Our meeting the night before consisted of being encouraged to drink heavily to get to know our tour mates, and the day of boarding the bus (which our tour "leader" insists upon calling a "truck") two of our tour mates showed up with 3 - 24's of beer, several bottles of wine and a few 26'ers of spirits, which they also went through within the first 5 days on the road.
That being said, it has not been all bathroom toilets and hangovers. These drinkers and the rest of the crew, while enjoying the drinks of life are very inclusive and genuinely fun people to be around. They take to heart the saying "go hard or go home", as the nights are filled with fun and the days just don't stop there.
Most of the first week was spent driving through some amazing scenery. The north of South Africa quickly turned into barren rolling hills with a few quiver trees and scrub brush attempting to survive in the scorching surroundings. We spent time on the Orange River where some people went canoeing and others relaxed and drank. Crossing into Namibia it got even more barren - barren, but BEAUTIFUL. Reminds us a lot of Bolivia, except being on a tour makes it somewhat sugar coated. The land is sparsley populated and concentrated in a few centres, so entire days are spent flying over dusty gravel roads passing by virtual desert on all sides.
From red sandy dunes to flat parched yellow grass, the land is lonely, forlorn and ruggedly beautiful. It is amazing still to pass by animals that live in this landscape such as ostrich and the beautiful Gemsbok. We went on a desert walk with a local guide, who picked out tiny footprints and brought the seemingly barren sandy desert alive with mice, beatles, jackles and gemsbok. We took in a Vlei, or a dried up water hole with dead trees, and apparently the filming spot for part of The Cell with Jennifer Lopez. Continuing on our "famous people-were-here-once" tour, we are now in Swakopmund, Namibia, where Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt holed up to have their baby not too long ago. And---get this!--- apparently our cook, Franko, was one of the cooks for Survivor and also on Tomb Raider.
Anyway, the tour, so there are 15 of us on this kind of giant truck with seats and a cooler for beer. Our tour guide is a Canadian doing his first solo tour with us, and although there is a fair amount of drinking and the general age level is a young one, this isn't some frosh tour week. People are friendly and we consist of Canadians, Aussies, Germans, Americans, a Belgian and a Norweigan. Some of the people are even going on after the three weeks and are traveling with this company for up to 56 days!
Anyway, the tour, so there are 15 of us on this kind of giant truck with seats and a cooler for beer. Our tour guide is a Canadian doing his first solo tour with us, and although there is a fair amount of drinking and the general age level is a young one, this isn't some frosh tour week. People are friendly and we consist of Canadians, Aussies, Germans, Americans, a Belgian and a Norweigan. Some of the people are even going on after the three weeks and are traveling with this company for up to 56 days!
Life is definitely more expensive on the tour, but traveling through Namibia there is virtually no public transport and hours of barren nothingness, so a tour or renting your own car is really the only way to go. In the coming weeks we work further north, away from the Kalahari Desert and into big game country. Our time in Swakopmund has been spent getting Chris to see a doctor, we thought he might have had his cold sores on his eyeballs again, but it turned out to be a bad case of pink eye. Other than that we have watched our tour mates throw themselves out of planes, board down sand dunes, rip themselves to shreds with quads, kayak the ocean and visit townships, all of course for a lot of money, which we don't have, hence us just watching and enjoying the scenery.
For now the tour travelling may not be the same exciting challenge as getting to a bus or finding a new town, but we are learning many other things about other people, about relationships and feelings, about drama, about chillaxing, about how great a cold beer can be after a 40c desert day, and of course about more drinking games than we thought existed.
