The white bomber was equipped with long range tanks giving a range of…..and quoting the car hire girl here…..about 1300km if you don't drive like an idiot. But only about 1100km if you do. Perhaps I am just really doff, but what constitues driving like an idiot? Especially in a 4x4? In other words, these fuel gauges were not to be entirely relied upon.

Heading down the road in Botswana is not a minor undertaking. Running out of fuel in this country can pose some very serious problems….like death at worst. Or a very long wait at best. But with the white bomber, we would have survived forever!

Hitting the first junction 400km after leaving the Hills, with left taking us to Maun 200km away and right to Ghanzi, the next town 250km, we had anticipated a fuelstation of some kind.

A warning: when travelling by road in Botswana, make sure you get a map of where the fuel stations are. Everything else is just fluffy sweet nice icing on top of the cake! Believe me!

We had 1150km on the clock. Could we make it to Ghanzi and our night's stop? Or would the nightstop be some unappealing roadside? To cut a long story short, we drove to Maun and back, a round trip of 400km! Daylight was dangerously short, as was my temper later. When the donkey (Botswana's own fourlegged roadblock) stepped out in the path of the flying white bomber and almost met his donkey maker, it was time to find a spot for the night….and so appeared, like an oasis simmering in the distance, Kalahari's el Fari (www.elfari.co.za).

A small little campsite on a Kalahari cattle farm with, according to Ing, the world's best ablution block and therefore the best campsite in the world! A little haven of peace, a fire and a long discussion with the younger farmer provided the balm to drive weary nerves! What a pleasure to have a blazing hot shower in the middle of nowhere while the winter night's cold settles in!

What happened to make my temper short? Government cordoned theft of our vacumned packed, smoked kassler chops, bought outside the foot-and-mouth cordon, that's what.