We went in and out of Namibia twice on the same trip. We walked in from Angola (ran, actually, on the first of two attempts), and then we drove back in later on with our own vehicle from South Africa. Eventually we left again with our vehicle, by way of Botswana.
This post is about our experience on the first and most interesting of these border crossings: from Angola (Santa Clara) to Namibia (Oshikango). This isn’t a guide since the border-crossing in question is very straightforward. It’s just an object lesson in expecting the unexpected, but you can read my full story about how the day went for us, here.
Namibia is a safe and comfortable country to travel in. But first you have to get there. And that should be pretty easy, unless you meet our friends Milton and Maputo.
Before you go
There isn’t a lot of prep-work necessary for Namibia, at least as far as ‘getting there’ goes.
You probably don’t need a visa (check that, according to your nationality), and you can easily book bus tickets online and pick up cash and SIM cards and delicious German food and whatever it is you need, as you go. Depending on the time of year you may want to pre-book your campsites, and you should definitely read up on all the stuff you can see and do in this beautiful place. For example, read this post about road-tripping and camping in Namibia.
Coming from Angola you can change the last of your kwanza with moneychangers in the street before you leave the country, and on the other side you can just go to an ATM.
At the time we crossed there were still opening and closing hours on the Angola-Namibia border. Now it’s open 24/7 according to iOverlander. There’s a time difference between the two countries – Namibia is one hour ahead.
If you’re going the other way, Oshikango-Santa Clara might be the only crossing you can use to enter Angola with the Angolan e-Visa (if you aren’t visa-free).
The route
Coming from Angola there are a few crossing points to Namibia. According to our friend Maputo you can cross wherever you’d like, but he’s about ten years old and honestly, he’s way more relaxed about that type of thing than we are. I’d stick to legitimate crossings.
We crossed from Santa Clara. That desolate town sits right on the Angolan side of the border and is about five hours driving from Lubango. In a car. There are buses too but they take a long time and have astonishingly inconvenient hours of departure and arrival. By car, you should be able to reach Santa Clara and cross in the same day, or you can sleep in Santa Clara. There are hotels and food and it’s fine. Dusty and edge-of-nowhere, but fine.
In Santa Clara you can walk to immigration and through the border. It’s a big complex, with lots of parking and hallways and pedestrians (mostly unofficial importer/exporters) going both ways. You just keep walking through the Angolan side, then carry on for a while to the Namibian side. There’s nothing confusing about it. Process the formalities and stroll on into Namibia.
It’s literally a few minutes walk from the exit to a depressing strip mall and the rest of Oshikango town. There are hotels although you probably won’t stay long since it’s just the Namibian Santa Clara (so dusty and on the other edge-of-nowhere).
Lubango to Santa Clara
Buses run from Lubango to Santa Clara. There are a couple of offices in town where you can get information and tickets. When we went to check, we found out that all the buses were leaving at really inconvenient times – like insanely early in the morning, or very very late – and still mainly arriving in Santa Clara too late to cross in the same day anyway. That’s where Milton came in – we’d met him the previous day and done a successful daytrip around the area with him. So we organized a ride with him, straight from the hotel to the border.
Since Milton opted to run several errands on the way we were late setting off and ended up in a mad dash at the border trying to get through in time. Spoiler alert: we did not make it and spent the night in Santa Clara instead. Illegally, since we were by then already stamped out of Angola, but like I said, it’s generally best to expect the unexpected. You can read the full story about our day, here.
If all that doesn’t happen, and you leave Lubango on time, it’s an otherwise uneventful drive straight to immigration.
The border
After we got sent back from the edge of no-man’s land, and nobody on either side seemed interested in sorting it out, we figured we’d just spend the night in Santa Clara and head across first thing in the morning. But it seemed Milton had overestimated how badly we wanted to get to Namibia that very night so he hired a fixer: a ten year old boy named Maputo.
With the two of them we drove for a while away from immigration and towards the border fence. Maputo knew the soldiers who work there, and he’d hatched a plan. Parked in a field, lights out and windows up, Maputo negotiated with the soldiers. His idea was that we should just walk around the border fence with one of them, and see how that turned out.
It wouldn’t turn out well, we figured, and neither of us was comfortable with the idea of being smuggled into Namibia of all places by a kid and his contacts in the military. So we noped that one, and made Milton take us back into town for the night.
But assuming that doesn’t happen to you, the border itself is a fairly quick one.
As it turned out, that was the first of three times we tried to enter a country on this trip and had to fall back behind the border for one reason or another. Start as you mean to go on, right?
Oshikango and on to Windhoek
When we finally did get to Oshikango, we spent most of the day at a nice friendly place with good food, called Palmeiras lodge.
We booked bus tickets online the same day we arrived in Oshikango and left on a comfortable bus that night to Windhoek. That took about twelve hours (scheduled for quite a bit less but it did a lot of time-wasting). When you buy the tickets you’ll get a notification about where to pick up both the printed tickets and the bus itself, at the depressing strip mall I mentioned earlier.
And there you go – Namibia awaits! Just don’t speak to any ten year olds at the border, and you’ll be fine.
Read More
For a full run-down on our border-crossing day and all the things in it that we didn’t see coming, you can read this story: Angola to Namibia: around the fence with a child-fixer.
And if you’re making plans for Namibia, check out this guide we wrote about road-tripping and camping in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa.
For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.
We’ve crossed a lot of borders by all sorts of random transport. Have a look at our Africa border crossing reports for strange stories and sage advice, here.
