Search results

As this was to be our last stop in civilization, we tried to to accomplish a few tasks - service the bike, buy new tyres, send a parcel back home and exchange some cash - running around the place like mad persons. Suddenly we realised that no matter how fast or efficient we ourselves were...

From Windhoek to Swakompund one can choose between some three major routes, and we took the one that was marked as being scenic on our map. It took us over two passes and across the windy plateau of the Namib-Naukluft national park before reaching the coast and some big dunes. It would have been...

We spent almost a week in Windhoek, arranging for some visas - Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Republic of Congo. The plan currenly is that we'll try to stretch the available funds as far north as we possibly can - it would definitely be much much easier to put the bike and ourselves on a...

Those hunders of kilometers of gravel took their toll on our ABS, but luckily nothing serious - a rock must have hit the rear brake sensor cable, damaging it, but a little bit of soldering and it was up and running again. Rock from the rear wheel caught the ABS wire. Had it...

From Lüderitz and the ghost town of Kolmanskop we headed towards one of the most popular sights in Namibia - the huge red dunes of Sossusvlei, but did not quite go there. As we got to the park entrance, we found out that starting from this year, motorbikes are no longer allowed to enter. We...

Close to Lüderitz is a popular tourist attraction - a town built in the beginning of the last century and abandoned in the sixties, which is now being reclaimed by the dunes. When it was first constructed, it even had a theatre and a gym, and its hospital housed the first x-ray machine on the...

Namibia is a pretty huge country with a population of only 2 million people, meaning that towns are small and far between. So no wonder we covered hundreds of kilometers of solitary road before we stumbled upon one, called Lüderitz. If you look at the map you might wonder why on Earth would...

Namibia….. Namiiiiiiiiiibia….. The road meanders across the landscape until it disappears somewhere behind the horizon. The wind brushes the sandy, dusty fields of semi-desert. The sky has the appearance of a watercolour painting and the sun is blinding. It feels as if we were aliens on a...

Big thanks to Michnus for organizing replacement suspension bolts for us while we were in Namibia, we're now heading to Angola with a little more ease in our minds. Looks like not much interest in this tread so I guess I'll skip the Namibia part in this RR. There's a lot of Namibian RRs here...

The Karoo is also home to the SAAO or the South African Astronomical Observatory, the biggest astronomical observatory on the whole continent. And to be totally honest, it was one of our main interests for visiting the Karoo in the firts place. Although not a tourist site as such, it is still...

The gravel tracks in the Karoo are a little shrewd though - most of the time one can go as fast as 120 km/h, the dust flying high behind, but there are some treacherous rust going across the road that one often notices only when it is already too late. Sure enough we went through at one of those...

Once we'd crossed the Swartberg Pass, there was a great change in scenery. We were in the Great Karoo. Broad, empty, lonely, full of power. No people, no cars, only a few lonesome sheep farms dotting the far horizon, with huge windpowered water pumps making slow, tired, squeaky turns. It would...

Climbing higher. Mountain top in Karoo desert. Crossing the Swartberg pass. A canyon in Karoo.

One of the great highlights of the Small Karoo was the Swartberg pass across a mountain range with the same name. Truly spectacular, and offering a different perspective every 100 meters! Panorama of Karoo near Swartberg pass (click to enlarge) Panorama of Swartberg pass...

It was, of course, nothing more than a one-day, or even a half-a-day ride, so it was not nearly enough to get our minds off the visas. So we took the decision to head out to Karoo which is basically a huge semidesert - huge enough to get lost for as many days as you could possibly like. We'd...

But back to Cape Town. Considering the geography, we would have expected to find something similar to Rio de Janeiro, with all the sea and mountains. But it wasn't there. Maybe it just lacked the samba and the bossa nova, I don't know. Or was it that our minds were too much occupied with more...

We did not spend too much time in Cape Town, although it proudly stands on many a traveller's final destination on their venture through Africa, something like a longing or a grand finale. For us it wasn't. We were there mainly for business - to apply for an Angolan visa which they say Cape Town...

In Cape Agulhas we caught some intriguing radio signals, one of them at 5998KHz, probably communication between lighthouses or ships going between the Indian and the Atlantic ocean? ...::: LISTEN :::... And also long wave radio signals propagate over the Indian ocean, so we had a...

The same Japanese ship, see the fisherment in the background? Life on the rocks. Almost like miniature volcanic mountains... Under the Cape Agulhas lighthouse - second oldest in South Africa. Closer.

One page back is some info. :)