One down, nine to go. Or eight, depending on how we feel. After a couple of delays and general laziness we are finally able to tick off one whole country. But I’m jumping ahead of myself…

From Lutzville (where we were very kindly given a free place to stay at the Golden Grape, having turned up very smelly and asked to pitch our tents in their garden) we headed to Nuwerus and had a truly brutal day. It didn’t help that we had such a chilled out morning that we didn’t leave until midday and were trying to climb some decent sized hills when the sun was at its hottest. We’re smart like that.

Having spent a couple of hours recovering from slight heat stroke behind a small bit of concrete, we set off to complete the relatively short distance (35km) to Nuwerus. Turns out that particular bit of road is horrible. In fact it isn’t really a road at all, more of a dirt track. With lots of hills and sand pits and rocks and bumps. After four hours of constant tiring uphills and terrifying downhills without any respite (and a particularly terrifying decent into Nuwerus in the dark (we saw the lights, got over excited and then our lights stopped working)), we needed a beer.

It turns out beer really does cure all ills – well at least the bloke outside the off license who pointed us towards a guest lodge did. We decided we needed a day off so after a day of not doing all the usefull things we should have done, like fixing our bikes, we carried on. We had been told there would be one tough day of climbing from Garies to Kamieskroon, which there was. We were also told that from there to the border it was downhill, which it wasn’t. Not even slightly. What followed were days of thinking “at least it will be flat tomorrow”, but it never was.

Amongst all of this Nick, for no reason at all, hid some milk from a teacher, tried to do a bit of off-roading – turns out he isn’t very good at either. It also turns out that he isn’t very good at staying on the road whenever I open my mouth or whenever he tries to wave at people. We also saw some dolphins and I managed to only get two punctures (the score is now 6-1 so I’m still losing). The ever elusive downhill eventually materialised and we were able to enjoy 35km of solid downhill all the way to the border.

That brings me back to the present and the present is rather nice – I’m sat under a tree looking out over the Orange River on the Namibian side of the border. What’s next? Well, you’ll have to wait and see, but it promises to be pretty spectacular.