So Close...

The Transkalahari Highway runs from Walvis Bay in Namibia, all the way through Botswana to Johannesburg. Even though it is almost 1700km long, it is straight all the way except for one turn (Quote Jane, my lovely GPS voice: “After 848km, turn left”). 

In Europe, travelling for 1700km would get you from Berlin to St Petersburg or from Paris to Lisbon and you would drive through hundreds of towns and villages. Not so in Africa. Here you can easily drive 1700km without coming across very much, if anything at all.

Bu the lack of entertainment is not the biggest challenge on the Transkalahari Highway; getting from one petrol station to the next is. The golden rule is to fill up at any station you see. But even if you stick to this rule, “survival” is not guaranteed.

Two years ago, Simon and I drove from Pretoria to Windhoek in a rented Kia Picanto and despite filling up at every station, ran out of petrol twice. It turned out that the tank of the Picanto wasn’t actually big enough to get us from one station to the next and we ended up stranded in the tiny “village” of Morwamosa trying to swap currencies, find petrol and figure out whether it was actually petrol or diesel in the old coke bottles…

Fortunately on our latest trip across the Kalahari, we were spared a second visit to Morwamosa and Simon’s Jeep got us through the endless desert without any incidents. But as we pulled into my local shopping centre in Johannesburg to buy some celebratory ice cream, the Jeep suddenly made a funny noise before dying right in front of our eyes. After carrying us across 1700km of desert, it broke down two kilometres away from my house and had to be towed to the garage.

I am still indecisive whether this was good or bad luck…