Day 6

After breaking up camp we went canoeing on the Oranje River, with South Africa on our left and Namibia on our right. Willem and I shared a canoe and discovered that in addition to hanging up lamps, (dis)assembling furniture and putting up tents, this too is an activity we can do together without bickering (at least for 2.5 hours downstream in easy flowing water). Willem did a good job steering in the back and I peddled sometimes as well.
After this, we made our way back to the border post to cross it. We had to stamp ourselves out of South Africa, then our guide took our passports to Interpol to see if we had behaved and then we could stamp ourselves into Namibia. As in all border posts that I’ve seen in Africa so far, here too they had condoms up for grabs. Interesting detail is that the package explicitly advertised a diameter of 49 mm and it made me wonder if this should tell me something about the South Africans leaving South Africa, or the Namibians re-entering Namibia.
All in all the border crossing went rather smoothly and within an hour we continued our way. It seemed like the landscape was even emptier still and the roads had changed to dirt roads, which sounds worse than it was, since I thought the quality was quite good. I guess one advantage of the dirt roads is that it only takes one man and a tractor to maintain it, as we would witness a few times. These dirt roads would also lead to the most important linguistic exchange between the Belgians and the Dutch in our group; ‘stoeber’. Stoeber is a dust cloud, but it is only applicable to dust clouds brought on by (vehicular) movement on dirt roads. As in “bite my stoeber”, which would actually happen a lot, as our truck could handle the dirt roads better than most of the 4x4s. Alternatively our African guide would refer to stoeber as ‘adventure dust’. Irrespective of what you would prefer to call it, we and our stuff would be covered in it throughout the trip.
Another important contribution to the inter-linguistic exchange, is that we informed one of the 5 Belgian students in our group, that she had been fooled when somebody told her that Dutch people refer to ‘lepeltje-lepeltje’ as ‘billetje-balletje’. Although I have to admit of being in favor of calling it ‘billetje-balletje’. And to make sure that this expression can be used in a wider variety of situations, we invented ‘billetje-voorbibs’, which has the disadvantage of lacking some alliteration, therefore other alternatives we came up with are ‘billetje-bosje’ or ‘billetje-brazilian’.
After putting up our tents in much warmer temperatures than we had experienced up to this point, we went to Fish River Canyon, after the Grand Canyon the largest canyon in the world. We had a 40 minute walk there that ended at a picnic site where we popped a beer and watched the sun set over the canyon and in the truck on the way back to the camp I could only agree with one of our young Belgian group members, when she said “I really do feel happier now” and this feeling was enhanced when later that evening we could watch the milky way from our camping chairs.