After our time at Mbezi camp, it was time to move on. We wanted to drive south, to a popular camp called 'Roy's rest camp'. The camp was 600 kilometers from Mbezi camp, so we were prepared to spend a very long day on the road, especially since we were hoping to stop in a town called Rundu, to have our SIM cards registered. Jeroen was able to use a hotspot from our neighbor in Mbezi camp, but after it said 'Registration successful', there was still no service at all.
The condition of the road shocked us. The Caprivi strip is very long, so we were very hesitant about the time at which we might be able to arrive at Rundu. This worry was not necessary at all. The road was all tarmac and the condition was perfect. Probably for the first time since leaving Kenya, we were able to drive 100 km/h for a longer period of time. We arrived in Rundu well on schedule (lovely to have an extra hour, since we 'knew' the time would be an hour earlier than in Zambia).
When we arrived in Rundu, we saw a huge line outside of the MTC shop and a lot of people waiting in line inside the shop. It must have easily been 100 people waiting. We entered the back of the line too. After about half an hour, we had not moved forward an inch. In fact, some people walked up to the people in front of us, started talking to them, looked at us and then cut in line. They obviously did not want to wait behind us and we highly doubt whether they knew the people in front of us at all. We decided it was not worth our time and we left. We had lunch at 'Hungry Lion', which turned out to be a cheap knock-off of KFC and went on to 'Roy's rest camp'. On our way, we found a shop where we could refill our water bottles and with our groceries and Dettol wipes, we were all set for some clean camping.
Roy's was still 2 hours driving from Rundu, but it was an easy drive. It was kilometers on end of straight tarmac. Such a weird sensation after all the potholes, bush roads, dirt roads and the twists and turns in Rwanda and Uganda. It seemed like heaven at first, but these endless straight roads also quickly became boring. Of course, we couldn't really complain about that. It got us to Roy's much quicker than we expected and we had some extra time to clean the tent once again.
When we arrived at Roy's, we learned about a 'Braai packet', which was a combination of different meats. We bought one for our dinner, just to try, and some firewood to get the fire started. We set up camp, Jeroen cleaned the tent again with the freshly bought Dettol wipes and Emma let her inner pyromaniac out to start the fire. We had a wonderful evening braaing the meat and the vegetables we had actually bought to put in a pasta.
The next day, we decided to do some extra cleaning of the tent and some more laundry. We now finally found a place with guaranteed sun, so we were finally able to do our laundry and let it dry properly. Jeroen also wanted to make sure to get the last part of the mold out of the tent, so he did another round of Dettoling. After our hard work at 30+ degrees Celsius, we deserved a nice plunge in the swimming pool, followed by another braai night. Since we enjoyed our stay at Roy's camp so much, we decided to add an extra 'just chilling' day.
On this day, we just chilled with the cute wildlife that ran around the campsite (guinea fowls, bush hares, dikdiks, squirrels and red-billed spurfowls, we even saw a bush baby jump from tree to tree). It really felt like we had arrived in heaven. The only downside: our SIM-cards were still not activated and the guys from Roy's told us to not even bother. According to them, there are dozens of people in line long before the stores even open. There is a new rule with a deadline for everyone to register their SIM-cards and people are apparently waiting in line from 4am in the morning, just to make sure they even get a turn on that day. But, like our motto says: One way to find out.
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