I guess the first thing to say about Angola is: We loved, loved, LOVED Angola.
Angola was pretty much our last major destination in Africa with Blue Lightning and it was also one of the least touristic places we have been to. Obviously we were duly excited. We have been told it is considered an “emerging” tourist destination, but it must be in the early stages as everyone (including a lady writing the first French language guide book) was pretty fascinated by the fact that we were there as tourists. We managed to score very expensive visas in Oshakati with none of the requisite paperwork and letters of invitation from the Angolan Methodist Church of Saint Mark – in Portuguese no less – which proved truly invaluable. Happily, they were satisfied with our shiny visas and we were actually stamped through immigration in about a half hour or so and with only a few attempts by the guy to get Thomas to put money on his cell phone. Not so for Blue Lightning. The guys in charge there had some serious big man syndrome and needed all manner of documentation. But, nevertheless, we got there about three hours later and without any bribes. We are calling it a success!
This leads me to what I am going to call: Operation Free Camp Angola. As the name would lead you to believe, we free camped just about everywhere in Angola. This was largely due to the insane expensiveness of the country, rather than any real desire on my part to be hard-out about our accommodation options (a very basic room costs at least US$85 – by basic I mean it has a bed, a barely working shower and certainly no hot water). Some examples of the joys of Operation Free Camp Angola follow:
- Landmines: Free camping in Angola always led to some fairly serious scoping out of camping area options because Angola is notoriously still affected by many landmines. Happily: so far, okay.
- Wake up calls: In the more populated areas you almost always receive a friendly morning wake-up call involving some local dude standing under the tent at about 5am and yelling out Bem Dia up at you. While the first inclination is to be concerned and jump up to check if in fact you are on someone’s land or they have a problem with you being there, once you do so, the local invariably stares at you with nothing more to say than good morning and a general satisfaction that you have provided the morning’s entertainment.
- Journalism: While camping outside a police station in Virei (a very small town in the Namibe province), we were eating dinner and a guy turned up at our tent. We all stared at each other awkwardly for a bit until he broke out into perfect English. Very strange. He proceeded to tell us that he worked for Angolan Radio and was doing a story in Virei (seriously, we never managed to figure out what exactly), and we were just so interesting as tourists, that he insisted that he needed an interview. This proceeded for the next half an hour on the tailgate of our car. Because I am so trusting, I locked up everything in the front before we got into it, but strangely, the whole thing was totally legitimate and he wandered off very happy hearing about our experiences in Angola and elsewhere in Africa.
- Interesting requests: Angolans are actually pretty good about not asking for stuff – as compared to many other African countries. At one camp spot we stayed at in a town, we rocked up and asked a family if we could camp on their lawn and they agreed. This was only to have the local busy body call the local militia via government provided satellite radio. The militia big man finally agreed to us staying the night because of our work for the church. Once our stay had been cleared, we were asked if we had a second camera we could give them. Ahh, sorry, no. They were not at all offended by this however, and everyone proceeded happily in the assumption that if we did have another digital SLR, we definitely would have handed it over. We compensated by sharing about various treats, and entertained the children with balloons.
- Angolan Portuguese BBQ: Possibly one of our best camps in Angola happened as a result of us driving along and seeing a bunch of Portuguese Angolans on the side of the road. We stopped to check their cars were okay and they waved us down for a chat. Turns out they were only stopping on the highway for a beer en route to their cousin’s farm in the area and, on hearing that we were sleeping on the car, they invited us to camp at the farm. We followed them and ended up in this amazing place where they proceeded to invite us to party with them and made us an Angolan oyster barbecue and fish dinner before making us espresso and sending us somewhat dustily on our way the next morning.
Anyway, back to where we actually went. We headed up to Lubango first and really enjoyed the city. Just outside the town is one of Angola’s major natural attractions, the Tunda-Vala. This is basically a volcanic fissure that drops from a plateau about 1000 meters, and it is simply breathtaking. It also has a great history whereby bad guys used to be taken to the top and told to walk on off. Lubango also has a Cristo Rei overlooking the city, similar, but on a smaller scale to the Corcovado in Rio, a bunch of cool and crumbling Portuguese architecture and some excellent gelato.
From Lubango we took the Serra da Leba route to Namibe. The Serra da Leba is an exceptional piece of engineering consisting of a series of switchbacks down a gorge of around 1000 meters to the Namibe desert, which leads onwards to the coast. The road was amazing, but unfortunately the next day we managed to hit the mother of all potholes (read: this thing was a crater in the road) and do some serious damage to the steering mechanism in the car (read: snapping it in two such that only one of the front wheels deigned to turn when we turned the steering wheel). Not good. This resulted in fairly typical travel experience of us hitching into Namibe with a Chinese trucker (who was very excited that we could say thanks in Chinese), finding a Portuguese speaking mechanic, various phone calls to a contact that spoke Portuguese and English, driving back out to the car, removing the part that had to be fixed, having the mechanic get something similar made African styles, heading back out to the car and installing it and then having a long argument about how much we were going to pay the guy for his work (we eventually gave him under half the amount he asked for and told them that he was not getting any more – but it truly was still hideously too much (the actual Toyota part cost may be one twentieth of the price back in South Africa!). At any rate, we were not in much of a position to bargain.
Namibe was fantastic though and not a bad place to be stuck. Amazing colorful and crumbling Portuguese buildings, pretty tree-lined streets set back from a lovely beach lined with Portuguese bars. Not bad at all. Also, they had some pretty damned good coffee (this turned out to be the case all over Angola, and definitely sits squarely in the plus column).
Once our car was fixed and no longer languishing in the desert 100km away, we headed south out of town to Flamingo Lodge. This is a major fishing lodge in Angola set in totally spectacular isolation (23km of dunes to get out to it) and run by the sister of the girl we bought the car off of and her husband. Lucky for us, they were excited that we stopped by and let us stay in a chalet for free. We wandered the area and went driving on the dunes with the couple that ran the place (I found this petrifying, everyone else seemed blissfully unconcerned) – possibly one of my favourite places of the trip. We also got chased by a seal and had an unfortunate encounter with acid flies (Thomas likes to call these “little black and red f*#kers” – and he is not wrong). For some climatic reason these things were everywhere when we were there. They are harmless unless you squish them and get their insides against your skin. If you do, however, your skin breaks out in a disgusting rash of little white blisters (think lots of little gross zits) over the area that the insides of the bug got smeared and last for about two weeks. Even though we made great attempts not to do this, I still got completely covered by the damn things. Given that this was possibly my worst ailment in Africa, I guess it is not too bad. It actually looked so gross though that one cop that stopped us got completely distracted from trying to get a bribe and tried to communicate in awful English something along the lines of – “What is wrong with your neck!?!?”. I considered posting pictures (we have these because Thomas thought it was hilarious), but really, I don’t think anyone needs to see this.
The rock art at Virei was worthwhile when coupled with the cool tribal people that hung out in the area. The guys wonder around in a sarong with a massive machete and the women wear loin cloths and have improvised a bra situation by leaving their boobs out and tying a piece of rope around them. On a side note, I think my favourite boobies out story (yes, at this point I have seen enough boobies out to have a favourite) from Africa was with the Himba in Namibia where I was clucking over a baby and asking an older woman if it was hers. She nodded enthusiastically, grabbed her breast and proved it by giving it a several squirts in the direction of the baby. I still laugh every time I think about this. Thomas, who did not happen to be there at that moment, remains somewhat traumatized by my recounting of this tale.
Back in Namibe we managed to get stopped by the police for a “traffic infringement” and had the joy of arguing with them about it. What we learnt was that getting out Thomas’s Methodist Missionary letter works just as well for corrupt cops as for border officials and pretty much whenever we handed it over, we were waived on our way. The cops were a massive pain, but not so quick witted. Once we got up to the Malanje region and headed out in the direction of the Lundas, there was a cop stop at least every 50km or so. On one drive of 250km in a day, we got stopped nine times. Each time we whipped out the missionary letter and were waived through. The police thing really culminated in one particularly intelligent set trying to convince us that we had done something wrong because Thomas was wearing sunglasses while driving and did not appear to be wearing glasses in either his driver’s license or passport photos. After about 15 minutes of Thomas making squinty eyes and miming that the guy with the glasses could not see without them, however, Thomas was perfectly capable of sight sans glasses, they finally got bored and gave up trying to get a gasoso from us.
From Namibe we camped in the desert and continued on the coastal road to Benguela passing by Lucira en route. Lucira was an amazingly picturesque, cute fishing town with a bunch of old colonial buildings.
Benguela was a nice town, but not our favourite. That said, it was very pretty on the beach and we found a Portuguese restaurant that did the best suckling pig ever! Benguela was the last place we stayed in formal accommodation for quite a while and we managed to double our Ethiopian record by getting to ten days without a shower. Not necessarily something to be proud of, but a record all the same.
Up country there are a few tourist attractions by way of a some nice waterfalls and rocks, but really most of the activity is driving through the area. A couple of these areas were quite nice and jungly, and the villagers were generally nice, but altogether not a highlight. Probably the best thing was a set of fish restaurants on the Kwanza river in the town of Dondo, which I loved (the kid below just seemed to love the flour bowl).
The roads deteriorated to more potholes than road, the surroundings are fairly heavily mined and there is long grass on either side of the road preventing particularly interesting views. Also, as we got further northeast, there appeared to be a phenomenon with the cars on the road whereby most of them looked like they were on the piss. By this, I mean that as a car was driving towards us, it appeared it was heading across the road into our lane by way of the cab being angled in our direction. On looking closer they were not in fact coming towards us, but rather simply drove on an enormous slant. I hated all these roads because between the potholes, the bad driving and the crazy oncoming truck drivers, I was pretty convinced we were going to be taken out at some stage. It did not help that driving back along one road the next day we saw a truck that had completed tipped over since we had last driven through.
The main intention of going up north was to find some Tchokwe people. These are a tribe that comes from DRC and Angola and are very famous for the making and use of ritualistic masks. As there is very little tourist information in Angola, our plan consisted of driving in the general direction of the Lundas (the regions they are said to live in) and seeing what we could find. Great plan. It deteriorated further as we got into the Lundas and could find nothing remotely Tchokwe related. We ended up just finally going to a town and just saying “Tchokwe, Tchokwe, Tchokwe” to people. Hmm. We are calling this part of the expedition a failure.
Getting back across the border into Namibia was a much shorter and more pleasant experience than going the other way and we headed onwards to Rundu for some shopping and to attempt to place an advertisement to sell Blue Lightning (sob). Before leaving Angola though, we did have one of our most epic free camps ever in an amazing Baobab grove.
April 2014