Sri Lanka in Feb 2018 was one of my fave ever trips, as much for the place itself (which I’m sure I’ll talk about at a later date) as for the friends I made whilst there. I organically ended up in a gang of solo travellers from different parts of the world, split roughly equally along gender lines, and all somehow on exactly the same page in terms of how to roll through so captivating a country. It was a magical time – I was so happy that I even did the unthinkable and celebrated my birthday for once – and we kept the gang together via WhatsApp + random meetups before people began disappearing off the radar and paths stopped crossing post-pandemic.
One squad member, Raquel from Portugal, relocated to Angola in 2019. It’s a country that had never really been on my travel radar prior to her move, but after a couple of our mutual friends paid her a visit, it rapidly rose to the top end of my bucket list. As with so many other travel plans, things got waylaid by Covid, and my intention to visit at some point in 2020/21 ended up getting postponed for half a decade before something finally came together in early 2025. A few of my Shanghai pals were planning a get-together in Cape Town (a city I’d already spent much time in) for Chinese New Year. I’d been toying with the idea of making Angola happen around that time anyway, and this gave me a perfect excuse. I’d visit Raquel in Luanda for a week or so and then fly down to South Africa to link up with the Shanghai crew for a few days before returning to China.
My geographical/historical knowledge is much sharper than most, but I’ll confess that I knew very little about what I was signing up for with Angola. There were some waterfalls and pretty beaches… I was aware that Luanda was once flushed with oil money and that prices weren’t cheap… and I also knew that English would be of fairly little use round here. Still, I’d spent some time in Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony struggling to combat poverty, and assumed that if I could survive that in one piece I’d be able to make my way around Angola just fine as well. (We’ll ignore the fact that I had a gun pointed at me in Mozambique – or at least we’ll save that story for the relevant blog post whenever it comes!)
Luanda
Raquel was a star and arranged for me to be picked up from the (shambolic) airport and escorted to her (amazing) house in central Luanda. I was instantly enthused by my surrounds. Her home wasn’t in any of the plush, gated communities that expats normally reside in here, but was instead a more traditional-style abode right in the heart of the actual city – where Angolans lived, studied, worked, and played! She was still on work calls when I arrived, so after unpacking I occupied myself by taking her enormous, beautiful mutt Buddha for a walk round the neighbourhood. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect introduction to the madness of Luanda than navigating the dirt, the potholes, the traffic, and the endless stares that came with being a scantily-clad foreigner with an incredibly-intimidating (but super friendly!) dog at his command. Many locals have a fear of our canine friends, so Buddha actually doubled up as a bodyguard during the late afternoon rush hour, helping me explore the very authentic hood that I’d dived head-first into without any qualms. I had a couple of people approach me with questions that I didn’t understand, but the general vibe was one of genial curiosity-bordering-on-confusion.
Thanks to my friend and her equally-awesome housemate, Pedro, I was able to experience much more of the city than I would have done so by myself. They took me out to bars, cultural events, beaches, and even a whole damn RASTA PARTY that was taking place by the rubbish dump a couple of blocks away (that may well have been my highlight of the trip – such a thrill to be under a giant canopy tent with reggae blaring out of the speakers and people experiencing some wild journeys together deep into the Luandan night). I also spent a day walking the capital alone which I later realised wasn’t the most advisable move – visible foreigners generally either drive or get driven from A to B so as to avoid unnecessary aggro on the ground. There were a couple of sketchy moments when I was being very obviously followed and potentially targeted as a mugging victim, but I was able to shake off my temporary stalkers both times, and I like to think that Raquel and Pedro trusted my street-smarts enough to allow me to explore so freely without reservations.
Road Trippin’: Part I
My timing in Angola was fortuitous, for two of Raquel’s friends from Portugal arrived just a day later. Their plan was to do an epic road trip down the country’s humongous coastline, right into the depths of the Namib desert and back again, and they very kindly let me gatecrash the first few days of their adventure. We went from the enchanting beaches of Cabo Ledo to the awesome Binga Waterfalls (though not as awesome as Kalandula Falls – my top destination here – which was sadly too far out of the way for me to reach within my time constraints) to the unspoilt rusticity of Praia Egito and finally to a couple of (slightly) more cosmopolitan centres in Lobito and Benguela. As in Luanda, there is no way that I would have covered anywhere near as much ground alone – Angola’s public transport leaves much to be desired, as does its road network, and English is barely spoken outside of the capital’s nightlife/expat scene, so I was 100% reliant on my new friends Simon and João for not only shuttling me from sight to sight, but also for being patient enough to order me whatever vegetarian food we could find at the restaurants we stopped at (FWIW: mostly beans, eggs, fries, and whatever vegetables were at hand, so perfectly decent actually). After reaching Benguela and getting a little too merry during an evening out with the guys, I jumped on a 9hr bus all the way back to Luanda – though I nearly missed it after sleeping through all my alarms. Fortunately, ‘Angola time’ means that a scheduled 7:30am departure won’t actually depart until closer to 8am, so I actually made it with several minutes to spare despite nearly losing all my marbles in the process of rushing to the bus terminal. One last night in Luanda closed proceedings here before I flew down to South Africa the next day.
(Related aside: Angola’s national carrier, TAAG, is the biggest shitshow of an airline that I’ve EVER dealt with. I deliberately avoided flying into the country with them – there’s no need to when Emirates offer a route here – as I was very familiar with their abysmal reputation, but they were sadly my only option for reaching Cape Town on my intended date. I’ll spare y’all an extended rant and will instead attempt to summarise: flight perpetually delayed without explanation, subsequently cancelled without explanation, rudely placed on a flight four days later by a menopausal bitch who turned out to be the ‘manager’ of this trainwreck – which would have meant missing pretty much the entire Cape Town adventure with my friends – and only spared a travel disaster at the last minute by a kindly English-speaking local couple (one half of whom turned out to be a national rap star!) who allowed me to take one of their replacement seats on the previous day’s flight which had been delayed by some 20 hours or something stupid and was leaving later that night, several hours after my scheduled departure. Throughout all this trauma the TAAG staff showed nothing beyond callous disregard for the pandemomium that they were causing in the airport. Seriously, the worst motherfuckers on the planet, and sadly they have a monopoly on so many routes in and out of Angola due to governmental corruption, so people are forced to endure their bullshit despite knowing that they’re the scourge of the earth. FUCK YOU TAAG. Eventually arrived in Cape Town some twelve hours later than scheduled, which I had to take as a #win given the deplorable ineptitude of the airline. NEVER fly with these bastards and yes I’m still pissed eighteen months later.)
Road Trippin’: Part II
I have so. many. highlights from those few days on the road with Simon and João. The contrast between the relatively-fancy beach resort we stayed in at Cabo Ledo vs. the shacks that people were people living literally right outside the resort. The abandoned and decaying infrastructure, teeming with human life so resilient in spite of the hurdles. The poverty, the hardship, the beggars who were drawn towards us in every major urban centre. But also the joy, the spontaneity, the random dancing on promenades and the intoxicating thrills of the night. Simon and João’s endless bickering, as if they were an old married couple out of an NBC sitcom rather than footie bros straight outta Lisbon! The rapturous power of Binga Waterfalls. The serenity of empty beaches, tempered by the mountains of trash run amok. My tolerance for the national chilli sauce, gindungo, which turned out to be a party trick that transcended language barriers and elicited much guffawing! That moment when, after rolling through the deprivation of the Angolan countryside for hours, we rocked up at a Shoprite where we purchased gallons of alcohol and soft drinks in order to curry favour with the village chief at isolated, impossibly-enchanting Praia Egito. What memories. All of them.
Angola clearly has so much potential as a travel destination – the stunning coastline, its colonial relics, and plentiful natural wonders see to that. But it’s been waylaid by historical trauma, endemic corruption, and kleptocratic governance; its hospitality sector suffering from years of neglect. Egregious affluence sits right alongside the visible paucity of the majority to the infuriating effect. It’s an emotional rollercoaster – the stench of festering waste punctuating a scene of breathtaking beauty, the visible struggles of people’s everyday negating the comforts that you crave. I avoid photographing humans and engaging in poverty porn, but know that my pics here don’t tell the full story of what I saw at all. I’ll leave you guys with an unphotographed image that’s stayed with me and which I described on IG at the time. A ramshackle roadside market, heaving with bedlam. People bellowing over each other, clattering into one another in a suffocating mélange of dirt, dust, and exhaust fumes. Amidst the tumults: a solitary kid, likely not even half my age, who’s peddling sofas (of all things!) on the street. And as I whizz past on my air-conditioned bus under the torturous heat of the midday sun, he painstakingly wipes the stains on one such sofa with a tenderness that suggests it’s the most precious act of love in the world – in that place, at that moment in time. How to make sense of a country like Angola? You can’t. But perhaps the ability to locate beauty against all odds trumps ‘sense’.
Click here for the full Angola gallery with some additional trip details.
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