Sunday 2023/01/15

Tsumeb – Gross Barmen Hot Spring Ressort (Okahandja)

A few laps in the unexpected 50m pool before breakfast!

Note: The shop at the lodge offers everything that long-term travelers need, including dairy products and fresh fruit and vegetables.

Instead of heading south via Otjiwarongo as planned, we circle the Waterberg massif to the east (via Grootfontein and Hochfeld).

When refueling, it is noticeable that our two patched tires seem to let air out slowly. But it should work as far as Windhoek. We drive an almost endless, mostly straight road with red coarse sand and green vegetation left and right – everything is fenced in and the names of the farms suggest that everything is firmly in white hands.

Hochfeld is as lifeless as everything today on Sunday. to stay at the targeted farm lodge you would first have to get someone by phone. So we drive on and on the way we pick up a young hitchhiker who, apart from "Okahandja", can't communicate with us and who, frozen like a pillar of salt, sits on the back seat for 1.5 hours. But we think he was probably glad that we took him with us, because otherwise there was hardly anything going on on the roads today.

The Gross-Barmen Hot Spring Resort turns out to be state-run and has accordingly run down a bit. It's such a shame that the cliché comes true over and over again: The locations that are well managed – by our standards – are mostly, if not always, run by white owners.

The reception in Gross-Barmen closes at 6 p.m., the hot springs are definitely too hot and the rooms and the outdoor pool are without lights, the food in the restaurant is low standard, very pity.