Day 2: Grootfontein -> Poppa Falls

The first night in our small roof top tent at the Roys camp was good. A bit stressful as everything was new. Except that the night was a bit colder than I expected, I still was able to catch up some good sleep. It is an interesting camp, in the middle of a farm about a km away from the highway to Caprivi. The camping place had enough space to set up the camp, and there was a common kitchen, ablution block etc.

We left the camp around 11 am towards the Caprivi region. The Lady decided to drive the first leg of the trip. It was nice of her as I was a little bit tired from the last days driving.  The road was as straight as it can be for kms. The land scape was more or less the same. After a while we got bored and decided to leave the road try to get into the dirt road D3402 in the north that runs parallel to the Namibian border with Angola along the Okavango river. All thought it looked like less than a km from the highway, we couldn’t find it in the first attempt. Finally we landed up in some dirt road and we decided to take it towards east. It was a good decision. It turned out that the road was indeed D3402 which runs parallel to the Okavango river. The road took us through many villages, which was quite different from the ones we saw in other parts of Namibia. The villages we saw the Caprivi region was the typical image that one has of Africa - villages with round huts. It was nice to see something different.
But the track also took us a lot of time to cover distance as the maximum speed allowed in gravel roads in Namibia is 80 kmh.  In addition we also experienced heavy rains on the way slowing down further afterwards. By the time we reached our camp near the Poppa Falls – Ngepi Camp Lodge – it was already getting dark. We tried to setup the camp as soon as possible but the continuous drizzling made our job difficult.

The camp was located on the banks of the Okavango river in upper reaches of the Okavango panhandle. Quite an isolated place with good view of the Okavango river. I wished if the weather had been a bit more kind to us!