and succulents on the other. Water looks scarce until the fog rolls in. A colony of meerkats are standing up; as sentinels they can see what’s coming but by standing up they create a different shape than the surrounding shrubs and are somewhat easy to spot. I dig meerkats. We spot another colony down the road.
Less cute, but still a hoot, is a colony of thousands of Cape Fur Seals. I’m hard pressed to describe what it smells like. 
Like the bottom of the ocean all stirred up. Down the road are ostriches and the shy Pale Chanting Goshawk – always staying still until the camera comes up, then off he flies.
And so it goes until we reach our first assigned campsite in many nights. Nothing fancy, a windbreak for a cooking fire and compostable toilets right on the shore. 
For the first time in days we meet fellow campers. They come over with a couple of cold ones for us – how’d they know we were down to our last Castle beer? SA native Gary is a large animal vet specializing in wild creatures and Annie is battling South Africa’s work permit bureaucracy which could be a career for her. They leave us with a 6-pac and their phone number to visit them in the Limpopo area. Now when a South African invites you to visit, they really mean it. We’ll take them up on it.
To continue our route, again for those of you keeping track, we’ll leave Namqua and resupply in Springbok, a charming and very hot town inland. Our goal for the rest of February will be to visit Augrabies National Park, near the South African/Namibian border, and the famous Kalahari Transfrontier Park, where we traveled in 2013 with Adrian and Rentia. 
A different season will make it a completely different park; instead of sparse grass and little water, we should see greenery and baby animals. That is, if we can get in. That park is so popular that many visitors make reservations a year in advance – like trying to get that perfect spot at Redfish Lake. We have no reservations. But something will happen – it always does.
Pronounced “titties”, yes. We have landed here on the official first night of our long awaited two -year journey, bearing north from Cape Town. Tietiesbaii is on the western coast with a picturesque shore-line of rocks and sandy camping at the water’s edge. 
The land around the shore is blanketed with fynbos – thorny shrubs and stunted succulents and there is always something colorful.
Our route to Tietiesbaii goes through the West Coast National Park which is famous for its flowers during the season. Once again, SANS Park wows us with its interpretative signage – we learn White Pelicans, beautiful birds, have become a menace to nesting gulls, terns and others. Pelicans arrived at the Cape to eat the offal from large-format chicken processing plants. Those plants were closed down for public health reasons (imagine that) and the ever-adapting pelicans found another protein source in the eggs and chicks of nesting sea birds. People are now hired to keep the pelicans away from nests – job creation in the new world.
South Africans do love to camp. They have a t-shirt that says “Australians call it Survivor, in South African we call it camping.” And it is a Saturday afternoon so there is a battalion of people at one end of the long beach. On the distant end, we can’t hear anything from them except the occasional bottle rocket going off. We wander over after dinner to examine their vehicles. These are serious campers – the amount of gear and gadgets would impress a five-star general. Packed in tent to tent, kids running everywhere, men tending the braai. I’m thinking, these kids (and some adults) are barefoot – in a place where everything is armed with thorns. As kids, we would have been barefoot too. No problem, right? Until as dusk comes on and we are returning to the Beagle, we nearly step on a scorpion. It was huge. I reach for a stick to see if it would move off the road and Jim says, you aren’t going to poke him with that stick?! You gonna need one a lot longer! I abandon the attempt; the scorpion moves. . . a little bit. Ok, now every shadowy mound looks suspicious and Jim spots another ugly one under a branch. We remember to be careful shaking out the sand mat in the morning and not to leave our shoes out for a scorpion hotel. 
SANS Park interpretative signage warns that smaller claws and a larger tail means a more venomous bite from these primitive creatures. You’d be in trouble if bitten not to mention in considerable pain. People worry about lion and elephant and some friends and family asked us if we would be armed on this journey. I’m laughing, thinking of having a gun and shooting a scorpion . . . on my foot. That sounds about right. Thankfully, no, we have no weapons.
The last night with our friends here in the suburbs of Cape Town started with a fine South African braai – meats on the grill – not to be confused with a BarBQ. 
BBQs are for girly-men. This is a country where the milk is labeled full cream, chicken is a salad and no one orders a skinny latte. When in Rome. Dessert is real ice cream with caramel sauce topped with cracked sea salt. Adrian insists we take the uneaten ice cream with us – just what we need on safari – as he and Rentia eat healthy but make exceptions for company.
Adrian and Rentia are such an inspiration. We owe them a debt impossible to repay. They’ve opened their home, complete with kitties Bandit, Sylvester and Fraidy-cat. 
They turned their hard-won knowledge of bush camping into a business. Throughout our contemplation of this long journey they have encouraged us, shared information, and championed the cause.
We first them met at Third Bridge, that mythical camp in Moremi. Hippo had charged through the camp right at dinner time and Jim wandered over to their site to see how they fared. Chatted awhile, admired Rentia’s kitchen and Adrian’s map, then parted ways. It wasn’t until later that I thought, gees, what an idiot, I didn’t get any contact info from them. Days later we were bumping along a sand track and there they were, in the truck coming at us. Hey, I told Jim, there’s that couple – let’s stop and have a natter. We’ve since toured the Kalahari with them – lion everywhere – and Jim was their guest in Cape Town when he took possession of the Beagle. Third Bridge has led us on paths we may not have noticed and we are so grateful for it and for our friendship with Adrian and Rentia.
On Adrian’s suggestion, we took off for the south coast. The trial run of the Beagle led us to where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet at Cape Agulhus along a coastline lined with shipwrecks from as far back as the early 1700s and as current as 1960. It’s not quite the coast of “Skeletons on the Zahara” (an excellent non-fiction account of the survivors of a Dutch ship in the 1800s) but it has its share of drama. On this day, the sea is opal green and only tourists are about. Well, tourists and vicious biting ants. Stopping to photograph the scene is to be swarmed and bitten by these tiny monsters. The tiny will rule the earth.
Penguins rule at Betty’s Bay. The colony of African Penguins is one of two on the southern coast, the other being at Boulder Beach.
These elegant birds are so endangered that any colony is fiercely protected and one must be careful not to disturb them. South Africa does a nice job of combining tourism and protection in this area; one can walk among the birds on boardwalks and the interpretative signs are current, if not a bit depressing.
Moving inland we traveled through the De Hoop Reserve with its enormous white sand dunes and on into the Karoo, a scenic land reminiscent of the desert Southwest in America. The resemblance is only superficial. The American desert is a baby compared to the age of this African land.
About the time the very smallest creatures were forming, the land around us – the coastline and the inland Karoo region – was being contorted and punished by the breakup of Pangea, the super-continent of early earth. This place, the Karoo, is really really ancient. Fossils here date from the Permian Era, 100 million years before the dinosaurs came into being – 100 million years! The creatures fossilized here are bizarre as any to ever form. Looking at them, encased in stone and viewed at the excellent Fossil Walk in the Karoo National Park, I consider how long it took for these creatures to get the way they were – like big flat turtles with no shell sliding around in the muddy primordial ooze on short stubby limbs. And on and on life goes; these creatures petered out and reptiles formed. What a trip thinking about the time frame as we drove through the hot and dry Karoo.
We tackled Swartsberg Summit, a high rocky pass, to see how the Beagle would handle the 4×4 terrain.
I drove up, and I give it a pucker factor of 30 on a range of 1-10. Going down pinged the pucker factor even more – people do this for fun, you know! It was a blast; the Beagle is a rock-crushing machine (and a thirsty one) and she could eat that pass for breakfast. Turning her around is a project – for the many times we need to make u-turns. There are four or five navigation devices on board and we still wind up turning around for missed turns or wrong ways. Narrow streets in the townships are the most difficult to negotiate but people are nice, pointing out the way through.
Here we are in Cape Town, with a photo of the view from Adrian and Rentia’s lovely home. We’re attempting the task of legalizing the Beagle at the Vehicle Dept. The line stretches across eight rows of the world’s most uncomfortable chairs in a fan-cooled room filled with people who thought the process would be quick. Or at least not last 2.5 hours. People range from the resigned to the mildly annoyed, to the downright hostile person who doesn’t understand how Jim could move to the head of the line on the second day. Yes, the second day. He has a get-out-of-jail-free card, coming back after having to collect yet one more document. And then we were legal.
Back at Adrian and Rentia’s, the Beagle is getting a make-over. It could be driven off without taking the time, but having some things taken away and others added will make for smoother camping. The kitchen in particular needs help. Designed by great big Afrikaans men who likely don’t spend a lot of time in that section, and for whom chicken is just another vegetable, it was created to look good in the showroom. A man could convince his wife to overland by showing her how neatly the coffee cups were stored – and it did look neat. We trash it heavily anyway. We know what we want, up to a point, but the only way to be sure is to go camping in it. So off we go, after a week of outfitting, down the coast.
Camping without reservations or even an idea of where we will wind up in the evening, takes a bit of getting used to. Recommendations from expert guide and South African native Adrian are a great starting point. Like any good trip though, the plan dissolves and seat-of-pants navigation takes over. Looking at the paper map we ponder what might be a good stopping spot and we wing it when we get there. This is not a situation for the challenged marriage. Not only do you have to trust the navigator and the map, you have to trust each other. There is a commitment to overlanding that goes well beyond seeing Africa. And so far, so good.
A burned out, rusted fuselage next to the taxiway. Vultures lurking on the tin roofs of the terminal. The air thin and wood-smoky. Welcome to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the world’s third highest capital at 7,200 feet. Jim braved the restrooms. Before we could catch our breath, we were off again; Cape Town landing in six hours. From Addis to CPT, it’d be our last plane flight. Another good reason to take two years to do this trip – we don’t care to get on another plane for a long time.
The last (and only) time I was here was in 2011 when I accompanied a woman I’d only just met to assist her in driving her car from Addis to Nairobi. Too stupid to be scared, I had the time of my life. Another unrepeatable experience; the road from Moyale to Archers Post has been paved since then. Not that the tar will last forever, but chances are it won’t be like it was in 2011. Winding around the thick mud in a 1988 Isuzu bakkie, men helped us find a path around the lorries stuck axel-deep in the mud. They’d been there for days and we could only drive by. 
Short rains turned into long rains. The Omo valley was inaccessible and we made Archers Post and the Umojo Women’s camp with nothing but luck and my companion’s wild driving skills. We saw no white people for days. The desert was stunning and green as all getout. Can’t repeat this one, so it’s on to the next African experience, with Jim.
The inauguration of the new president was not the reason for the stop over in the nation’s capital. We planned the lay over to visit with my niece, Renee and her family: husband Tom, son Zander (6) and Abigail (4), and to see my wonderful friend Colleen. The capital was subdued compared to the chaos of six adults and two young children plus Sundance the dog in the suburbs of Falls Church.
Renee and Tom hosted two women who’d come to march on Saturday, as well as Jim and me. The conversation was raucous and definitely not in favor of the “orange yam”.
The kids were confused – are we watching something interesting on TV? And if so, why are we so annoyed by it? Hard to explain, kids. It’s like science fiction only real.
Renee and Tom live steps from a historic if tiny park commemorating Andrew Ellicott, one of the surveyors who mapped out the US capital. The park’s iron fence enclosure was built by Tom, with some welding advice from my brother-in-law Ed – so I feel like it’s part of the family. The cornerstone has stood the test of time, something to think about as our country veers in an unpredictable direction.
Washington DC has as much culture in one block as our entire home state of Idaho. It’d take weeks to see even half of it and your feet would not be happy. But, again, lucky for me, my friend Colleen lives a stone’s throw from the National Cathedral and on a perfect January day
we toured around it. The weathering and moss make it look ancient when in reality the building is quite young. Colleen made sure I saw the startlingly huge clematis vine; geezus, it is impressive (not my exact words, but you get the picture). The vine can’t be more than 40 years old but resembles has the an ancient Ent of Fangorn Forest.
Botanically satisfied, we returned home to admire the bust of Marquis de Layfette by Jean-Antoine Houdon – 
the French general indispensable in General George Washington’s efforts secure the creation of the United States.
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