Of all the places that I've been to on this trip, Namibia has easily been the most varied - both in terms of the environment/landscape, and also the activities we've taken part in. It's been a place that's been packed with close encounters... although they didn't exactly get off to the best of starts - at the first campsite in Namibia, at a place called Rundu, there was a scorpion in the shower block and I had a snake slither out from under a garden rock and hiss at me as I walked past - I still get the shivers just thinking about it! Thankfully though there were far more enjoyable encounters to be had along the way as well.
Our first touristy encounter was at Etosha National Park. People we'd met along the way, who'd been travelling in the opposite direction to us, had raved about Etosha and all the animals they'd seen there. I'm thinking our timing must not have been so great though, because aside from the usual zebra/wildebeest/gazelle (it's amazing to think that sightings of these animals could ever seem "usual"!), and the odd giraffe running or drinking at a water hole (not as elegant as we've come to expect from these beautiful, graceful animals), the most amazing sight we saw on day one was that of enormous, menacing storm clouds rolling in. We stayed at some (enclosed) camping grounds in the park that night and fortunately managed to set up our tents before the torrential rain set in. Somewhat less fortunately, I didn't put the fly on my tent up correctly and so spent most of the night soaking up the puddles that kept forming in the corners and sticking my arms out into the rain to wring out sopping wet towels, only to have to start the whole mopping and wringing process all over again. In hindsight that might have been a good night to upgrade! The coolest thing about the camp was that part of it looked out over a watering hole... but I think animals must be scared of storms too, because although we sat there until our eyes started playing tricks on us, I'm not convinced that we actually saw anything (aside from hundreds of moths and bugs that were investigating the one spotlight shining on the scene).
All of the next day was spent driving through Etosha and searching for rhinos (the one animal that most of us had only seen in the far distance, if at all). We drove onto the giant salt pan that sits in the middle of the park - surprisingly, the drive there reminded me of the last part of the drive/walk to Mont St Michel (if you can ignore the fact that there wasn't actually a town on a hill in the background that we were heading towards!). We also saw the brownest, filthiest looking waterfall I've ever come across. The day was shaping up to be pretty boring (and to be honest, disappointing) on the animal front until suddenly, sometime well into the afternoon, Darlington stopped the truck, woke up those people who'd fallen asleep, and pointed out the rhino that was about 70m away. Quiet slumber was quickly replaced with excited chatter and the sound of shutters, and all of a sudden the day was a success. After everyone had had their fill (and taken more photos than they'd ever be able to make even mum or dad sit through), we carried on, and less than 5 mins down the road we stumbled across another rhino - only this one was chilling out and munching away right on the road edge. The cameras went wild again, and you could feel the relief emanating off Darlington in waves! After a happy half hour or more of snapping and checking out the characteristics that showed this was a black rhino rather than white (incidentally, did you know that "white" rhino is a bit of a misnomer - and originally came about because of a general mispronunciation of "wide"), we were happy to move on and head towards the exit. Etosha had one more treat up her sleeve for us though, and on our way out we came across a pride of lions with three little cubs who were in a very playful mood. We watched, delighted, as they stalked up behind and pounced on each other and then rolled around in the dust play fighting and clearly having a ball - it was only the threat of huge fines for leaving the park after it's 6 o'clock closing time that eventually dragged us away.
Next in line on the list of close encounters were cheetahs, and plenty of them. We spent the afternoon at Otjitotongwe Cheetah Farm, where the owners have converted part of their property into a sanctuary for the animals. The resident cheetahs were all captured when they wandered into local villages looking for prey in the form of livestock - the villagers phone these guys, who pick up the animals and let them loose in their fenced off enclosure, thereby saving the cheetahs from being shot and killed by the farmers. The enclosure is already pretty huge (about 250 hectares), but the family has plans to extend it across the entire 7000 hectares of their farm. First up for our "meet and greet" were the family's 3 pet cheetahs, who wandered around amongst us and sat for some great photo opps - one of them licked my knee as I scratched behind its ear and even turned around at one point and playfully gripped my hand in its mouth. Playful perhaps, but also a tad concerning! Being licked by a cheetah is a bizarre sensation - it's kind of like having a rough exfoliating scrub, or as though someone's rubbing a piece of pumice over your skin.
Once the pets had had enough of us, we moved on to see the wild ones. We drove through the enclosure in an open ute and trailer - and were quickly being stalked and followed by the 15-odd cheetahs that live there. It quickly became apparent that this was feeding time - because they can't roam free, the guys who run the place have to come in here to feed them large chunks of meat every couple of days. We pulled up to a stop and the cheetahs, who seem to have formed themselves into 2 rival groups, started facing off against each other. It's pretty awesome being able to lean over the edge of a vehicle and find yourself just a metre or so away from the world's fastest land animal. One surprising aspect of the encounter was listening to them as they spoke to each other - I hadn't expected it to be quite so high pitched and piercing. Although they might sound a bit screechy for a big cat, they showed what they were all about when meat was thrown in their direction - it seemed to be a bit of a competition to see who could get fed first, and the cheetahs would jump up and try to catch the bones mid-air before any of the others could get near them. The explosive power as they took off once they'd successfully got their bit was incredible, and gave you a real sense of just how fast these beautiful creatures can move.
One final thing to note about Otjitotongwe - it has one of the weirdest and most disturbing bars I've ever been to. There was a massive eland head mounted on the wall, together with things like snake skins, shark jaws and the trunk and ears of some poor elephant. They had also set up a shot shute - by using a warthog butt pinned on the wall - and they had a ton of photos on a cork board which showed some (very drunken) people using the thing! So odd - I still get the creeps just thinking about it.
Otjitotongwe marked the last real animal stop of the tour. No more game parks or scheduled wildlife photo opps for us... but still plenty more to see. The next stop was at Spitzkoppe - a group of massive granite rocks in the Namib desert. The landscape reminds me a bit of somewhere like Ayers Rock, with these huge red mounds jutting up in the middle of (a very flat and barren) nowhere. Here it was a case of real bush camping - trying to find a site that was a little less rocky and uneven than everywhere else to pitch your tent on, and devising an "occupied" signal for the lone long drop that was hidden in a crevice in the rocks. We climbed to the top of one of the rocks to watch the sunset over the dessert - about half of us made it all the way to the top, the other half looked like ants by the time we got there!
That night we had dinner round the camp-fire, complete with toasted marshmallows for dessert, and listened to stories about past trips that Darlington had taken here. On one of them, all of the group bar one had gone for a walk during the day, and the guy that stayed behind watched as a leopard casually walked through the camp. That clearly played on a few people's minds as when a small group wandered off to the long drop just before bed, they suddenly started yelling out as they were convinced that they'd seen a pair of eyes in the bushes around the camp. That got us all started, and kicked off a discussion about whether they were yellow eyes or white (yellow = danger, white is probably harmless). Eventually everyone calmed down and we headed off to bed thinking that was the end of it... until we woke in the middle of the night to hear Simon screaming and scrambling about - as though he was being attacked. After a very long 5 seconds or so, Karlissa, his girlfriend, started yelling "arghhh, Simon, arghhh". I lay in my sleeping bag convinced that they'd gone out to pee and were being attacked by a leopard - it was horrendous. Maybe half a minute later there was silence, and someone yelled out asking them if they were ok - they were, and they apologised... and then I might have told them that they had some explaining to do in the morning! Turns out Simon has very vivid nightmares... and he'd dreamt that a leopard was trying to come into their tent... and so he'd started yelling and kicking out at it... only in fact he was kicking Karlissa... which made her scream. And there you have it.
After our extreme bush camping in Spitzkoppe, we made a return to civilisation in Swakopmund. It was heaven - there were beds, walls, restaurants and shops. Things I hadn't realised I would miss so much (aside from the beds of course!). We had a group dinner at a restaurant called Neopolitana, which gave everyone a chance to try some kind of game - my springbok medallions were phenomenal, as was the steak I had at Spar a couple of nights later. There was plenty of time just to chill out in Swakopmund, and to pick up a few souvenirs (with only a week to go at this point, I didn't feel too bad about stuffing my already full pack with presents for home... and momentos for me!).
Swakopmund wasn't just about chilling out though - it was also adrenaline central for this part of the trip. There were plenty of optional activities, and in the end I opted for a bit of 4WD quad biking and sand-boarding in the dunes. The quad biking was brilliant - the guys off our tour basically made up the entire group, with just a couple of tag alongs making up the numbers. One of them was a very sweet German guy who, when he discovered that Caroline was from Munich, threw his arms wide in the air and shouted "You're German? Yaaaaay!!". Poor Caroline - that became the most frequently used phrase for the rest of the trip! Initially I was a bit of a scaredy cat and opted to join the "medium" group, but after getting stuck behind the one other random guy, who insisted on slowing down when you were meant to speed up (honestly people!), I released the inner speed demon and joined Sara in the fast crew and spent the rest of the ride on full throttle, trying not to shriek or let go of the handlebars in fright! The "ahhhhh" moment of the afternoon came when we rode over the top of a dune and all of a sudden found ourselves looking out over the Atlantic Ocean. Such an amazing sight when for the last couple of hours we'd seen nothing but sand. To top off a wonderful adventure, when we dropped off the bikes at the centre we were introduced to the company's beautiful pet Macaw, who we had to nickname Ritchie in honour of our rugby world cup winning captain.
The next day, a group of us moved on to sandboarding. Here we had a couple of options - there were lie down boards, which were basically greased up planks of ply wood and stand up boards, which were essentially greased up snowboards. In lie down boarding, you hold up the front edge of the board (it acts as a barrier and prevents you from eating half the dune as you slide down the slope on your belly), and then throw yourself down the dune - if you manage to get up enough speed you can end up shooting up the other side as well, which saves you a bit of effort on the hike back! If you feel yourself going wonky on the way down, you can stick your feet in the sand behind you and that magically seems to straighten up the board... but it also slows you down a bit so it really is a question of judging what you're after the most - it's fair to say there was an awful lot of sideways sliding going on when it came to my turn! I registered in at 72kph on their speedo, which I thought wasn't too bad for a first timer!
Most of the time though I was trying out stand up boarding. Despite having now spent a week and a half in Chamonix over the past couple of years trying to learn how to snowboard, I'm still rubbish at it. Turns out those non-existent skills transfer very nicely across to sandboarding too - I had a lot of fun though and was very relieved to discover that sand dunes are much softer to fall on than icy beginner slopes! Also the temperature in the desert is definitely more my cup of tea than that on a snowy, windy mountain top. One thing I didn't think through before signing up for this however was the fact that (1) there are no chair lifts on sand dunes, and (2) trudging up sand dunes while wearing heavy snow boarding boots and carrying a snowboard is bloody hard work! Proudest moment of the day was when i managed to go over the wooden "jump" and land on the board (before then losing my balance and tumbling down the slope!) - and this was despite bailing on my first attempt and getting a killer graze right across my butt cheek as I slid down and across/into the top of the wooden edge. Battle scars are cool right?!
From Swakopmund we headed to Sesriem and Sossusvlei. Here, red sand dunes have formed in the shape of a semi-ellipse with a dry river bed running through the middle of it. The river occasionally floods, and where it runs into the dunes (and can get no further) it forms a vlei, which is like a small clay pan/lake surrounded by orangey-red sand dunes that have a small amount of vegetation growing on them. Over time, the dunes shift and the river changes course, and as a result, the existing vlei may dry out and a new vlei will form elsewhere. As we were exploring the area, we walked to the Deadvlei - a clay pan that dried out when the river changed it's course. The Deadvlei is now made up of hard, cracked, white mud, with the dead, blackened remains of trees that must have once thrived there still sticking up in the middle of it. The whole area is surrounded by red dunes and deep blue skies and the contrast between the three colours is just very stark and confronting. It's apparently a very popular spot for Hollywood movies - Darlington told us how J-Lo filmed scenes for The Cell there.
Our final stop in this area was at Dune 45 - it's the iconic Namibian sand dune that you see on virtually all the postcards, key rings, magnets and other souvenirs for Namibia. I have to say, it IS massive - 80 metres high in fact - and it looks amazing when you watch the wind whipping across its front and sending sand spraying up in swirls along the sharp ridge that works its way to the top. Supposedly it's the most photographed dune in the world - and when you're there, it's easy to see why.
Talking about the wind though, it got quite fierce in this part of Namibia and at this campsite and the next one (just before Fish River Canyon), we had to put rocks and packs in the tents to prevent them from blowing away (some of us learnt the hard way that you'd have to chase the tent if you didn't!) At both campsites the ground was also rock solid and too hard for pegs - and although the weather was otherwise grand and I had no need to worry about lightening strikes a la Botswana, during the nights I did start to wonder whether the wind would be strong enough to pick up the tent with me and all my bags (and a few large stray rocks) in it and send us all flying across the grounds and away from camp!
Our last sightseeing stop in Namibia (after a couple of quick photo opportunities at a male baobab tree and the Tropic of Capricorn sign) was at Fish River Canyon. This is supposedly the second largest canyon in the world, after the Grand Canyon in Arizona (that's according to our Namibian guides, but word on the street suggests that may not be entirely accurate). We pulled up there an hour or so before sunset and walked along the rim to a lookout point area where the river at the bottom bends in a horseshoe shape. It was impressive, but I guess it was always going to be hard to compete with the multi-coloured rock and sheer scale of the Grand Canyon... and I think it would have made more of an impact if I hadn't seen (and been blown away by) the Grand Canyon just 6 months earlier. Never mind - it was still cool, and the sunset was absolutely amazing.
The one thing that I still can't get over about Namibia is the sheer size of the place - we spent 11 days here, which is as long as we had in Tanzania/Zanzibar, and although there were no 16 hour days in the truck, we did travel a fair distance on most of those days... and yet when you look at our route marked out on a map of the country, it looks as though we barely scratched the surface! Same could be said for this entire trip I suppose - hard to believe really.
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