Making a run for it

Read / lees in : Nederlands

In the end I stayed way to long in the apartment in Luanda waiting for the Argentinians. Not so strange of course, since I was finally wallowing in luxury for the first time in months. There was, for example, a big flatscreen installed so I could finally hook up my playstation again and help out Nathan Drake with his adventures. But at some point I really needed to pack my stuff and hit the road again. Because Lucía was going to fly to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, via New York where she’d pay a quick visit to a friend. And I had promised to pick her up from the airport so she wouldn’t have to stuff all the gadgets I ordered on Amazon into a taxi. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. But that meant I’d have to travel over two and a half thousand kilometers and pass two borders in about two weeks time. Impossible for a normal mortal of course, but making a run for it is not a problem at all for an Ed.

Closing time

Late in the afternoon on the third day after leaving I even had already reached the border crossing Santa Clara/Oshikango with Namibia. Because I was in a hurry I decided, although it was already getting dark, to cross the border right away. On the Angolese side however there were some problems with the computer system. According to the grumpy immigration officer it was my fault for having fiddled with the camera. In the end he fortunately managed to stamp me out anyway. Just a few moments later I rolled through the open gates into Namibia , only to find out that all counters had already closed. I started to investigate and found the last, rather corpulent, officer present in one of the dark attached offices. He stated that the border was closed and he was unable to help me because he had to be home in time for dinner. The Angolese shouldn’t have let me through, or something like that.

In my arms

Of course I couldn’t just drive on, because I would then be illegally in the country. And the Marrakesh pact hadn’t been signed at that time, so before you know it you’ll be given shelter and food. Therefore I threatened to pitch my tent right in front of his office so they could process me first thing in the morning. While I was pulling my tent out of the car he called me to him from the doorstep. The computer was started and less than half an hour later I was sipping a beer and chewing on a schnitzel the size of a doormat in a nice little hotel down the road. Steaks from the braai there were as cheap as they were enormous too, so it goes without saying that I stayed and hung around for three more days. Now I really had to make run for it, because Lucía was already packing her luggage. But the remaining sixteen hundred kilometers were, except for a faltering cilinder, uneventful. As such I had a totally unexpected two day margin which I used to have the engine of the Edmobile taken apart. Mr. Botcher worked for about ten hours on the car, but the diagnosis and therefore the repairs, were wrong. With the still faltering cilinder I then sped to the airport to collect my parcels wrap my arms around Lucía after seven long months. And last but not least we made a run for the hotel, because we had a lot of catching up to do.