Tour d'Afrique - Cairo to Cape Town by Bike

The people:
• Namibia has the lowest population density of all countries in Africa; once again very few people here. The German influence is very strong here.

The landscape:
• Finally, a hill! Though the flat landscape of Botswana was beautiful, it was a little tiresome after a thousand kilometres of zero geographic relief. There were some beautiful mountainous areas farther west and of course out on the west coast are the famous dunes of the Namib Desert.
• We unfortunately skimmed through the country with only a sampling of diverse Namibian scenery, but the rest of the country houses an unbelievable diversity of scenery!

Infrastructure:
• The Namibians apparently take pride in the state of their roads. The paved roads are in good condition.
• Of note is that Namibia has apparently the largest network of gravel roads in the world. It was decided that due to the low population density (and hence low traffic) on the roads outside of the main artery, these roads would be kept gravel, but well maintained. I can attest to the good condition of these gravel roads since I hit 77km/h heading down a hill in my aerobars on gravel. I couldn’t have said that before this trip!
• Extremely westernized. The “typical African village” is nearly lost through the areas that we travelled.

Namibia is certainly another country that I would like to come back to. There is a huge amount to see and we really did skim through it very quickly.