The Pont

the Fal River ferry in Cornwall

I love the little ferries that take one across the many rivers in Europe. They are so helpful. This little one-car King Harry Ferry took us across the River Fal in two minutes and saved us about an hour's worth of driving allowing us a proper Sunday lunch at the Hotel Tresanton in Truro.

And this little private ferry took us to the island home of Waterford Castle for a weekend full of wedding celebrations after the earlier nuptials at Trinity College Chapel and wedding breakfast in Dublin.

But the thing about these quaint and cute ferries is that they keep quaint and cute hours making them sometimes more of an obstacle to progress than a delight to encounter. Like the time we arrived at the dock from Stockholm to find that the ferry that connects Malmo, Sweden to Copenhagen, Denmark stopped at sunset! We scrambled to find a hotel in Malmo for the night losing our night's deposit at our hotel across the Oresund in Denmark. This was before they built a proper bridge with a mass transportation tunnel to connect the two countries. We took the train from Copenhagen to Malmo years later and laughed about our earlier predicament. But we never forgot!


So when we were confronted with another ferry crossing in the Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, we were prepared. The ferry provides transport across the Orange River which divides South Africa and Namibia. We had a long day drive ahead of us over uncertain roads to the Fish River Canyon in Namibia and we would have preferred to end our stay at the Sendelingsdrif Rest Camp right after breakfast at dawn, but the immigration offices for South Africa and Namibia do not open until 8:00 am ... which is the exact same time that the Pont - which is what they call their ferry - makes it first ride across the Orange into Namibia.

Oh well. We slept until a luxurious 6:30 before hitting the passport window at 8:00. It beat the alternative drive backtracking south east through the entire Richtersveld to the highway where we had gotten off the day before. That had taken us almost 3 hours of hard driving.

We watched another Pont crossing from the view deck at the reception center while we were waiting. You can fit two cars on the Pont or one car with a trailer. The Pont is connected to heavy overhead cables that keep it from drifting down the Orange and probably helps save on gas.

Our turn to cross ...












Everyone out of the car.

Our pilot.

there's Namibia

the Orange

that was fast!

Welcome to Namibia!