Of course you do your shopping carefully. You make sure that you buy plenty of energy food such as beef and chicken to keep you going. Meat = Food, and Cross and Bray refuse to eat without its presence in dinner.
Turns out Namibia has a region (the north, of which its border is where we were travelling from) which isnt allowed to export its meat products raw. We of course had no clue. It isnt in the bradt guide anyway.
Having crossed the border the day before we did our shopping in Rundu and drove on again, aiming at Etosha pan.
We quickly arrived at the vet control checkpoint.
The vet control guy and his police side kick started by asking to share John's chocolate (crunchy no less) which is never gonna happen and just annoyed Bray. Crossy was more polite/soft and caved in to sharing his chocs with the dude who then cheerfully conned us into telling him we were travelling with contraband.
Basically we could either cook it there and then or they would take it away and destroy it. Now as we had no previous knowledge of this perfectly applicable law and Bray was still off on one about his chocolate, we debated the point somewhat.
Just to clarify we were hardly driving around with half a cow bleeding away in the boot. We are talking about packaged / shrinkwrapped meat products from a supermarket in plastic and everything.
To be fair their official response was consistent. Simply pointing to the HUGE sign on the huge and rather official looking checkpoint. So crossy whipped out the old stove and we had 9:30 am pepper steak and sausages.
Why smuggling we hear you ask? Aside from it being a potentially pun tastic title, if we told you, we would be breaking the oldest rule going. What goes on tour, stays on tour. CMJJJ 1- 0 Bureaucracy.
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