My husband and I are coming to South Africa later this month and want to rent a car that we can take to Botswana and Namibia.
One of the car hire companies I contacted told me that South African car rental insurance does not cover you if you are driving on gravel roads. Is this the case? If so, what do we do? We don't want to rent from different countries as we travel and were planning on getting one vehicle for the entire trip.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
For Botswana, assuming that you dont just want to drive from city to city, you will need a 4x4 vehicle. So if you want to be flexible, and have one vehicle only for your time in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, you will have to rent a 4x4 for the entire trip (they are obviously more expensive than normal sedans). Bushlore is a company I can very much recommend. Their head office is in Joburg (they also do rentals out of Windhoek, Kasane etc. - but you have to pay an extra fee to get the vehicule delivered there).
Thanks for the note, Nathalie.
The trouble is,a 4x4 is extremely expensive for 2 1/2 months and not something we can do.
So we're now in a quandry: do we rent a car only for South Africa and then fly to Namibia and Botswana and rent vehicles there? We don't really want to do that since we have so much time to explore and would prefer to travel by land. If you have any suggestions, I'm happy to hear them.
We just came back after renting a car in Namibia for a week. It was small and some of the roads were tough, but it was possible in a small car. As far as insurance - we couldn't get any to cover the whole vehicle (basically if it got in an accident you would owe about 6000 Namib dollars) but for 150 a day we had tire and windshield protection which we bought from the rental agency. It was a nice safety net. Good luck
Husband and I will spend 8 weeks traveling in Namibia and Botswana. We had the same dilemma and after costing everything out decided on the following:
12 days in Botswana: Okavango Delta and Chobe staying in 3 different fly in style lodges.
3 days at Vic Falls (Flight from Kasane)
5 weeks in Namibia (fly in via Jo'burg)
pick up a fairly sturdy 2 wheel drive in Windhoek.
I used 2 different agencies to arrange this trip: Expert Africa for Botswana and Cardboard Box for Namibia.
Husband and I are independent travelers however for this trip plus a 9 week trip to east Africa some years ago we found that using an agency works really well for this part of the world.
We leave next week.
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