After we have settled our outstanding bill with the resort, we set off north. We don't get very far at first, because a police checkpoint doesn't like the fact that our rear license plate is covered by two spare tires. OK, so we have to pay a fine of N$ 500 (approx. EUR 30), but that's where the process begins...

First, a lot of data is written on a piece of paper. The friendly police officers need your "ID", although they accept your identity card, and your driving license, of which they only want the German version. Nobody here is interested in the international driving license that we had specially made, and nobody wants to see a passport either. So we have to help a lot, because of course none of the officers understand the German text of the papers.

While Tina wanders through the data jungle with the lower-ranking police officers, the head of the squad and I philosophize about football. He knows a lot about it and is of course a Bayern Munich fan. Oh yes, to pay we would have to go to the local police station, which is only 1 km away.

This "police station" is a joke, or rather: a container made of corrugated iron with a window and a door. Inside is a weapons safe, from which the officer takes several books, and a switched off computer from the late 90s with a CRT monitor. Our payment is then recorded in several books with carbon copying on carbon paper (they still have that here) and after a total of over an hour we go back to the pad. We don't have to change anything about the installation at the moment; we should do that when our tour is over.

So we take a very beautiful route along the Orange River from Aussenkehr to Rosh Pinar, where we fill up with over 200 liters of petrol. The rest of the way to Aus is on a tarmac road and is not very spectacular. Things change again from Aus, because from there the route leads directly west through the oldest desert in the world, the Namib, to Lüderitz.

Right at the beginning we stop at a lookout point where, with luck, you can see some of the Namib wild horses. Where they come from is not entirely clear and there are several theories: either they escaped from a stud farm, horses belonging to escaped German prisoners of war from the First World War, or they are horses from the South African army whose riders were killed. In any case, the animals have adapted to the desert and are therefore relatively small, can go twice as long without water as their fellow animals and look quite emaciated. We are very lucky because after only a short picnic a small group of wild horses arrives to drink. So the delay caused by the police in Aussenkehr has its good side.

The rest of the journey through the desert is characterized by disused train stations (according to Google, these are usually "temporarily closed") in the individual diamond mining towns and a lot of wind with a corresponding amount of sand that is whirled across the road. In extreme cases, this can lead to damage to the vehicle, which can suffer paint or even glass damage due to the "sandblasting".