The last photos were from after arriving back in Windhoek from the Namibia/Botswana loop and saying adios to the Canadian. After 3 straight weeks of sleeping in a tent, I was looking forward to chilling in an actual room with wifi and running water and everything. Even better, there was a grocery store across the street with a hot foods counter, so I was able to spend my time catching up with the real world while demolishing half chicken & chips each day.
Also was able to send off some mail, as Namibia has pretty reasonable international postage rates. Sent myself an assortment of coins from the countries I'd been to so far:
as well as some of the banknotes. I prefer banknotes as souvenirs because they are super lightweight and take up no space. Very easy to mail back at intervals with little cost. Also a unique souvenir to the given country. Coins are obviously far heavier, but I can't say no to some sweet animal coins!
Those are all taped down to the interior side of a 1L cardboard juice box. You gotta package them up well because mailing currency (inc coins) is usually illegal and they will get confiscated if detected.
After some time communing with the real world, it was time to move on. There is a southern African regional bus called the Intercape which goes as far north as Malawi between most of the major cities. This one was an overnight from Windhoek, Namibia to Livingstone, Zambia:
and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had USB outlets above each seat! How lucky:
So it was easy to pass the time (24 hour bus ride!) with my phone, mostly playing Polytopia. Don't google that, you will waste countless hours on it. It's a game that is a dumbed down version of Civ, and the games only take like 10 minutes to play. Highly addictive. You've been warned.
Was also even more lucky in that I didn't have a seatmate until over halfway into the trip.
After leaving in the late afternoon, we made it into Zambia early the next morning:
but passing border control took hours. They do an infrared temperature scan to see if you are sick, after which you get a small "cleared" slip that you then have to take over to the police to show you aren't going to make anyone sick, then you can get your visa. The lines were effectively non-existent and things were pretty chaotic. Eventually we all got sorted, along with everyone else, and continued on into Zambia, tho.
Like most places in southern Africa, there is a lot of poverty in Zambia. Here's someone's house with people chillin outside:
On the plus side, that one isn't made of garbage bags, which I saw more than a few of in South Africa.