How Many Days Have We Spent in Angola?

Angola occurred in brief setting-determined episodes and distinctly memorable stretches of grievous road. Our relentless itinerary quickly made it difficult to remember which day was which and made it seem as if we had been in the country for ages. Anxiety about defaulting on our stingy fifteen day transit visa pervaded the slow going, car damaging days and propelled us to drive far later into the night than we ever enjoy. We woke with the sun, ate dinner's remains in the first hours of morning and drove in six or eight hour shifts, stopping, sometimes, to cook a quick lunch of canned meat, canned vegetables or some other unpleasant thing-we passed one affordable restaurant or food stall in the thousand and whatever grueling kilometers that separate the extreme northern border of Angola from the onset of suburbia, where Namibian self-containment begins.

Falling asleep was never a problem; the full moon was a blessing until it disappeared somewhere around Huambo, right about the time the roads decayed into the most appalling, chassis pummeling slippery stretches of earth that I've ever seen. The usual side-escape routes were fewer and harder to find on account of the abundant mine fields surrounding the gauntlet.

We were all torn between sporadic outbursts of bitter resentment towards those Angolans who possessed everything nice and insisted on charging the moon for it (hoteliers, restauranteers, shopkeepers, tire repairmen and profiteers) and the welcoming, gracious and colorblind people who accepted our sudden arrival on a nightly basis, or gave us roadside assistance and direction along the way. The time pressure and difficulty in communicating meaningfully with the Portuguese language kept our contact with Angola fairly skin deep; but the necessity of traversing the entire thing at least enabled us to witness which areas are well looked after and which areas deserve their reputation for natural beauty.

I recall, in perhaps slightly jumbled sequence: the village of exceptional palm wine, flatulent, space-invading children, gregarious elders, a chief's daughter named Fifi and an exhausting uphill kilometer walk from the pump; the three hut village of the nice blue tarp where they are unexcited to be given half a bottle of gin; the village of the random roadside Pygmies, exploded mustard jar and explanation of the Tsetse fly trap; the village by the river rapids after the creepy military outpost into which we should not have accidentally driven and also after the sealed mining community into which we were not welcomed; a night at a bar in a minefield where we waited for a costly ferry boat, watched Chinese movies and were allowed to camp indoors; a village in the high corn fields (lost by Dondo, after chickening out of bush camping, after checking for mines in the dark) where the Stingray was bathed in vegetable curry; a tiny village of woven straw mats, whispering children and the industrious man who chopped all the stumps down that might have caused us to stumble or puncture a tire-the same man dug an ample dike around my tent to protect it from the reliable nighttime rains; then, also, the village of the abandoned chief's compound where we were left in amazing solitude; a night under Mike's pick up truck on a wet blanket in the mud, shivering next to Sean in the high altitude chilling rains; and a final night in Mike's village in which resides only Mike and a handful of incurious drunken minions.

These places were separated by sections of road that live in my memory as distinct and hostile creatures. Sometimes muddy, surrounded by equatorial rain forest and full of painful and persistent tsetse flies, sometimes 33% tarred and 67% stricken by deep jagged potholes, slowing our progress so that tsetse flies could enjoy greater access to the vehicle-they are fast and durable; we smashed several of them two or three times only to catch them gnawing at the soles of our feet minutes later. Respite came with a smooth gravelly section along the coast heading to Luanda, though it filled our machine with dust and fooled us into believing that we had covered a healthy distance and put the real struggles behind us. Fully developed highways on either side of the capital further increased our hopes and set us up for the brutal sand paper for cars over which the Stingray could cripple step at 3km an hour.

When we hit the most degraded stretch in the center of the country, near the annihilated provincial capital of Huambo-where I saw war damage surpassing most things in Beirut, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau-we began to understand why the immigration officials near Luanda had told us that we would not be able to cross their country with the days remaining on our visas. On a daily basis we cramped up from the stress of jerking the steering wheel back and forth to dodge the fatal road pits and then my inflatable sleeping mat decided to spring an unlocatable slow leak that leaves me on solid ground every two hours or so. Each of the car's tires began to voice its own unique rebuke, we stripped the two front ones down to their dangling wires and discovered that we couldn't find spares anywhere. Only the promise of flawless Namibian roads and available parts made us comfortable driving the last two or three hundred kilometers badly under-prepared for serious tire damage.

As it turned out, we were able to cross the country in about ten days, thanks, predominantly, to several fourteen or fifteen hour drives and the helpful assistance of a truck driver who showed us a short cut near Ondjiva. We were already considering driving straight through the night and camping at the border when we were delayed for a day and a half by a friendly and hospitable black South African named Mike who wanted us to see and enjoy his adopted Angolan region.

No comments from anyone in a while?
* posted by Nathaniel at 7:18 AM