Namibia (Day 1) - Francistown - Ghanzi

Leaving Francistown this morning at 6:30am (April 10), we arrive in Ghanzi, Botswana, (2:00pm) 7 ½ hours and 780km later.  We took turns every 200 km (more or less).  The roads are really good; the best part of the drive was between Maun and Ghanzi (280km).  You have to dodge the donkeys and the cows, and watch out for the monitor lizard crossing the road.  As children we would have loved to have grown up in Botswana with all the donkeys playing our favourite game driving “buddy”, to see who would spot the most donkeys, I think literally we passed more than 100 donkeys along the way, and that is a rough estimate.  The cows were a lot smarter though, when crossing the road some even stopped to let us pass.  On these roads you can travel 120km/hr or more, when not in a village, otherwise you have to go between 80 and 60km.  Otherwise, slow down for those asses!

OK, so we forgot to bring our jerry can with diesel.  So we filled up yesterday, but made a trip out to the Painter Farm for a lovely lunch the day before our adventure is to start, never “topping up” with diesel in Francistown.  Off we go, Lennox driving, we never filled up in Nata (200km out of Francistown), with the lovely Caltex gas station (as we usually do when driving in this direction), another small error, we decided to fill up at Gweta (100km out of Nata), big mistake, the little rundown  gas station neither has diesel or gas.  The man says, you have to go back to Nata, no diesel or petrol in Gweta (and we are heading in the other direction).  We now have less than ½ tank of diesel, with 220km to drive to Maun.  Kate takes the wheel, drives, the car made it to the gas station in Maun on fumes (whooo), you see how dangerously our life has gotten!!! 

So here we are at Ghanzi for the night, staying at the Ghanzi Khalahari Arms Hotel, not bad for a stopover, maybe two nights, basic, clean, you can get ice, AC, TV.  The people around are friendly and nice, they all look just like the San people, little, brown skinned.  Kate is dying to take a picture with one of them.  There are a couple of Herero people walking around too, Kate wants to snap them too.

We will see how the night goes in Ghanzi, we want to get an early start for the border, Manumo on the Botswana side and Buitepos on the Namibia side.  Tomorrow we have 500km to drive to Windhoek (Namibia’s capital) where we plan to overnight.

Blessings from the Francis in Ghanzi