Angola’s highways are brand spanking new and the landmines have largely been cleared. Dale Morris had the time of his life exploring the parks, deserts, war sites and buzzing cities. In the first of a three-part series of articles, he discusses a southern circular route.

A half-buried cog here, a sardine tin there; I eyed them all with suspicion and gave them a wide berth while walking off, spade in hand, to do my ablutions. To my untrained eye, the detritus of more than three decades of war and the litter from the locals all looked like landmines.

It was my first night in Angola and our eight-car convoy had pulled off to camp in the flat mopani scrub close to the southern town of Cahama, a ramshackle place where half-buried tanks and Soviet troop carriers litter the road margins.

“Don’t worry,” said Martin le Roux, our bearded Namibian guide whose job it was to see us safely through three weeks and 4500km of Angolan roads. “This area has been cleared of mines. Look, there are people and cows here.”

There were, and none of them were missing any limbs.

The landmines I feared were a legacy of three decades of war, civil war and rebellions that amputated Angola from the tourism map. When the wars ended soon after the killing of Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002, hundreds of thousands of landmines, along with ruined roads and railways, made Angola unsafe to visit.

But with Savimbi’s death came the chance to rebuild, which is what Angolans have been doing ever since. Most major roads have been upgraded from potholed mud tracks to gleaming new highways, while the removal of landmines has made the western provinces of Cunene, Huíla, Namibe, Benguela, Cuanza Sul, Huambo and Bengo much safer.

Although the war is evident in the bullet-riddled buildings of the cities and the big guns and military vehicles that lie derelict here and there, Angola offers much more than just battlefields to the visitor, I realised on a visit in November last year as a guest of the 4x4 touring outfit Live the Journey.

The inland highlands with their fertile plains and rugged dramatic escarpments can make the Drakensberg look quite tame, while the Namib desert reaches into southwestern Angola.

In the north, towards the Congo, tropical forests and steamy mountains dominate, while cities such as Lubango, Lobito, Namibe, Huambo and Luanda each have a distinctive, hectic flavour.

Angola’s Wild West can be explored on three circular routes: in the south, central area and north, respectively. Each route can be done on its own. The southern route is the subject of this article. In subsequent issues, Drive Out will feature the central and northern circular routes.

The southern route is an adventurous 1200km journey. We went north from Ruacana in Namibia along dirt tracks to the war-torn town of Cahama. From there, we climbed northwest on the brand-new B1 highway to the Highlands region of Lubango and Humpata where Afrikaans-speaking Dorsland (Thirstland) Trekkers settled the land in the 18th century.

Then we went west, down the spectacular Leba Pass. The tar road goes on to the port town of Namibe where the highway veers south, parallel to the coast to Tombua, the end of the road.

After that, only the foolhardy or the extremely well prepared like us should continue travelling south through the Iona National Park. On the coastal route, you enter the vast desert where there are only dunes and beaches and marshes and pans.

The infamous Acre of Death is on an 18km stretch of desert beach where 60-metre tall dunes drop directly into the Atlantic Ocean at high tide. Many 4x4 enthusiasts have lost a vehicle to the sea here after getting their timing wrong.

The last leg back to Ruacana continued east through the park, roughly following the Cunene River, the border with Namibia.