The Curmudgeonly Traveller

  1 st November 2025 (Day 21) The Fellowship is at an end, but not in a bad way, more like the bit where Aragorn tells the hobbits that they should not bow to anybody. We lose Alan, Jinni and Sybille to an airport transfer to Victoria Falls Airport, Zimbabwe. The rest of us persevere to the border where kilometres of trucks queue in the baking sun. We skip the line. At the health check a guy hands us a small piece of paper that he’s previously date stamped. “What’s that about?” I ask Tawanda. He shrugs. The piece of paper goes into box, a raffle maybe, on the Zambian side of the border building. The smiling lady official asks me where I’m going, when I’m leaving and why I’m not spending three months in Zambia as I’m allowed to. “I have a wedding to go to on Wednesday,” I reply. “That I only found out about yesterday.” Then we transfer to a shuttle because this is where we leave Towanda and Jonas for some reason. It’s an emotional farewell. I will miss them. In Ghanzi Jonas...

  26 th October 2025 (Day 15) I ask Claire why she’s getting up at 04:55 but it appears that the clocks have gone forward and we’ve lost an hour’s sleep. It’s cold because Windhoek is at an elevation of 1,650 metres. In his first briefing in Livingstone Tawanda told us that not all of us would make it to the end. I wondered whether this worrying news was backed up by statistics based on the age of the group but it turns out that Lesley only booked a 14-night trip and is flying home today. So, the Fellowship loses its first member, our Boromir. White people make up 2% of Namibia’s population yet they own most of the land, property and businesses and they control tourism. In every restaurant the staff are black and the cashier is white. Windhoek’s white people live in large detached houses with exotic gardens and high walls topped with razor wire, while outside the homeless lie under trees. The Government posters that proclaim Namibia’s hastening to equality are feeble. It feel...

  21 st October 2025 (Day 10) Wake up at 6:35, five minutes late for breakfast. It’s so cold! Must be ten degrees. That’s because we’re in the desert. Should I put on long trousers? Nah. It’ll warm up. The early morning light is beautiful. In the desert scrub there are numerous roadside stalls selling art and gemstones, the vendors desperately trying to wave you down, but I doubt anyone will stop today. There are small settlements of tiny mud-walled and grass-thatched huts, and small tumuli dot the landscape which I presume to be graves. The green slowly disappears and we’re in proper desert. That could be because we’ve crossed from the Kalahari to the Namib. The sea! The sea! We stop for bushy-bushy and it’s still cold - about 13c. Somebody whispers that the Skeleton Coast, so named because of all the shipwrecks, rarely gets above 20c because of the winds from Antarctica. Which, of course, I knew already. About ten thousand cape seals bark, squawk and flap around, movin...