Posts tonen met het label South Africa. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label South Africa. Alle posts tonen

vrijdag 19 oktober 2012

Going back up

After more than a month in South Africa, and 3 weeks in Stellenbosch with Anita and her brother Roland, the decission was made to continue on my trip. It was a bit of a strange string of events. At first, I was traveling alone and on my way to Mozambique, when around Lesotho, I realised I lost my pleasure in riding and even was getting a bit depressed. When Anita told me she was coming to Stellenbosch in 2 weeks time, I turned the bike around, to meet up with her again and after that to just put the bike on a plane home, I was finished.
 Or so I thought, Geert, a friend back home suggested to help me put my bike on a plane in Nairobi, Kenya, as from there, there's a good connection to Belgium. Slowly this idea worked itself into my mind, it had some great advantages, I would be able to kinda finnish my trip in a nice way, not aborting it while feeling bad and I would also avoid the troubles of how to get back home via Egypt (or Libya). The road would be easy going and enable me to enjoy another 6 beautiful countries, so that's how the traveling bug infected me again.
Road to Botswana
It was with mixed feelings I said goodbye to Anita, I wish I had found a way to stay with her, but things were complicated. South Africa is a country with high unemployment, low wages and politics that make it pretty difficult for a European to come in and work, but back home I will certainly give it another go. First  I'm going to concentrate on getting back home, via Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania I will take a mostly straight route to Nairobi, and if all goes well, I will be back in europe by christmas. Bring on Africa!
With Anita in Stellenbosch

woensdag 12 september 2012

South Africa - don't fence me in

Flowers of Namaqualand

Cape Town

Mosselbay on the garden route

For my Belgian readers: can you read the message?

Desperatly looking for adventure

Serkan and Mulat drove the East coast from Turkey


Jeffreysbay, surfers paradise

On the road to Lesotho

Fences, fences everywhere
I don't want to sound negative about South Africa, but this is how I experienced driving through this wonderful country. The views are amazing but it seems that nowhere you can go into the wild, the sideroads to the left or right are always blocked by gates and fences and it looks like the whole of SA is private property. After spending so many months in West and Central Africa, this is realy hard to get used to, although you can have a wonderfull holiday here, an adventure it is not. And I don't consider myself a tourist anyway, I'm a traveler, and that's a distinct difference.
So I needed to find some rougher place, where I could buy some streetfood or go wildcamping and luckily I quickly found it in the form of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho.

zaterdag 1 september 2012

Cape Town

The statistics:

9 months
15 countries
27000 km
2 rear tires, 1 front (Tkc 80)
2 oil changes
No breakdowns
No flat tires! 
Some minor crashes 
Police controls: 99
Arrested: 1
Bike confiscated: 1
In hospital : 1
On antibiotics : 4 times (2 spiderbites) 
On malarone: 5 months
Food poisening: 0
At dentist : 3 times
Nights in the tent: +100
Ate rice with beans: +100