To remind you, we spent 22 days on an overland tour from with Drifters, Inc. (www.drifters.com) with four other travellers (we had a 16-person truck to ourselves!). We started in Cape Town before heading north to Namibia for the next 12 days, then a brief excursion into the Okavango Delta in Botswana followed by a couple of days in Victoria Falls, and ending with a quick trip through Zimbabwe to get back into South Africa (Johannesburg). The trip out of South Africa was not very exciting as it rained on us the entire way. Luckily our guide, Belinda, was able to pull a few strings and secure accommodation in a B&B for the night, otherwise our first camping experience was not going to be pleasant.
Once we got into Namibia, the weather took a permanent turn for the better, and our day spent canoeing on the Orange River (which forms the border between South Africa and Namibia) was absolutely lovely. It turns out that we canoe downstream, and the current is strong enough that the only time we really needed to paddle was to keep ourselves straight in the rapids. The rest of the time we just kicked back and watched the lovely scenery and wildlife pass by. Check out the plover chasing away the monitor lizard.
Orange River
Once we got into Namibia, the weather took a permanent turn for the better, and our day spent canoeing on the Orange River (which forms the border between South Africa and Namibia) was absolutely lovely. It turns out that we canoe downstream, and the current is strong enough that the only time we really needed to paddle was to keep ourselves straight in the rapids. The rest of the time we just kicked back and watched the lovely scenery and wildlife pass by. Check out the plover chasing away the monitor lizard. We wandered out along the river's edge near the camp to enjoy the geometric rock forms and nice scenery.
Fish River Canyon
We then spent an afternoon at Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world. We enjoyed a walk along the edge of the canyon, looking out over the myriad mini-canyons leading down to Fish River. It was impressive to learn that the river managed to carve this canyon and it doesn’t have water year round! As we walked back, the sunset cast a nice glow over the canyon walls and interesting plant life of the region (lots of succulents!).
Desert Camp
Next we spent a couple of days at the Drifter’s Desert Camp, which looked more like a massive grassland than the desert plain that it normally is. It turns out that Namibia has been suffering from serious drought, but this year they had lots of rain. So, everywhere we looked flowers were blooming, grass was growing, and the antelopes were extremely fat and having babies. This camp was really beautiful, with huge mountains of red or black boulders scattered across the landscape. These mountains are a result of magma that a long time ago pushed its way up into crevices in the rock above, hardened, and when the surrounding rock was eroded away, they eroded more slowly to form these huge boulder piles. Some of the resulting boulders were unbelievably massive. We climbed up one for sundowners one night (this is a lovely South African custom of finding beaut places to sit and watch the sun set while drinking copious amounts of alcohol – good fun). The succulent “trees” also seem to enjoy life in mountains, while some of the other plants grew in the red sand dunes that populate a section of the camp (that’s Peter, the farm manager and Theo, the only other male on the trip besides Ben).
We had a lot of fun watching the sociable weavers at this camp. The males build massive community nests where there is supposedly safety in numbers. Compare the size of one of their nests to our overland truck – huge! The entrances to the nests are on the bottom, so these birds would fly by our heads at top speeds before taking a right turn and shooting up into the nest and then back out again, constantly working. Also huge were some of the bugs at the camp, particularly the one posing on Ben’s shoe. Here we saw our first desert squirrels, which have adapted to life in the desert and no longer climb trees. They live in holes in the ground, and use their bushy tail both for support and as a shade during the heat of the day (it is white on the underside to reflect heat). This is critical as it can get up to 55 degrees Celsius during the summer!
Sesrium and Sossusvlei
We saw a lot more red dunes at Sesrium. As we drove in, the dunes lined the road on either side of us. It was hard to appreciate just how big they were until we saw a hot air balloon next to one of them – they are really tall! We got out at Dune 45 (supposedly the most photographed dune in Namibia), and a few of our members climbed up to check out the view before breakfast. The sand was really red in that early morning light.
Later we went out to Sossusvlei (pronounced soss-suss-flay). A vlei is (we think) an open, flatter area surrounded by dunes. We were lucky to find that this vlei still had some water in it – imagine a mini-lake in the middle of the desert. It also meant that the desert plant-life was looking great, like the desert-melons pictured here (supposedly edible… barely). We climbed up one of the dunes (you walk right along the crest of the dune) and were amazed at the view – red dunes everywhere you looked. The dunes here are star dunes, meaning that they get strong winds from all four directions. You can also have parallel dunes (winds from two opposing directions) and crescent-dunes (winds from one direction). We weren’t the only ones climbing the dunes; there were beetle tracks everywhere. You could see these little guys running all over the slopes; they go just as fast uphill as down (and the crows love them either way). We followed suit and had a great time bounding down the steep slope of the dune.
Swakupmund
We took a break from camping and spent a couple of nights at the Drifter’s Inn in Swakupmund (you may remember it as the town where Brangelina gave their press conference on baby Shiloh). For such a lovely sea-side town, it has an interesting name: “swakup” is derived from the local word for bottom excretement (“tsaokhaub”), and “mund” means “mouth”. Yup, shitmouth. Actually, it means that the city is located at the mouth of the Swakup river, which seems to have been named that because of its appearance during flood. Lovely, eh? In any case, we didn’t check out the river, mainly because we were too busy with fun adventure activities. Ben tried his hand at sandboarding. Unlike our attempt in Peru, this time they used real snowboards and boots and Ben got to stand up….. well, at least he was standing at the start of each run (check out all the sand on his face). ;-) He was accompanied by two lovely ladies from our trip: Gerlinde and Verena (our very own sand dancer). After sandboarding, we both went on a 4x4 expedition – Ben on beefed-up manual and Karen on a tamer automatic. We both had a lot of fun, driving up the sides of dunes, enjoying the awesome desert scenery (can you see our tracks?), and getting really sandy. We were also joined by friends from the tour: Theo (to the left of Karen) and Christine (to the right), as well as our guide (not pictured).
Cape Cross Seal Colony
Leaving Swakupmund, we stopped by the Cape Cross seal colony. There are an unbelievable number of seals here: basking on the shore, playing in the breakers and just hanging out in the ocean seemingly oblivious to the pounding surf. They are actually a type of sea-lion, and we were really lucky that it was a cross-shore wind that day because that many seals (~100000) sure create a stink!
Spitzkoppe
We stayed that night in Spitzkoppe, home of some excellent boulder scenery. It was amazing to see these mountains of boulders rising out of the otherwise flat land we had been driving through for the last 150kms. These rocks were great to climb on as shoes easily gripped their rough surface. We weren’t the only ones enjoying a climb on the rocks as we encountered many rock dassies (hyraxes) hanging out with their ever-watchful sentries on top of the cliffs. We also saw a different type of birds’ nests here – maybe the semi-social weaver ;-)
Twyfelfontein and Palmwag
Leaving Spitzkoppe, we headed to Twyfelfontein, home to the most San rock art in Namibia and set amongst yet more boulders and impressive rock shapes. Our guide for the site (not Belinda) was less than inspiring and managed to lose all of us halfway through the tour, but we still managed to enjoy the rock art as well as the brightly-colored lizards and cool plant life (we think the fuzzy plant is desert edelweiss). Most of the art here was carvings such as the elephant (next to Theo), the giraffe, and the dancing kudu surrounded by raindrops. We didn’t follow the guide so well, but we think that the carvings were representations of what the San shamans saw during their visions and/or were to help the shamans attain the necessary hypnotic state. The shamans were transformed into animals during their visions (we think), hence some animals with human characteristics, like the lion with human hands. There was only one painting at this site, the one depicting human figures. They used only natural materials to make the paints. The art at Twyfelfontein is 2000 to 6000 years old. We stayed the night at Palmwag, an oasis sometimes visited by desert elephants; however, they didn’t visit while we were there.
Etosha
Our last major stop in Namibia was Etosha National Park, and it was really good! We stayed at Okaukuejo (which means “woman who gives birth to one child each year”) camp our first night, and it had an excellent water hole that was lit at night. We enjoyed night-time viewing of elephants, rhinos, a hyena, and some smaller animals like jackals and genets (a type of cat). It was amazing to see how much more active rhinos are at night. We got to watch two male, black rhinos trying to assert dominance (it was amazing to hear a rhino “roar”), as well as a male and female black rhino doing what seemed like a courting dance in the middle of the water. A female rhino tried to assert her dominance over an elephant and was quickly rebuffed. We lost a lot of sleep that night, but it was worth it!
We spent most of the time in Etosha in grassland areas where we saw abundant numbers of animals: wildebeest, black-backed jackals, banded mongooses, warthogs, a lone rhino, birds, antelopes, and zebras. Some of the birds we saw were the yellow-billed hornbill (or “flying banana” as one of our safari guides called it), a pair of secretary birds, some eagles, Kori bustards (the heaviest flighted bird in Africa), and plenty of flamingos.
Most of the antelope in the park were springbok. We really enjoyed watching the males show off for the ladies with their particular springing run (pronking). We also saw some red hartebeest (named because their horns form a heart shape), kudu, black-faced impala (different from the loads of impala in Kruger because of the black triangle on their faces), and the beautiful oryx or gemsbok. We learned that the oryx can handle a body temperature of up to 45 degrees Celsius because of a network of blood vessels in its nose that cools the blood before it reaches the brain (a fine example of a biological heat exchanger, appealing to our engineering backgrounds). However, the best thing about the oryx has to be their horns; they are sooooooo long!
There were many, many zebra out in Etosha. We learned that they rub their heads on each other as a form of bonding or non-verbal communication. Also, the stripe-pattern is different from zebra to zebra (check out the one whose stripes turn into squiggles on his back – you can also see the shadow stripes which are a hallmark of the Burchell’s zebra). And, finally!, we have an answer to why the zebras are striped. Supposedly, the zebras’ predators (lions, leopards) are color-blind, and when chased, the zebras weave back and forth causing the predators to have trouble picking out an individual from the herd. Cool, huh?
Etosha means “great white place” and we thought it was called that because of the wide grasslands; however, it is actually named after the huge salt flats in the park. Another interesting feature of this area are the very tall termite mounds (and there is as much under the ground as there is above it!). Some of them looked to be 4 meters tall and in some places the tops seem to point off in random directions.
Once we found a few trees we saw lots of lovely giraffes and elephants. Some interesting giraffe facts that we learned: their babies fall about a meter to the ground when they’re born, their spots get darker as they get older, they start to grow a third bony “horn” above and between their eyes as they age, and you can tell the male and females apart by how hairy their horns are – males’ horns are bald (and no, not because of male-pattern baldness) because the hair is worn off during fighting when they hit each other with their horns. We definitely saw more elephants at the water-hole than during the day time, but we did catch one fellow having a good old scratch on a broken off tree. Can you find the elephant with five legs? ;-)
The highlight of our time in Etosha had to be the lions; we saw fourteen lions in one day – awesome! It started off with three lovely lionesses out for an early morning hunt. They already looked pretty well fed, and they took a little break from hunting to have a bit of play time with each other, which was really nice to see. We then saw a male lion who was walking away from us, but he gave us a nice parting profile shot. As if this wasn’t enough, a bit further on a pride of lions headed across the road – nine lionesses and young males. Our day was crowned that afternoon when we came across another male lion napping on the side of the road. He woke up enough to give us a sleepy stare and a great big yawn. What a day!
Namibian Roads
One of the great advantages to being on an overland tour is that you don't have to worry about any of the driving. We just sat back in our reclining seats, listened to some music, and watched the scenery move past. We saw some abundant desert flora, some grass plains that seemed to stretch off to infinity, interesting mountains, and the locals doing their things: herding goats, driving donkeys, or hanging out in their villages. We also saw an ostrich day care - how cute!
We had one last night in Namibia before heading out to Botswana. We stayed at Ngepi camp on the banks of the Kavango river. They have a “pool” in the river, basically a floating cage. We went in so we could say that we swam with the crocs and hippos. In actuality, we saw neither and basically froze ourselves. The best part about the campsite were the bathrooms – each of the showers and toilets was decorated or had funny signs such as marking the flush pull with “pull here to call the dungbeetle.”
We’ll leave the second half of our overland tour for another blog – we’ve mooched off of our friends’ Kieran and Rochelle’s internet long enough (thanks guys!). Just an update on us: we have settled for the moment in Canberra, Australia staying in the spare room at Ben’s dad’s house. Don’t ask us what our plans for the far future are, as of now we don’t know. Our short-term plans are to spend a couple of months camping around the country (joined for two weeks by a U.S. friend, Christina (who you may recall from our U.S. travels hosting us in Texas) yay!) before coming back to Canberra. We’ll hopefully get the second half of this blog up before we go!
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