Glamorous Only in Retrospect: November 9

9 November

53 Miles

Bush camp – Gobabis – Johan's farm

Erik:

Packed out and left by about 7. Both of us feel a lot better today than yesterday. We reached Gobabis at about 830 am. Fairly big town, not too unfriendly. Some kid stole an empty water bottle. Whatever. Shopped for some food, refilled on water and headed out. Stopped at about noon again for our siesta.

I feel that our most demanding part is just about to come up. The route up Botswana is going to be hot, and getting water may be a challenge at times. And even in the Caprivi area there isn't much civilization. But I'm looking forward to it. Both cyclists enjoyed the northern parts (well north of us, so central really) quite a lot, and were a bit disappointed by the southern area. Good news for us! It is only going to get better.

So we rode on at about 3. We were shooting for about 10 more miles til we hit a side road to bush camp. Steph was a bit beat up, and I felt bad because there really is no good place to bush camp here. On my map there was a farm, but it was still 3 more miles away from where we were (already 3.5 miles into the gravel road) and where we were there was an O.K. place to camp. So I unloaded my bike and rode to the farm. Here I met another Johan. Different spelling, Dutch decent this time. I asked if we could stay the night in our tent on his land. He said yes. In fact, he told us we were invited to dinner and we could stay in the spare room. So we hung out with him and Paul (his partner). They raise cattle and breed Arabian horses. We had dinner with them and some other friends of theirs came over. We got invited to stay the next day at the farm to explore and meet the horses and cows. AND we got invited to have Poike' with another family tomorrow night. Another good day.

Also, as it turns out, all of them saw us over the last 3 days cycling. So we are known by the locals... as the idiots on the bikes :)