Coming back to Cape Town felt like coming home. After spending several weeks in this lovely city, we truly fell in love with it, but this wasn’t the only reason we returned to Cape Town. We came back for several reasons. Our initially planned trip - driving to South Africa in our Defender - was now ending, and of course, money was coming to an end as well ;) Therefore, we had to face the truth and think about going home. A few weeks back, we began to discuss different options. One, of course, was to ship the Defender back and fly home; another was to keep the car in South Africa and continue the trip later. A third one came up, which we initially never thought about. We met Toby and Martina, a Swiss couple who traveled through the Middle East and Africa in their Defender. Our traveling schedule was entirely aligned towards the end, so we thought of driving back home together along the west coast of Africa. This route is less traveled than the east coast and has its challenges. It includes transiting through many countries and therefore includes many border crossings with different entry requirements. Furthermore, these countries face different political situations; some countries are very unstable, which sadly leads to a lot of corruption. But after overlanding for more than a year and a half thorugh Africa, we also became very curious to explore the western part of it. However, it was clear to us that we would not want to drive up on our own. Being more than one car has many advantages, number one of course being safer, but also sharing the workload, for example for researching (many different rules apply to enter all these countries and they change all the time) and having a second car in case you get stuck on bad roads or if you have any other kind of problem. Traveling with someone also means spending a lot of time with them; you get little privacy when you live in a car, and it even gets less when you travel together with someone else. Therefore, it is crucial to have someone who is on the same page and someone we get along with. Even though we had never met Toby and Martina in person, it soon felt like we had known each other for a while already, after we started getting in touch to discuss the option of driving back home together. We were sure it would be a match. But as it goes, as soon as you have a plan, life will come in between to change it. Just after we agreed to go on this journey back home together and started making plans, the two called us in January to tell us that they were pregnant and expecting the baby end of August. They therefore had to make some new plans and after long long talks, they decided that Toby would drive their Defender back to Switzerland on his own together with us, and Martina would fly back to prepare everything for the baby at home. However, before Martina would leave, the four of us planned to go to Afrikaburn (a pretty famous festival in the desert of South Africa) together, to have a great ending to Martina’s trip and a great beginning to our journey back. So, meeting Toby and Martina and going to the Afrikaburn was the main reason we returned to Cape Town. Also, we wanted to go to a suitable Landy workshop in town once more and have our Defender thoroughly checked before starting this journey. Along the west coast of Africa, it is more challenging to find spare parts and Land Rover mechanics. This time, Tom wanted to be there and help with all the work on our car, so he would know better what to do if anything happened. Stefan, who runs a small Landy workshop, had time and booked us in for a few days to check on our Defender. Of course, we now also needed to replace the second-hand injector we installed in Zimbabwe to get us to Cape Town.
Since our home on wheels was now in a workshop for a few days, we needed another place to sleep. Once more, we were lucky. Shaun, Tom’s friend from Switzerland, was joining us for the Afrikaburn with his girlfriend Judith. He owns an apartment block in Cape Town and invited us to stay there for the week before the festival. Besides working on the Landy and preparing stuff for our trip back and for the Festival, we also met up with the lovely people we had met in Cape Town in the past, like my friends from the Yoga Teacher Training and Tom’s friends from his previous trip. Also, we had a little project and upgrade to our Defender going on. We found a very cool second-hand e-bike, which we could use for the Afrikaburn, but also we thought it would be very nice to have a bike to get around once we have set up our camp. Because of the roof tent, it’s always a bit tricky to go to places when you installed everything at a campsite. With the e-bike, we gain a lot of mobility. But we also needed to mount a ramp to the Defender so we would be able to bring the e-bike along on our journey. We found some very cool people in Cape Town who helped us getting a ramp and mounting it to our Defender.
After a week, the Defender and we were ready to go into the desert to Afrikaburn. This festival is organized by a worldwide community. Their biggest festival ‘Burning Man’ takes place in the U.S., and Afrikaburn is the second biggest event after this. The concept is always the same: coming together to create art, costume, performance, theme camps, music, mutant vehicles, and much, much more. All of this is based on a volunteer and gifting culture. This means you cannot buy anything at the festival. You have to bring along all the food and water and whatever else you need for the time at the festival. Tom has already been to Burning Man three times; for me, it was the first time going to a “Burn,” but it was the first Afrikaburn for both of us. We decided to join a camp because having people and a common area to chill is nice. Johnny from Wilderness also came to Afrikaburn and invited us to join him and his camp. It was a super cool bunch of people, very international; we had a lot of South Africans, a couple from Norway, two girls from Germany, and of course, Shaun, Judith and Tom, and I from Switzerland. Our camp organized a brunch everyday. Therefore, we built different groups. Our “Swiss Group” made “Rösti, Speck und Spiegelei mit Zopf und Birchermüesli” (hashbrowns, bacon, and fried eggs with a special bread and Muesli - a very Swiss breakfast) on the first day and everyone loved it. In return, we got treated to Shakshuka, Norwegian waffles, and Tacos. The festival was fantastic and hard to explain in words. Seeing what people build and produce and how creative everyone gets is amazing. Wandering around every day, there is so much to explore. At night, the whole world changes a lot again; everything lights up, there are a million LED and fairy lights and it’s hard not to get lost in the desert. We enjoyed our time and I was super happy we visited this festival.
Unfortunately, Toby and Martina couldn’t join us from the start at Afrikaburn. They realized just a few weeks before the festival that their chassis had a crack, so they had to strip their whole car down to repair the chassis and had it built together again. Otherwise, Toby could not drive the car back to Switzerland. They primarily did the whole job by themselves with some help from a workshop in Cape Town. It was incredible to see what they had managed to do in only three weeks, and luckily, they managed to come for the last four days to the Afrikaburn. We were delighted when they arrived and enjoyed the few days together to the fullest. Of course, we also wanted to contribute a little bit to the festival, so we decided to cook a fondue one night and invited people around us. It was such a cool vibe and people loved the melted Swiss cheese on a piece of bread, definitely one of the many highlights of this week :-)
After the festival, unfortunately, it was time for Martina to fly home. She and Toby drove back to Cape Town, where they had to fix some final things on their car; the 500km drive into the desert and back was quite a good test drive. Tom and I decided to spend a couple of days in the Cederberg because we love this area a lot. Back in December, Tom did a hike called the “Wolfberg Cracks” with Flo and I also wanted to do it, since it sounded amazing. We drove to a nice campsite on Monday and went on the hike early the following day. It was totally worth the slight detour!
After the hike, we drove straight to the workshop, where Toby was waiting for us. Martina had already left to the airport earlier that day. Unfortunately, Toby still had to wait for some parts until the next day, so we were allowed to camp in front of the workshop. Since we had the time and were waiting anyway, we decided to drive our Landy on the lift for a last check as well - what a good idea. We only then realized that our rear brake pads were used and the brake disc was already damaged. It definitely needed replacement. Also, our transfer case was leaking after we had just revised it a few months earlier in Cape Town at another workshop. Of course, we called them to tell them that their job hadn’t lasted long, and they offered to pay for the revision we now had to do again. It’s always costly to drive into a workshop with a Landy, but on the other hand, we were happy that we realized these things before we were somewhere in the bush where we could not fix it properly anymore. We also took the chance and stocked up on some last spare parts.
On Wednesday night, we were almost ready to hit the road, but Toby had to wait one more day to get the new suspensions that he needed. Simoné and Marcel, a couple from South Africa, who had met Toby and Martina in Kenia while traveling, invited us to stay with them for our last days in Cape Town. They have a lovely house in Camps Bay and it was amazing to spend a couple of days there before we started our journey; we spent all day Thursday and Friday driving around the city and organizing things and had two amazing last braais with friends at Simonés and Marcel’s place. We also visited their workshop, where they produced some very cool braai tongs, which they gifted us for our journey back.
On Friday afternoon, we finally hit the road to drive up to Windhoek, where we would try to organize all our visas before continuing up north. Saying goodbye to everyone and Cape Town was a bit emotional for us. Luckily, the first three days on the road together with Toby were already a lot of fun. We met another Defender-couple on the road and share our camp for one night and then continued with our two Landies up north. We had such a good vibe together, and we’re excited to be sharing this next part of our journey with him - and we are very sad that Martina cannot join us, but we’ll try our best to bring Toby back home in time together with the two Defenders and ourselves :)
