South Africa – Page 4 – Clancy Abroad

Bots to Moz

We’ve been offline for a short while as we crossed back from Botswana to Sth Africa last Saturday, then made our way across the north-east of SA to Kruger National Park and crossed into Mozambique via Pafuri Gate on Tuesday.

On our last night in Botswana, we wild-camped north of Serowe on a disused road we found when we were there in March. We used the Martin’s Drift/Groblersbrug border crossing from Bots to SA for the 4th time. Martin’s Drift on the Botswana side was, as usual, quick, easy and predictable. Groblersbrug was the usual confusion of not knowing where to go because the Immigration section had been moved again, although being Saturday afternoon, it wasn’t as busy as we’ve seen it. There was a huge line of trucks waiting to cross into Bots, though – at least 3kms long.

We stayed at the Big Fig Inn near Tom Burke, just a few kms from the border. Lovely campground with grassy sites. The first grass we’ve seen in quite a while. On Sunday we headed east towards Louis Trichardt. We’d driven along a really terrible stretch of road from Tom Burke to Alldays on our first trip here, so we wanted to avoid that this time. Google Maps offered an alternative, but neglected to mention that parts of it were dirt! Blrgh. Anyway, we reached our second campsite, Zvakanaka, just north of Louis Trichard and it was a lovely set-up too. We had a site with our own shelter, power, water, braai. Ablutions including a front-loading washing machine were nearby. Great views over the Soutpansberg mountain range.

On Monday we did some stuff in Louis Trichard – groceries, tyre & inner tubes, hardware, more groceries, then continued east to our third campsite, Nthakeni, at Nkotswi. On the way, we stopped and fuelled up at Masisi, the last fuel source for us in Sth Africa, and in the part of Moz we were heading to, fuel supplies are unreliable. On our first trip to Sth Africa, we were heading to Pafuri Gate and were stopped by a roadblock at Masisi – the bridge over the river had been washed away, so we had to head south to another gate.

Nthakeni Bush and River Camp was an absolute gem. Located on the Mutale River, it offers a range of accommodation and provides employment for local villagers. Our campsite had its own outdoor shower, (indoor) toilet and the best camp kitchen I’ve seen. Well-equipped, nicely laid out, it was excellent!

It would have been great to spend more time at any or all of the 3 South African campgrounds we visited, but …. places to go, borders to cross, a new country to explore …

Last camp in Botswana, unused road on ioverlander

the river near Nthakeni Bush and River Camp

Judy cooking in the kitchen at Nthakeni Bush and River Camp

An aggressive looking Cape Buffalo in Kruger National Park

Elephants in the distance Kruger National Park

Monkeys and Warthogs Kruger National Park

THAT was a really crappy day!

The bad bits

When we were parked at the Midas car park in Kuruman, several men tried to mug Greg and steal his daypack with his passport and other assorted items in it. I was sitting in Clancy, which was all locked up with the windows up, watching and listening in horror whilst trying to get the driver’s side door open.

We drove 15kms out of our way to a farm which, according to signposts, offered camping. When we go there 2 extremely disinterested women told us there was not camping but we could stay in the B&B part. No thanks. I commented as we were leaving that I felt like leaving all their gates open, but being a nicely brought-up country gal, I closed them.

Then we drove to the next place that offered accommodation and got a flat tyre just after we arrived. First of the trip.

The good bits

Greg absolutely would not let go of his pack and the would-be thieves got nothing. He rolled under the car to get away from them, yelled ‘Help’ several times and people came to his aid. As Mr Rogers would say … in bad situations, look for the helpers. They are always there. I think it was a very good thing that I didn’t get out of the car as that would have given the ‘thieves’ the opportunity to try and grab hold of as much as they could from the front of the car!

Greg got quite a few scratches and grazes on his arms and legs, but is otherwise fine.

We were able to spend the night in a nice cabin at the OppiKnoppi Guest Farm which gave Greg the chance to fix the tyre while I cooked dinner in the cabin. The hosts charged us a very reasonable R150 per person, around $30 in total.

On the Road, at last

I bet at least 50% of you now have that Willie Nelson song ticking over in your brain. Sorry about that!

We headed out of Jo’burg yesterday morning. Finally. We really enjoyed spending 10 days at Airport En Route. It’s the longest we’ve spent anywhere apart from home in … forever. We settled into a nice little routine of Greg working on stuff on Clancy – new roof box, diesel-powered heater for our living space that we can also use to heat our outdoor shower tent, water heater for our showers. When he needed things from the hardware, or we needed something from the supermarket, Greg would ride his bike to the shops. I cooked, read a lot and did my best to maintain the campers’ kitchen to the high standard the owners keep it. There’s something about a very clean kitchen that seems to make us want to keep it that way, and our hostess Marion thanked me for keeping it so clean, but she still liked to splash plenty of Ajax around.

Most of the time, we were the only people there, but a couple of nights before we left there was a family from French Guiana who stayed overnight. And where is French Guinana? Just north of Brazil, and east of Surinam. If you have read ‘Papillon’, you’d recognise it. It was a former French penal colony and our host David took great delight in pointing out that all their campers were from former penal colonies – ie, us and the French Guianans.

We’re on our way to the SA/Bots border crossing at McCarthy’s Rest, north-west of Jo’burg. We drove through the centre of Jo’burg yesterday, we hadn’t meant to, but we got to revisit some of the places we got to know quite well when we stayed in an Airbnb in Maboneng on our first trip to Sth Africa. We were driving along and all of a sudden I realised we were in that trendy area. It looks better at night when all the pretty lights are on and there are plenty of people out and about, but it still looked good.

Last night we stayed at a campground just off the N14, at Barberspan Lake, 300kms west of Jo’burg.We had a lakeside campsite, and were the only ones there! There were only 6 campsites, but loads of A-frame chalets which were also all empty. I guess it gets busy during school holidays, at least I hope it does, for the sake of the owners and their staff.

Tonight we’re staying at the Red Sands Country Lodge, just a bit west of Kuruman. It’s an impressive set-up … lots of rondeval-style cabins, campsites with private facilities plus campsites without their own bathrooms, restaurant, bar, pool etc etc. We’re just staying in an ordinary campsite and using the shared bathroom, but we do have our own sink, braai and bench with power points and light. It’s very nice and at the lower end of what we pay for a campsite – R240, around $25.

We’re planning on crossing into Botswana tomorrow and have read various reports of what food we can and can’t take across. We know we can’t take fresh meat, and why would we when Botswana beef is so good and so cheap? But then we’ve read of people having UHT milk confiscated, no idea why, and fish and all kinds of other fresh food. Seems like it depends on whether the customs officer is hungry or not! When we crossed from Namibia to Bots earlier this year, we had apples and potatoes taken, despite a notice in the office with information on maximum allowed quantities, and what we had was nowhere near the limit.

Still in Jozi

Our plans to only stay a couple of days in Jo’burg while we get a few things done have sort of gone out the window. Greg has been building another fibreglass box on the roof to hold 2 more tyres with solar panels covering them. It’s taking a bit longer than anticipated, but we don’t really mind. We like it here at Airport En Route, and our hosts Marion and David don’t seem to mind us spending some extra time here. There have only been a couple of other overnight campers – one family at the start of their trip and another at the end of theirs – so most of the time we have the lovely campers’ kitchen and bathroom to ourselves.

The weather here is gorgeous at the moment, especially considering it’s winter here too – up to 25C during the day, down to -3 a couple of mornings, sunshine, clear skies. It’s much colder at home. The countryside here looks like Adelaide in summer – very brown and dry. A combination of frequent morning frosts and not much rain. Apparently it’s not usually so warm at this time of the year and the locals are worried that they may be in for a hot summer. I’ve been feeling like one ear is blocked, as if I’m still on a plane and when I mentioned it to Greg, he reminded me that we’re at an altitude of 1750m here! Which also explains why I thought it was taking longer to cook and bake stuff. It’s the altitude.

We returned the rental car on Sunday and now if we need anything from the supermarket or hardware, Greg rides his bike. It’s about 4kms to the nearest large hardware store and there’s a good shopping centre nearby.

While Greg has been adding, subtracting and modifying stuff on Clancy, I’ve been cooking, refining my bread recipe and doing lots of reading. It’s all been very laid-back and low-key and I’m sure we’ll be happy to get on the road to Botswana, but for now, we’re happy doing what we’re doing.

Some guys were repainting road markings on a road nearby. They were painting stop markings, but they didn’t use a stencil like we do in Australia, they paint it with a roller freehand, and it looks really good!

Adding the diesel heater into the storage area

Fibreglass panels most brought on the plane in pieces and fibre-glassed together

Making a mounting for the diesel fuel tank for the heater

Mounting the inlet and controller for the diesel heater

Season 2 begins

We follow a lot of Overlanders on social media. Recently I read the final post of a guy who had been travelling for several years and he included the last lines from the movie, The Martian, in which Mark Watney says:

At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

Seems like very good advice for overlanders as well as astronauts.

We hit our first problem before we’d even landed in Jo’burg. On the flight from Singapore to Joburg, we realised that we’d forgotten to bring the keys to the camper part of Clancy. We’ve brought almost 90kgs of luggage and no keys. Excellent. Actually, we’d forgotten to bring any keys at all, but we’d left a car key here with David and Marion at Airport En Route, the vehicle storage place/campground that has been Clancy’s home for the last 4 months. And from now on,the first and last items on our very long lists of stuff we need to bring will be KEYS!

It all worked out okay though. We were able to spend our first night here in an ensuite room at Marion and David’s, which meant we didn’t have to scurry 30m across frosty lawn to the toilets in the middle of the night. The next morning Greg got to work on the camper door lock and managed to lever it open, and we could then access the set of keys we’d left in the camper.

Greg re-installed the injectors he’d removed at the end of Season 1 to get refurbished, and that all went smoothly, got Clancy started without too much trouble and we’re now back to sleeping in the camper, but we’re using the nice camp kitchen here while we can.

It’s good to be back.

Clancy parked in the cold foggy morning in Johannesburg. Now we have to figure out how to break in…

Greg replacing the injectors in the 2H diesel

Starting to do repairs, a long list of things to do.

First nights dinner. South African Boerworst and these tiny potatoes that we see a lot in South Africa.

The days are cold in the morning but warm up and the days are bright and sunny getting over 20C

We thought about buying them but we didn’t. Bought 2 already-barbecued chickens instead

African Overlanders

As soon as we got our Clancy, we switched from Airbnb mode to camping mode, so we headed to African Overlanders. Located on a farm about 30kms north-east of Cape Town (with a great view of Table Mountain to the west and the Hottentots Holland Mountains to the east), and not far from the Airbnbs we stayed at when we first arrived here, it is a haven for Overlanders needing vehicle or motorbike storage, mechanical assistance, advice or a place to stay – either camping in their own vehicle, tent or in one of the straw-bale rooms. Duncan can also organise shipping.

We spent 4 nights there getting organised to head off into the wilderness. Greg was busy doing big tasks including fibreglassing a storage box onto Clancy’s roof, bolting a solar panel onto the roof, putting his pushbike together and other important things. I kept busy doing little stuff like washing, cooking and moving piles of stuff from one place to another, then somewhere else then back to the original place. Well, that’s how it felt anyway. We’re still figuring out where to store stuff, but that’s always a work in progress.

Anna, Henry and Judy jammed together in Clancy

While we were at African Overlanders, we met fellow travellers and exchanged stories. Most had been on the road for a while, travelling from north to south via various routes. It was good to hear their advice, tips and tales. The second night we were there, 8 of us shared a meal – someone had leftover curry sauce and rice from the previous night, I added the chicken sosaties skewers I’d planned to cook for our dinner, someone else had a baguette and salad ingredients and with all that we had heaps of food with seconds for everyone. We ate off Meakin English bone china plates, which are part of the very well-equipped camp kitchen that’s located in a 40ft shipping container. The bathrooms are in a 20ft shipping container.

African Overlanders is fairly close to the shopping centres we visited when we were Airbnb-ing, so we went back to familiar places to do our shopping. Greg also rode the 5 or 6kms on his bike a few times to go to local shops to get some food and hardware bits, because it was much easier than packing up the camper to drive there. Also, the camper had to stay stationary for 24 hours or so while the fibreglass on the roof dried. So it was handy having the bike for running errands.

We said goodbye to Anna and Henry on Friday – they were meeting friends for the weekend. We’ll miss them and will follow their adventures with great interest. As they are planning on spending a year in Africa, I’m sure we’ll get some good ideas from them on where we should travel on our subsequent trips within and around Africa.

And then by early Saturday afternoon we were finally organised and packed up to get going. First stop was Food Lovers, our favourite fresh food shop, where we bought lots of new potatoes for Greg and 3 punnets of raspberries at the bargain price of $2.50 for all 3! As a comparison, at home I occasionally buy one punnet when raspberries are on special for under AUD$5.00. We bought some other food too. We spent our first ‘proper’ night in Clancy – sleeping in the camper rather than in a tent – at a lovely campground at Kardoesie, grassy sites, lovely views, quiet and not crowded. All went well and we feel like our set-up is working well for us.

Yesterday, Sunday, we drove further north and stopped at Springbok Caravan Park for the night. Another nice place with grassy sites and a swimming pool. Springbok is very much like Alice Sprince – low mountain range going through the town, very similar terrain and even some hills in the middle of town, like Anzac Hill in Alice.

The Namibian border is only about 100kms north of here, so today will be our first border crossing in our own vehicle, and we’ll get to use our Carnet for the first time.

Some of the many vehicles in storage at African Overlanders

More vehicles in storage plus motorbikes at Africa Overlanders

Discussing how to forge documents and cross borders with other overlanders

Trying to repack and organise at African Overlanders

Fibreglassing brackets for the solar panel

Leaving African Overlanders on our first journey

Springbok town centre with very Alice Springs like hills

Soap behind the spare tyre mount so we can wash our hands with the water from the onboard tanks

The Getting of Clancy

Okay, so … we finally got Clancy late on Tuesday afternoon, after a couple of days of hanging around a lot and waiting for things to happen. It was my birthday on Monday and after an early-morning call to let us know that Customs were inspecting the container, we drove to Bidvest SACD where it was being stored. By the time we got there, Customs had left, having apparently opened the container, glanced inside and then closed and sealed it again. We stayed close to Bidvest for the rest of the morning, but by early afternoon we realised that it wasn’t going to be happening that day, so we booked another Airbnb, extended the rental car for about the 4th time and got on with our day. We had a lovely dinner at Moyo, an African restaurant at Bloubergstrand, which is on the coast north of the city with a perfect view of Table Mountain, Robben Island, kite-surfers, windsurfers and the setting sun.

A large birthday Gin and Tonic at Moyo – note from Judy: tonic water has quinine in it, which is an antimalarial, so this was purely for medicinal purposes!

Sunset from Moyo, with Kite surfers and Robben Island in the background.

Next morning we were up and out the door by 8am to drive back to Bidvest because we really, really thought we’d be able to get Clancy on Tuesday. It ended up being another day of a lot of waiting around, punctuated by a visit to a colleague of our shipping agent to hand over a very large pile of ZAR South African rand to pay for the SA portion of the shipping cars to Africa exercise. The colleague, Daya, asked why we were paying cash and not doing bank transfers, and we told him that we had been advised that we could only pay cash, so that’s what we had prepared for. Right. So …. payment made …. now let’s get our cars!

Hmm, not so fast. More waiting, more paperwork, a courier had to bring our carnets, which is sort of like a passport for a car and which is a requirement for any vehicle shipped here. By this time it was around 3pm and apparently whoever does the container stuff finishes work at 4 and so it was looking like we weren’t going to get our cars that day, unless we paid AUD$150 in ‘overtime charges’. We didn’t have to think to long about that one – it would have cost the 4 of us at least $100 in accomodation, plus extending 2 rental cars for another day, so we agreed to pay the charge.

And then when we were waiting for more paperwork so we could get our cars, the power went out because of loadshedding. Argh! More waiting, more muttering under our breaths. As Anna commented, it’s like every single person we have dealt with during this whole process has never ever imported a vehicle in a container before. Anyway, eventually we got to our container, and the company agreed to waive the overtime charge. We were all so happy to finally be reunited with our cars.Both vehicles and their contents were in exactly the condition they were in when they went into the container, apart from Willie suffering a broken battery terminal which Henry and Greg fixed with brown paper and string …… not quite, but a bush mechanic would have been proud of them.

We had been very careful packing Clancy, following a comment from our friend Liam who had spent time working as a Customs officer in Sydney. He told us about a vehicle he’d inspected that had got wrecked inside because of a loose box of cutlery which just smashed everything it came in contact with during the sea voyage. We made a rule that whatever we packed had to either be full or empty, no half-full boxes or storage spaces, and no ‘wriggle room’ between anything. We used cheap yoga mats, bubble wrap and bed linen as padding where we needed to. That worked well, nothing moved and we kept everything intact.

First stop was the servo 500m down the road (thankfully both cars had enough fuel to make it there), then we all drove in separate cars to the airport to return the rental cars, and then on to African Overlanders which offers a campground / vehicle storage / maintenance / mechanic / shipping agent that was highly recommended by other Overlanders. We unpacked just enough to get to our tent, mattresses and a quilt & took ages putting up the tent because it’s been a long while and we forget how to put it up in between camping trips. We sat and had a drink and a chat with the other people staying here and crawled into bed without worrying about finding pillows or bedlinen.

So now the African adventure can begin!

Opening the container, and it was all OK

Reversing out – Greg had to crawl between the tyres to get to the driver’s side door so he could open the bonnet and reconnect the battery

Healthy Fruit- Cherries wrapped in bacon!

At last!

Look what I got for my birthday! And it came with a chauffeur wearing a pink fluoro vest!

One of those days

We all have them. Those days where, if it’s going to go wrong, it does. We had that kind of day yesterday. Nothing major or life-threatening, just a day of annoyances and irritations.

We had to check out of our lovely Airbnb place and when I was thanking and saying goodbye to our host, she commented that I looked so calm and relaxed about still not having Clancy. I replied that we had been deported from Russia, so this current situation is just inconvenient, not stressful. It’s all about perspective.

We were hopeful that we would be able to get Clancy yesterday though, and decided to go and hang out near the freight forwarder’s, in case we got the call to go there. We are the only ones with keys to the car, so when the shipping container is opened, we really have to be present. We decided to revisit The Old Biscuit Mill in trendy Woodstock, have something to eat at one of the eating places there, have a wander around and wait. When we were here 3.5 years ago, we had lunch at The Test Kitchen which is located in the Old Biscuit Mill. It doesn’t open for lunch now and we just wanted something simple so we went and had burgers at Redemption Burgers. What really caught our eye about this place was their clever menus. The burgers were delicious too.

Table Mountain looms over everything in central Cape Town.

We had a walk up and down Woodstock’s main drag, Albert Road. Lots of places to eat, antique and retro shops, clothing stores and other signs of gentrification from light industrial to inner-city trendy suburb. We found a shady spot inside the Biscuit Mill complex and sat and waited for news from the freight forwarder, but by 3.30 we decided that it probably wouldn’t be happening until next week, so we extended the rental car hire again and booked another Airbnb place, only a couple of kms from the previous one.

Our potential Airbnb host had been pretty good about replying to messages, but somehow once we’d booked and paid to stay for 3 nights, everything went quiet. We got to the address and rang the doorbell as instructed … nothing. It was just on 5pm and we thought maybe he wasn’t home from work yet, so we waited. Sent a couple more messages, rang the bell a few more times, sent some SMS messages. Still nothing. This place is fairly typical of suburban homes here – very high fence, built like Fort Knox, impossible to get into. This one doesn’t have razor wire or electric fencing, but a lot do.

So while we waited, we went off to the local shopping centre to find something to cook for dinner and as he was walking back to the car, Greg noticed that one of the hubcaps was missing. Sigh. We remembered hearing a noise as we were driving on the motorway to the Airbnb, and we now realise it was the sound of the hubcap rolling away. We drove back to where we thought we might have lost it, but couldn’t find it. So, back to the Airbnb, back to no answer when we rang the doorbell. We were starting to think that maybe we’d lost our money and our bed for the night, then decided to phone the number rather than just send text messages. Answered on the first ring and things went smoothly from there. No idea why he didn’t reply to any of the other messages we’d sent, but by that time we didn’t feel like pursuing the topic, we just just glad to get inside and get settled. It’s a nice place and we’re happy to spend a few days here.

And now, today has been fine. Lovely weather, Greg took our laundry to a laundry service nearby so we now have clean and beautifully folded clothes, and we went to a different Food Lover’s store where I found packets of dried tortellini and ravioli which is a staple part of our camping pantry and which had eluded me up until now. Food Lovers has excellent produce & meat, and offers a good range of groceries, all at lower prices than the other supermarket chains here – Spar, Pick & Pay, Checkers. We’ll probably go back to that one and stock up before we head off in Clancy.

I hope your weekend is going well too.

Still in Cape Town, still waiting for Clancy

Things are progressing, but very slowly. The container ship docked on Tuesday and ‘our’ container was unloaded, then yesterday it was taken by truck to a freight forwarders depot.

Now we’re waiting for an appointment with Sth African customs to come and inspect the contents of the container, ie Clancy and Willie. Then, hopefully, we can hand over the remainder of the freight / customs / fees payment and drive Clancy away.

We are staying at the Airbnb until tomorrow, but then they have new guests booked in, so we hope to stay at African Overlanders which offers vehicle storage, a campground and other services not far away from where we are now. It offers some cabin accommodation and camping.

So, we’re feeling frustrated and powerless at the moment, but very grateful that we have comfortable accommodation. And the weather is beautiful!