So Angola is not a popular tourist destination. I have observed through experience that in general, countries in Africa that have oil money do not give a hot goddamn about tourism. Because they don't have to. They have oil money.

Angola certainly falls into this category. During our entire time in Angola, each person we met asked us some version of "What the fuck are you doing here?". For the most part they didn't seem to grasp the concept of visiting another country just for shits.

No matter. I'd dreamed of visiting Angola since I was a little kid. Growing up I was unusually interested in Africa, reading novels by Nigerian writers and listening to music from around the continent, but especially Angola. Bonga Kwenda's heart-wrenching songs about the Angolan civil war captivated me. Now we were here! Life is magic.

Angola's civil war started the second they became independent from Portugal and lasted from 1975 to 2002, as the Angolans fighting against the Portuguese colonialists splintered into a communist group and an anti-communist group the second they no longer had a common enemy. Soon the US and USSR were funding the opposite sides in a proxy war between the Cold War enemies. Angola itself had been slapped together out of adjacent tribal territories to serve Portugal's interests, and as soon as they were gone, tribal conflicts helped fuel the civil war.

For many years, Angola was almost impossible to visit, it was one of the most difficult countries in the world as tourist visas were nearly nonexistent. It had opened up more within the past year, thankfully for us, but not that anyone had told anybody inside Angola this.

If Angola had a tourist attraction, and it doesn't, but if it did, it would be Kalandula Falls. I've seen a lot of great waterfalls all over the world, and others are bigger and wetter or whatever. I've been dangled over the edge of Victoria Falls with only a guide I literally just met seconds before holding my wet ankles. But I think Kalandula Falls are the prettiest waterfalls I've seen.

The sheer number of different lovely streams of water was captivating, as rainbows arced through the spray rising up from the bottom of the falls.

Once we'd taken our time enjoying the falls from above, there was nothing left to do but hike down and enjoy them from below. This was a terrible idea.

The path down was one vast mudslide occasionally interrupted by trees and stops to take our shoes off and wade through a river, hop on some slippery yet sharp rocks, walk over some thorns and then fall in the river again.

My friend Mike let me know he would never forgive me for this, even though this was absolutely not my idea and he knew it.

At the bottom of the falls, we were treated to more rainbows and more water and the treat of getting very, very wet.

The hike back up was like the hike down, only uphill. This was Mike's favorite travel experience ever.

One thing I'd found interesting on our drive to falls from the capital city of Luanda was that our driver didn't know where the falls were. We'd paid a fair bit to have drivers and guides take us around the various places we were visiting. Angola isn't really set up for this, I'd found literally one tour online and it was preposterously expensive, so we'd gone with some quasi-reputable fixer we'd found through the grapevine. This choice began to concern me a little when we got to the general area of the falls and our driver asked us if we knew how to get there.

We eventually found it though and I really liked our driver, so we couldn't be mad at him just because he was a tour guide/driver and had never been to the closest thing his country has to a tourist site. On the way to the falls we were taking in the landscape and listening to local music on the radio. We drove by a massive mural of Michael Jackson painted on the side of a building.

"Whoa that's weird," I commented.

"Yeah. The Michaels are very popular in Angola," our driver answered.

"The Michaels?"

"Yes. Jackson and Jordan."

Hmmm.

We sat in silence for a long thoughtful moment, then the song that had been playing in the background this entire time, which we had tuned out to background noise because we don't speak any Portuguese at all, suddenly hit the chorus and just as suddenly was in English.

"Oooooooooooh Michael Jackson! Awwwwwwwwww Michael Jackson! Oooooooooooooh Michael Jackson!"

Mike and I burst out laughing. God that was weird. Any time for the rest of the trip (or ever since, honestly) when something would go sideways, one of us would sum it up with a plaintive "Ooooooooooh Michael Jackson."

About halfway to the falls our driver pulled over to get gas. This isn't that weird in and of itself, but where he pulled over was a bit strange. It wasn't a gas station. It was a shipping container just dumped by the side of the road. And this shipping container was, somehow... a gas station. I mean it was apparently full of gas and a dude standing in front of it was taking money so that you could pump some of this sloshing shipping container gas into your vehicle. This is maybe one of the more sketchy gas-related things I've ever seen.

We had to wait our turn, as the driver of a pickup truck in front of us was pumping endless gallons of gas into a huge tub in the bed of his truck.

OK, I take it back. THIS is the sketchiest gas-related thing I've ever seen.

We watched in silent fascination and waited for the explosion. This guy was pumping gas for probably twenty minutes into this massive plastic container, so there was a lot of silent fascination. We kind of wanted to see it blow up, but maybe not when we were parked so close. We imagined a fireball so huge all they'd find were some charred goat hooves and a single melted speaker that was somehow still playing "Ohhhhh Michael Jackson."

Sadly but not sadly, we all survived this experience. Even the goats.

We were staying near the falls in a decent little hotel but there really weren't any restaurants nearby. I'd heard there was a nice resort with a good restaurant on the other side of the falls, so I asked our driver if he'd take us there. He agreed somewhat apprehensively, but he was game.

We drove across a bridge and doubled back the way we'd come, now on the opposite side of the gorge, with the river far below us. Night was falling and an ominous storm was brewing on the horizon, and then very quickly all around us. As we turned off the main road and onto a scrubby, narrow dirt road, the trees we drove by were backlit by an eerie, fading orange sky.

As the road narrowed further, lightning struck in the distance, intensely lighting the entire scene for a brief flash. Lightning continued to strike in the distance, outlining the trees as dark black silhouettes. Wow this is cool! Our driver slowed as the brush was scraping the sides of our truck. Is this even still a road? We bumped and crunched along through the gathering dark.

The lightning flashed again and I saw... some... THING run across the road. It was comically long, like a weasel, but too big to be that, and had a banded mask like a raccoon. I saw it lit up for a brief second as it darted across the road in front of us, and then it was gone. Wow. What was that thing?

After the trip I flipped through images of all the animals in Angola and never found that weird bugger.

Another half-hour of awesome atmospherics and intense mood lighting later, we pulled up to the resort, rain hammering on the roof of our truck. Our driver said something about not being able to afford dinner as we were dashing through the rain and heading for cover inside.

On the balcony on the back side of the hotel, we were treated with an absolutely amazing view of the falls from the other side, which were completely invisible except when lightning struck and then, suddenly and briefly, it was high noon on some strange planet.

In-between the lightning strikes, the roaring sound of the falls pushed through us and the waterfall spray mixed with the rain and swirled through the electric night air. What an awesome place.

Once we'd got our fill of basking in the scene and trying to time lightning photos, we ducked inside out of the night rain and sat down to a well-deserved dinne-HOLY SHIT this place is $100 a plate! We left.

Our second must-see on Angola's non-existent list of imaginary tourist attractions were the Pedras Negras de Pungo Andongo. These black rock formations are millions of years old and aren't black but it's too late to get your money back now, sucker.

The prevalent dense fog was perhaps not the best timing for morning photographs, but it did add to the feeling of isolation and mysterious antiquity as we hiked up the path and began to climb the rocks.

Up top, the view disappeared into the fog, but the sounds of birds and distant donkeys emerged mysteriously from the grey.

Fog clung to the tiny flowers poking up out of the grass.

Climbing back down, we passed a threadbare waterfall disappearing into the mystery below.

Nearby, there are footprints embedded into the rock floor that are said to belong to Ana de Sousa Ginga of Ndongo and Matamba, the queen of Southwest Africa in the 1600s, who was revered as a great military leader.

And apparently a real heavy walker.

A baobab-adjacent tree waited patiently for the rain to begin.

We drove away through fields full of traditional huts.

And stopped for a minute to get our Ya Yas out.

Little can compare however, with our stopping at a gas station to buy some water and the VERY ready to party girls out front twerking on the hood of our car.

I was too startled to get a photo of this but I did manage a snap of the nearby Puma Lubricants. Is your Puma lubed?

That night we went out to dinner and there was live music. Oooh, I wonder what the guy is gonna play? He immediately launched into a Bonga Kwenda song and I was on cloud nine.

Soon as can be we were flying off to the Namib desert in Angola's far Southwest to check out what was up down there. Our new guide picked us up at the mini-airport and broke the news as we drove through the empty night that we couldn't stay at the hotel we'd been told we'd be at, because there was a festival or something and all the hotels were full. But don't worry, I found a good backup for you guys.

The good backup was a bona-fide shit stain of a hotel. Our room was two tiny single beds with faded cartoon sheets on them packed into what appeared to have been a utility closet. The bathroom door wouldn't close, which was great because if you closed the door you might not have been able to smell the acrid sewage stench emanating evilly from the toilet.

I've stayed in some bad hotels. Really bad. Like "I hope to write about them one day" bad. But this just seemed unnecessary and especially for the money we were paying. I caught our guide in the lobby before he disappeared and told him we were paying way too much to stay in a place like this. He hemmed and hawed, implying there was no where else in town where we could stay.

"You could stay at the ~NAME REDACTED~," the helpful girl behind the counter suggested.

"Do the rooms there smell like shit?" I asked.

She burst out laughing.

OK so good, doesn't sound like she owns this place.

Our guide hemmed and hawed some more and after I insisted several times and told him we either needed a better hotel or some of our money back, he took us to ~NAME REDACTED~ and it was big and nice and modern and approximately 107 thousand times better than the rat hole he'd tried to put us in. Travel has changed me in many ways, but perhaps the most useful has been gaining the ability to be kind of an a-hole when the situation requires it and your good nature is being taken advantage of.

In the morning we were off across the desert to see the pink dunes. Angola is home to a vast sea of sand dunes in the south, which continue on through the country of Namibia, and some of them are pink because they're girl dunes.

Eventually the road ran out and we were motoring over the dunes themselves in our little mini-SUV. Now this is more like it!

We skimmed along the top of the dunes, the beautiful sea surging in to our right, the endless dunes stretching to our left. The sun baked down from the blue sky. A huge dune loomed in front of us and our guide accelerated toward it, picking up the speed needed I'm sure to crest the top.

Wow, I thought. That's a really steep dune. Like REALLY steep. But I'm sure our guide knows what he's doing, this is what these guys do for aOH SHIT

We hit the dune like we were hitting a brick wall, as it was far too steep for us to just zip up like I'm sure our guide was intending. The front of the SUV smashed into the dune with a loud KABANG and I was thrown forward toward the windshield and into my seat belt. As the SUV lurched forward up the dune, simultaneously something large and black flew off the back, stumbled over the top of the SUV over my head, and flew over us off into the sand. We chugged the rest of the way up the dune and then stopped.

Mike and I got out, stunned. Well. So much for assuming they'd done this before. I didn't have whiplash, thankfully, but was feeling the shock to the system of the collision and would be sore the next day. Our guide and his friend were poking around the SUV, inspecting for damage. I headed back down the dune to find the piece that had flown off. The guide insisted nothing was missing but unless a tailgating goat ran into us from behind I was pretty sure a part of the SUV had broken off.

Further down the dune I found a black mudflap and part of a fender half-buried in the sand. I carried them back up the dune and handed them to our guide, who looked at me like I was an idiot.

"This isn't from my car," he pointed out.

I looked more closely and it was from a Land Rover. What in the hell? How many vehicles have crashed into this sand dune? Mike and I began to laugh at the thought of what we might find if we dug further, the parts of even more cars or perhaps the rest of the Land Rover. Weird.

We made our way to a nice vantage point on top of the pink dunes.

The sand here was indeed pink, but even more interesting, when you sat down for a minute, the wind would gently blow the pink sand around you, so when you stood up, there was a teardrop-shaped halo of dark reddish sand in the spot where you'd been sitting.

I hiked off to see the dunes from a few different angles.

We were getting ready to leave when suddenly our guide realized "Holy shit, my license plate is missing!" and we had to drive back to the car crash dune to find it. So that's what flew off when we hit!

We made our way out of the dunes and down to the beach, where we got a nice seaside sit in and I got to chase the absolutely gigantic crabs on the beach.

Further down the beach we pulled over to inspect a shipwreck, and Mike wasted no time at all climbing the mast of it.

Returning safely back to town against all odds, we were greeted by a mermaid trying to squeeze a fish for its delicious juices.

We stopped into a store for drinks and I was mesmerized by this package of 48 Stylish Jeans, which if I ever have a baby I don't want that thing shitting in anything less stylish than disposable jeans.

The next day we were off to explore Colinas Canyon, a bizarre yet beautiful Martian landscape in the desert of Angola.

Leaving the desert, we passed through a small village and got stuck behind some kind of tractor, which allowed me to make the acquaintance of these wonderful goats.

And this kid on a donkey.

And this awesome Dr Seuss tree.

We were on our way to Lagoa Dos Arcos, a crossroads and viewpoint full of rock formations in the middle of the vast nothingness.

I took an hour or two to sit on the top of the rocks and meditate, watching motorcycles come from miles away and watching them motor away for miles more as they passed the crossroads. Watching cows very slowly wander by. It was extremely peaceful and the vast sense of space really cleared the mind.

From there we drove for hours, stopping at a viewpoint where a semi-truck had gone through the railing and tumbled on down the mountainside some long time ago.

As we drove up the endless switchbacks that climbed an impressive mountain face, the curving road was full of potholes, and local kids had filled them with rocks, and swept the tops of the filled holes smooth with tree branches as an assistance to drivers. An assistance they expected to be compensated for, and they would yell loudly and chase you car if you didn't throw change at them as you drove by, like a non-existent toll booth. After several instances of this I finally found the change in the bottom of my bag, but then there were no more child labor road crews to share it with.

We stopped for the night at a hotel/crocodile farm in Lubango because that's what you do. The geese loudly protested our presence and the guinea pigs quietly asked us if the rumors were true and there were goddamned CROCODILES right around the corner.

In the morning we made our way to Tundavala, a vertiginous split in the mountain that you can stare straight down into if you dare (I did, but while holding on for dear life) or climb up the side to take in the view of everything on that side of the Earth.

Bare-breasted local women from the Mwila tribe with cow shit decoratively braided into their hair tried to sell us trinkets as we took in the view. I didn't feel right taking photos of them since we weren't buying any of their shit and also they were naked.

From there it was to the other end of town to see the Senhora Do Monte Chapel and its lovely cactus garden.

Up in the hills surrounding Lubango there is "Christ the King," a giant Jesus singing "I Believe I Can Fly". You have to listen really closely to hear the singing.

There are apparently stairs inside Jesus but the door was locked. I was pretty sure I could climb in the open window and climb up to see through Christ's eyes or whatever happens up there but Angola didn't strike me as the kind of country where they find that kind of thing funny if you get caught.

There's also a baller LUBANGO sign that Hollywood copied.

In town, another pretty church/fortress.

When we were checking in to fly back to the capital of Luanda, a security guard tried to tell me something in Portuguese, which I naturally did not understand since I do not speak Portuguese. He gestured toward my bag and seemed to be indicating something was going to be a problem. Is he pointing at my cookies? Nah, that can't be. We got into the security line.

Eventually we got to the scanner, and my bag was pulled out for further screening. They went through everything inside, including my big bag of vegan treats that keeps me alive in Africa. I was afraid for a moment they were going to tell me I couldn't bring food on the plane. Stranger things have happened. Finally, they found the roll of Hipopos in the side pocket of my bag.

Hipopos are hippo-themed chocolate cookies that I only bought because they were funny and accidentally vegan. I hadn't even opened the bag yet.

"You can't bring these on the plane," the bag scanner person told me in limited English.

"What? Why?"

She couldn't explain. Just no Hipopos on the plane, you maniac.

Is... I'm struggling to think of a reason why these are a problem while the rest of the food in my bag is fine. Is it... because they're round? Does this person just really want my Hipopos?

In defiance of this illogic I decided to eat my Hipopos right then and there. I opened the bag, stuffed one in my mouth and... ooh. Oh these are gross. Never mind I change my mind you can keep these.

My best guess is that the cylindrical shape of the cookie bag meant maybe you could hide a shiv in them or something. You get used to this kind of stuff in Africa and just roll with it.

The last thing we wanted to see was the Ship Graveyard outside of Luanda. We met yet another guide and driver and they took us to... yeah they have no idea where this is. After a while we eventually found it. We were informed that we could look at the shipwrecks littering the beach but couldn't take photos, because there was a guy there acting like he owned the photography rights to all shipwrecks everywhere. We eventually gave him a little money to go away and we were in shipwreck heaven.

The beach was absolutely jammed with massive fishing vessels that had apparently not realized Angola was here. As far as the eye could see in either direction. Why do so many ships wreck here? Does Angola not have radar? Do they need a lighthouse? Can we chip in? Mysteries of the universe.

Mike and I wasted no time on common sense and immediately started climbing the decrepit, rusting hulks of the gargantuan fishing trawlers.

Climbing these things was a dicey proposition of course, as rusted stairs collapsed into nothingness and there were no guarantees as the sturdiness of the various rail-free ledges we were walking around on. But it was a lot of fun.

After leaping from rusted beam to beam in the flooded base of a wrecked ship, we made our way up the rungs to the next level up. The biggest challenge was hoisting yourself over the top once you got to the highest rung, without castrating yourself on a rust razor or loose bolt.

Our guide had apparently never been to the ocean before, evidenced by the fact that when we got to the beach, she pointed at some crabs and said "Oh wow, seafood!". Regardless of this and the fact that she seemed vaguely terrified of the whole place, we managed to talk her into climbing one of the ships with us and she was an absolute trooper.

From up above we watched the locals drag in their fishing nets as they tried their level best to ignore our tomfoolery.

The only thing that stopped me on my upward journey were these absolutely fucked rungs that were supposed to take you up the mast of the tall tower that pulled in the nets. Magled and snapped off in every direction, these rungs seemed more like a gag or an invitation to get tetanus than anything else. I found another way to climb up the tower but realized that afterwards I'd have to jump down, and I didn't feel good about the odds of the floor I'd be jumping down onto not giving way and depositing me into the sea, so I decided this was high enough.

Back down on the beach we progressed to older and older shipwrecks, which were harder to identify as much more than formless conglomerations of rust.

Herons looked on, pecking for fish and eyeing us suspiciously.

Ah. Goodbye Angola. You were lovely and one day, maybe soon you'll find out what a tourist is. And you'll laugh and laugh because who in the hell would want to do that?