The plan today was to return the hire cars to Windhoek Airport, and we would be met by somebody from Britz, who would take us to the depot to pick up the Defenders.
The vehicles were delivered by 7:30, however by 8:30 there was nobody from Britz, and somehow a sign welcoming Messer’s Smith and Liston had appeared at the dreaded “Budget” Counter, but nobody knew how it had been put there.
After several phone calls, three different excuses and one hour later a driver appeared to collect us in a vehicle, that had we brought our baggage, would have been too small. Fortunately there was only Neil, Keith and myself.
We arrived at the Britz depot and complained about all the hassle as we had now lost some time and had to be at Waterberg before they closed the gates at sunset.
We had a demo of the Defenders including erection and storing of roof tents, use of Hi-Lift jack, contents of the drawer full of kitchen and recovery gear, as well as what switches and levers to use to operate the vehicle (except for one vital one, but more about that later), and then completed the paperwork before driving off back to the lodge to load up and hit the road.
Kim was happy to see us return, as we had not been able to communicate about the delay, and we set about loading each vehicle putting essential items into the fridges.
By 11:00 we were on our way out towards the airport once again and onwards before hanging a left and heading due north.
As an addition to make the trip a bit more interesting we had been considering attempting some confluence points and had noticed that several unvisited points were near a road. Our maps however gave no indication as to how easy or hard they might be to visit, and sealed road had given way to corrugated dirt track.
The first confluence point of S E was about 12 Km into the bush and in a private game reserve, we drove on.
Earlier between the airport and Windhoek we had spotted a few animals including baboons, warthog and a couple of buck, but now sightings were increasing and on two occasions kudu had leapt out from one side of the track across it and leapt over a high fence on the other side. Warthog were now being recorded by the dozen and it looked like Namibia as a country was a whole game reserve.
The driving was fun but exceeding 80 kph was not a great idea on these roads with two roof tents raising the centre of gravity, taking corners at that speed was a bit dodgy on occasions.
Daylight was however fast disappearing and we had to make the camp at Waterberg before the gates were closed (and locked), which fortunately we did literally minutes before the sun went down.
After booking in the camp came an extreme test of patience.
We needed to buy some meat and firewood, plus a couple of other items from the shop, about 8 in total, however the till / computer was not functioning, and the lady cashier had to write down a description of every item including the numerical part of the barcode number into an invoice book.
15 minutes later we were out of the shop, but the sun had set completely and we then rushed to find a good camp spot and erect our roof tents for the first time.
A sundowner preceded Neil’s firelighting skills and meat thawing techniques during which we carried on with several liquid intakes before sitting down to our first braii of the trip and then climbing up into our respective roof tents to drift off and dream.
