#5: [15-Dec-20]

#4: [25-Jul-09]

#3: [14-Jan-05]

#1: [04-Jul-02]

23-Jul-2003 -- After planning a family holiday with my wife, Sandy, and daughter, Brittany, to see the sites of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe with Dragoman Overland Adventures, I thought about what confluence points I might be able to visit. I checked the Degree Confluence website and noticed that only a few confluence points had been visited in Namibia. As most of our trip was to take place in Namibia, I was optimistic that I would at least be able to visit one location.

The trip was to start in Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. Our travels would take us southwest from Windhoek and then north with various stops along the way. Prior to our departure, I attempted to get a map of Namibia to have a sense of what confluence points I may be able to visit. Unfortunately, nothing detailed enough was available at our home in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada so we would have to wait until we started our Namibia & Botswana Family Adventure trip to see where our journey would take us.

This confluence point would be the second one of our journey after having visited 24S 16E some days before. I had recorded the status of all the confluence points before we left and knew that this one had been visited once before. I thought that since the road we were traveling on our journey north to Etosha National Park was so close to this confluence point that we had to stop. I convinced our drivers, Claire and Vic, to stop the truck, as it was only 1.3 kilometres, which I thought wouldn't delay our trip very long. Needless to say, by the time we gathered all the group together, the same group who had been to the confluence visit at 24S 16E with me, it still took about 40 minutes round trip. I don't think our drivers were too happy that it delayed our already long journey somewhat, but fortunately for us, Mike was our cook and he came with the group to visit the confluence point, so they wouldn't dare have left without us.

The journey was uneventful, other than the fact I told the group we had to jog to the confluence point to minimize the length of this little side trip. I led the pace but unfortunately, the group got spread out such that they didn't know where I was. I stopped several times to let them know where I was with a loud shout of "over here". Once everyone regrouped, we were almost at the point. The area en-route to the confluence point was covered with a variety of brush and small trees. Just enough to make visibility limited but several animal trails existed that made our trip to the confluence point somewhat easier. We skirted along the side of a hill and had to scramble part of the way up to get to the actual point. We stopped long enough to take the required photos plus a couple of group shots and then we made our way back to the truck.

The drivers and our fellow passengers were waiting impatiently for our return and I knew they weren't very happy that it took as long as it did. We boarded the truck to continue our journey through Namibia and Botswana with our final stop at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. I hoped for additional confluence visits on our journey, but our travels would not put us in reasonable distance to any more.

At this point, I am able to say that I have confluence visits on two different continents. See my first confluence visit at 56N 115W. To where will our next holiday take us? What confluence points will be next? There will be more!