We spent five days in Luanda and most of them went on errands. Two embassies, one of which turned out to be a dead end, a visa payable only in dollars we did not have, and the thing that quietly ate the most time of all, simply getting hold of Angolan kwanza.

Kakoakos, where we stayed. The room was a shipping container and this was the garden.

Where we stayed, and the advice that came with it

We rode the 400 kilometres up from Soyo on 14 December, and the day started in a queue for fuel. We did try to slip in at a different pump. They did not let us.

We got to Kakoakos Campsite at half twelve. The track in was muddy and would have been a problem in the rain, but it was short and it was not raining. The room was a small twenty foot shipping container, there was a pool, and there were animals wandering about the place. Luis and his wife ran it and could not have been more accommodating. His wife cooked us a vegetarian dinner that first night.

Luis also told us something we used all week. Do not take cash out of a machine on the street. Go to a five star hotel and use the machine inside. He meant it as a safety point, and it turned out to solve a second problem we did not know we had yet.

The queue that had not moved in three hours

Getting hold of kwanza was the slow part of the week. Not the price of things, though Luanda is not cheap. Simply getting the cash into our hands.

On our first full day we did what Luis said and went to the Epic Sana, a five star hotel in the centre, for the breakfast buffet and the machine inside it. The minimum withdrawal was 40,000 kwanza a transaction, and the staff told us it varies by machine. Max's Wise debit card worked, four separate times over that one day.

Eddy's own caption on the day. Three hours later it looked the same.

Five days later we were out in Talatona for something else entirely, and there was a bank with cash machines outside the building. That queue was the longest we had seen anywhere on the trip. We came back out three hours later and it was the same length. We never joined it.

So we went back to the Epic Sana instead. Short queue outside, and we got plenty out. What we only worked out afterwards was that there had been a long line of people waiting inside the hotel for that same machine, and we had walked straight to the front of it without noticing. The security guard was saying something the whole time. Neither of us speaks Portuguese and he did not speak English, so we stood there getting our cash while being told off in a language we could not follow.

Most of our week happened somewhere along this road.

Two embassies, one of them a dead end

The reason we were in Luanda at all was paperwork for what came next. Namibia first, on that same first full day. Luis printed the form for us the evening before, the embassy was exactly where Google Maps said it would be, and the application went in without any trouble. Then they told us they only take US dollars, eighty of them, and we did not have dollars.

The money changers worked the street across from the embassy, near a supermarket, and no single one of them had the eighty we needed, so we bought it in pieces from two different people and walked back in. Three working days later the visa was ready.

South Africa went differently, and it took two attempts on two different days. That first afternoon we spent an hour driving around looking for the embassy and simply could not find it. Google was no help. We gave up, ate at the Fortaleza mall, and looked it up on iOverlander instead, which had it out in Talatona, around eight kilometres from the city centre. We drove out just to confirm the building existed.

We came back properly on our fifth day, and the answer was no. Max could not apply for a South African tourist visa there at all. It needed Angolan residency or a work visa, neither of which a person riding through has. The staff suggested the Philippine consulate might be able to do something. We went. They could not. We sat in the cafe downstairs and started again from scratch.

And when the errands stop

None of the above should read as a complaint about Luanda. We liked it. The one taxi we took across town, to the hotel on that first morning, we booked on the Yango app and it worked fine. There are proper shopping malls, Fortaleza and Belas, which after a few months of West African road towns felt like a different planet. Eddy got his hair and beard done. We ate well.

And on one of those evenings we ended up at the annual meeting of Angola's overlander club, awards and dinner and all.

Luanda from the balcony, on one of the days between errands.

Five days, most of them spent on money and paperwork. We would still go back.