After almost a month of adventures in Angola, my time here has come to an end, and I have crossed into Zambia via the Jimbe border. In fairness to Angola, I have decided to make two entries in this blog. This first one describing my overall amazing experiences of this wonderful country, the second describing my last 3 days trying to fight my way through some rough territory to get to the border.

Angola, a country that has suffered years of war only opened it’s borders to the outside world 20 years ago, and only waived visa requirements for most countries beginning this very month to promote tourism. What this means for the traveler is that Angola remains an uncut gem with so much to offer.

Being closed to the world for so long, Angola is not overrun with fancy lodges, hotels and tourist gimmicks. In fact, it is a challenge to find anything of the sorts. There remains endless potential for this to develop though, and with a rise in tourism, I think that it will be a completely different place in ten years’ time. For now, it is unregulated and spacious. I was able to ride donkey onto pristine beaches and camp there without seeing another person all day. The restaurants and local businesses are still completely authentic and not plastered with the standard franchises that we see in the rest of the world. There is also a genuineness in the character of the people. For better or worse, there is no feigned friendliness for the sake of tourism. The people are who they are, most friendly and some of them absolutely not :P

I came on this trip largely because I wanted to see the beauty of the world I live in, and the landscapes of this country left me breathless more times than I care to admit. From arid desert landscapes to challenge even Namibia, to lush tropical forests and grasslands, it has everything. Mountains, and vast expanses of flatness. Dried up canyons and thundering waterfalls. Don’t expect to see too much wildlife outside of the national parks though. Years of war and poverty have meant that most of the larger mammals have ended up on someone’s plate or moved to safer territories.

One, and probably the only, major negative I experienced here was the number of children, most of which live in extreme poverty. This made me feel two very conflicting emotions. The first was sadness. It is difficult to see extremely skinny children sitting around town or under trees on the side of the road. Families don’t have the means to feed 8 or more children, and there simply aren’t enough schools and teachers to educate even half of them. Unless the Angolan government makes some huge infrastructural changes (which I hear they are not), they will have a huge problem on their hands in a few years when they will have a huge population of uneducated impoverished adults to manage. The second emotion I felt in this regard was frustration. Everywhere you stop and walk around, you are followed by a horde of children all repeatedly begging for money. Unless you are in the middle of the bush with not a soul around, you will have a child on your heels. Even in small rural towns.

On one hand I would advertise for everyone to go and experience Angola for its beauty and raw experience. However, if everyone were to go it would lose this and become the tourist hotspot it has the potential for, though mind you, it will probably become that in the future anyway. This being the case I encourage anyone who wishes to see this place, to come and visit as soon as possible.