A smorgasbord for the eyes
Angola is an overlanding dream
ANGOLA
The only bad thing I can say about our time in Angola is that we ended up with cricked necks from spending so many hours looking up at its insane skies.
How come we all live under the same sky, and yet some people seem to get so much of it, and more than their fair share of the drama? These are the kinds of deeply intelligent scientific conversations that occupy our dark, middle-of-nowhere evenings with Ivy.
Even a standard cloudy-sunny day on the road was like journeying through a piece of renaissance art.
Angola quickly made it into our ever-expanding Favourite Countries Club. It wasn’t only the sky that was being a drama queen; the landscapes were stupendous and had it all – mountains and striking rock formations, glorious desert, colourful sandy canyons, accessible and wild beaches, impressive waterfalls and sprawling wetlands.
It was a smorgasbord for the eyes.
In another failed bid to catch up with real time, I had every intention of trying to squeeze the whole country into one post. But it would have been a travesty and I just couldn’t do it. As you might have noticed, I’m not ruthless enough when it comes to photo quantities, so you’ll get another serving soonish.
As mentioned last time, entering Angola felt like a big arrival, and the end of an era. It was emotional to reach the country that we could only imagine while we were in the throes of West Africa madness. For many reasons we’d made a conscious decision to take the route slowly, and for us that really paid off. Yet, some days impatience could rise to the surface – we’d watch people zooming ahead (two Belgians on bicycles overtook us in Guinea Bissau and reached Cape Town in September 2025 😂), look at the map and think, ‘will we ever make it to southern Africa?’
It wasn’t that we wanted West Africa to end, it was that we could hardly wait to see how it would end. Like that feeling when you’re really enjoying reading a thriller and have to fight the urge to hurry through the words or release the tension once and for all and skip to the last page (only sociopaths actually do this – you know who you are).
A couple of hours in, we encountered a huge queue of trucks on a hill. I walked down to the front of the line to see what was happening. An enormous lorry had tipped over and was sprawled right across the road. It was an early opportunity to roll out my pretend-Portuguese again (talk in Spanish and hope some of it lands). A bunch of men were trying to clear a space around the stricken lorry but some concrete bollards were causing an issue. Cars were getting through though. We established that Ivy was a pequena camioneta and the guys said ‘bring it down!’ I panted back up the hill to Jeremy and Ivy. The heat was savage.
We drove down, breathed in and squeezed through the gap. On the other side was a German overlanding truck that was trying to come up the hill. But with another half metre of width they had no chance. They pulled off and camped for the night by the bridge, while skinny Ivy skipped off down the road, trying not to look smug.
We were heading for the capital Luanda which, apart from being an enormous city and an unrelaxing driving experience, is home to a campsite with loads of facilities that has evolved – mostly due to its wonderful, savvy owners – as one of the well-known overlanding hubs on this route.
Firstly though, we called in at the massive municipal fruit and veg market, then to a hypermarket for the stock-up of the year. And I wasn’t leaving there before a visit to its cafe. There was a proper Portuguese-style coffee and a pastel de nata with my name on it (and Jeremy was allowed one too). It had been a long time since a coffee and pastry treat had passed our lips. Oh my sweet lord – the creamy, sugary, flakey butteryness; the rich, dark non-Nescaféness. Now we’d arrived.
We pulled into the campsite, Kakuakos Lodge, to find six other camper trucks already there. It was the biggest gathering we’d seen since Senegal in 2024. We were quite overwhelmed. We’d already met all of these at some points, in Cabinda, Congo and at the beach in Angola. There was a lawn! Soft grass underfoot. This excited me a lot. Also a swimming pool, bar, restaurant, communal dining/cooking areas and more. The owners, Luis and Julieta, are as lovely as you can imagine and have travelling in their souls. They’ve thought of everything and welcomed everyone like family.
With a magazine deadline approaching, we settled in for a couple of weeks of solid work for me. As outdoor offices go there was little to complain about, but this stint of work was probably my most challenging yet due to the suffocating heat. Even in the shade, our brains melted in temperatures of the high 30s, high humidity and the lack of breeze in the city.
Campers came and went. Two huge overlanding expedition trucks passed through – these companies transport up to 24 strangers, in one bus, on year-long group trips through Africa. It’s like a social experiment; Lord of the Flies on wheels. The gossip coming from some of the passengers and crew, who spied fresh ears in Jeremy and me and took a chance to offload, was worthy of a reality TV show. Meanwhile two other overlanders had hit and injured a motorcyclist on their way to Kakuakos and spent a night at the police station. Luis was trying to help them. I worried all night about these people I’d never met (they showed up eventually and were fine, if a bit lighter in cash) – these things could happen to any of us. We’d spent very little time with other people in recent months and my brain was exceptionally busy with all the stimulation.
While I worked, Jeremy was mostly focusing on Ivy jobs and trip admin. We might have passed the hardest parts of West Africa but we still managed to make it difficult for ourselves by entering on a free 30-day visa-on-arrival, then realising too late that we couldn’t renew it from inside the country. A pre-paid visa would have been more flexible, we later found out. By the time my work was completed, this wouldn’t give us enough days to explore Angola. After touring around we’d also planned to store Ivy at Kakuakos and fly home for a visit. This plan also failed because, inexplicably, Angola doesn’t recognise the widely-used international Carnet de Passage system (a bonded ‘passport’ for the vehicle) and our plan to apply for a temporary import permit extension didn’t come to fruition. With translation help from Luis, Jeremy spent hours trying to make the case to the customs office, but it wasn’t to be.
It was a fiendish puzzle. For reasons of both the visa and storage issue we were going to have to hot-foot it about 1,300km to the Namibian border, leave Ivy in the capital Windhoek – where the whole storage process is infinitely easier – fly out from there and return to Angola later after our UK trip.
Or so we thought.
Our new plan meant a long driving day to one of Angola’s biggest sights, Calandula Falls. It was a big detour on our route south but we were determined not to miss it and it was too far to come back to later. These stampy cows had a good go at interrupting our schedule. No amount of nudging around the edge, reversing, revving or cajoling could make them budge. After about 15 minutes some villagers ran over and shooed them into the bushes.
The beautiful drive and prize at the end was more than worth the effort. A lodge overlooking the spectacular waterfalls allows camping with one of the most unbelievable views we’ve ever had from the truck. It’s hard to imagine many hotels allowing campervans to park in such a prime spot. One of the best things about Angola is that it has so much natural beauty and a decent infrastructure, but mass tourism has yet to hit. As they look to their neighbours, such as Namibia, for ideas on how to market and monetise their country, it seems likely this will change quite soon.
It wasn’t far from there to another little-known Angolan wonder, the monolithic rock formations of Pedras Negras de Pungo Andongo. We got a drenching from the rain as we arrived and wild-camped among the rocks. In the morning it was dry enough for us to take a hike up to a viewpoint.
I’ve probably been guilty of the occasional smug ‘digital nomad’ photo, as the location of our office is often enviable, but usually the reality is something more ordinary. Phone signal and data anxiety, slapping away mosquitos as you type, and/or trying to block out an indescribable array of noises and distractions.
This photo isn’t curated. We pulled up at the side of the road when the phone signal showed maximum bars, and I sent the final emails to get the mag off to the printer. My trainers were drying on the dashboard after I’d stored them in the passenger footwell all night and the rain had poured in through the gaps and soaked them.
It was a gorgeous drive filled with lush scenery, agriculture and baobab trees, and a constantly changing sky.
That night, while camping in another disused quarry, we spun around in awe as we watched a 360-degree sunset consume the sky with pink and orange.
The following day was another cracking drive from the mountains of Quibala out to the coast.
Are you tired of the theme yet? From our camping chairs we witnessed another eye-popper of a sunset. Angolan skies are the gift that keeps on giving.
The rains were providing some dramatic stormy skies. Some of the roads south of here were closed due to floods, but somehow we kept narrowly avoiding the worst of the weather.
We pushed on, doing more driving than we’d usually do, and passed straight through areas that we’d visit properly when we came back into Angola.
We wild-camped amid fragrant wild sage bushes near the Namibian border and did some final - some might say stupidly last-minute – checks on their visa rules. It turned out our plan wasn’t really a solid one. If we returned to Namibia after our UK trip then drove into Angola for a month, the clock wouldn’t stop on our Namibia visa – it would still be ticking down, thereby ‘wasting’ 30 days of our time in that vast country. We made a rapid change of plan - we still had three weeks until our flight from Namibia to the UK. We scanned the map and decided to squeeze everything else we wanted to see in Angola into the next fortnight, then return to Namibia for our storage preps and flight.
We still had to pop over the border to get a new Angola visa. So we’d made it to Namibia! We celebrated this momentous achievement with a quiet early night and an early start, then drove straight back to the border and into Angola again.
Believe it or not, we still had most of Angola’s main highlights to come.
Angola! Now so very definitely on our list. Thanks for all the pictures and descriptions, I feel I can see and smell life as you go through. Overland driving in Namibia is glorious but you already know that. Love the top shot of all the Campervans and their Insta handles!
Another cracking yarn. Thx guys!!