Hitchhiking in the second less populated country in the world (after Mongolia) is not easy. With my boyfriend Sebastian, we often have to wait several hours to catch a car  in this huge  arid desert of stones. Sometimes we have to pitch the tent and try our luck the next day.

But hitchhiking also brings us great surprises. Katrin, a Namibian with german roots, takes us in her jeep and invites us to her luxury lodge in the middle of the desert. We meet her French husband, Bernard, who - funny coincidence on the other side of the world - knows my father ! There is also Christian, the brother-in-law and painter who shows us his beautiful travel diaries.

The next day we head to the Sossusvlei desert, famous for its sand dunes and petrified trees. It is one of my favorite regions of Namibia. I also really enjoy Etosha National Park where we get a ride from an old Dutch couple who had hitchhiked across this park in the 80s. Considering the conditions of the roads, the cars and the infrastructures at the time, I suddenly feel like a little player. Barely arriving in the park, a white rhino comes to drink from a puddle two meters from the car! We also see a family of cheetahs, lionesses, jackals, pretty colorful birds, zebras, wildebeest, gazelles and antelopes. My third favorite place is the region of Opuo and Epupa. There are very few  tourists in these remote northern lands where live many tribes like the Hereros dressed in German colonial dresses or the Himbas half-dressed in animal skins. We will also spend two beautiful days on the road with a Franco-Polish couple.

I will not go into the details of our night at the police station of Sesriem (because wild camping was prohibited), nor of my complications to get a visa for Angola, nor of the facility to obtain a visa for Congo Brazzaville . We are also invited twice to stay with Namibians by the sea, and twice by retired French people living in the desert. We see 6000 year old petroglyphs, pitch the tent a few meters from the Epupa Falls, watch the dances of the students of a Himba school ...

At the end of these four weeks, my boyfriend Sebastian flies to New Zealand to work there for three months. I continue my hitchhiking world tour on my own heading to the border of Angola.