Namibia Part 2- Landscape

After leaving Hobatere, my time in Namibia shifted from landscape to cultural and natural sites.  We stopped at a "traditional village" - aka tourist trap- to see women in traditional clothing (topless) being shown off by the polygamist males wearing all western clothing.  I don't mind polygamy.  I don't mind traditional clothing.  I do mind very clear gender imbalances, which is what I saw here-  Very young girls being taunted by older men about their bodies in front of Western visitors.  This was not traditional division of labor.  I didn't enjoy this.

The next stop was much better- a petrified forest.  Trees had washed down from central Africa when the glaciers melted millennia ago, and eventually turned to rock in the desert of Namibia.  The stones looked like wood but were hard as metal.  It was pretty amazing.  Some of them were meters long!

The final stop that day was a Twyfelfontein, site of bushman rock carvings that are thousands of years old.  My guide was an adorably eager student, who cheerfully pointed out the images of animals, maps of the land, and other marks made by early inhabitants here.  I think this was the oldest human artwork I've seen.

The lodge at Twyfelfontein was lovely, with a very cold pool set in the rocks and a delicious buffet.  There was a beautiful view of the flat countryside beyond the lodge.

The next morning was an early start. We drove over to the coast to see the seals at the Cape Cross Seal Colony.  They're actually sea lions.  They smell TERRIBLE.  But they had the most adorable baby seals!  Seriously, so cute.  There were tens of thousands of animals on the beach and in the water.

I ended the day in Swakopmund, a very German feeling city on the coast.  There were several expensive excursions available, but I had no money.  Instead I had a fairly lazy evening.  I walked down to the pier, then bought some food at the grocery store, and enjoying having a couch in the little apartment for the evening.

The next day we went back to the capital, and said farewell until the second part of the tour, to the south, which went the next day.

On the second leg, I was joined by an American couple down visiting from DRC.  It was great to have company, and really nice to talk to fellow Americans abroad! The drive the first day was fairly long.  We went south to the border of Sossusvlei National Park, where we stayed at the Desert Camp.  The first night wasn't much.  We had an amazing dinner featuring all kinds of African animals to eat- oryx, impala, ostrich, zebra, kudu, water buffalo, blue wildebeest, and more.  It was fun to try different ones!  I was such a carnivore at that restaurant.

The next morning started our exploration of Sossusvlei.  We went right to Dune 45 to start.  I hate walking on sand and climbing things, so this was just swell.  I'm kidding.  It was awful.  So exhausting.  But gorgeous views.  Then we went over to the Dune they called "Big Daddy." I didn't climb that one. I did a shorter hike to see Deadvlei, a bunch of very old trees frozen in time in the desert.

After the dunes, we left for lunch. In the late afternoon we went to Sesreim Canyon. We could walk down into the gorge caused by rain runoff.  It was really pretty in the late afternoon light.  Dinner was back at the meat buffet.  Yum.  And oh.  OH.  THE STARS.  I finally got to see that perfect night sky.

The last day was back to Windhoek, and then a few days of dealing with the embassy and passports.  In the end it all worked out, and I flew back to the US, albeit with a day delay in Germany thanks to a cancelled flight.

Namibia was a giant pain to schedule, but it was so worth the effort.  Despite the passport troubles, the lonely week on the road, and the drama of flights, I saw so much and have such a new appreciation for Southern Africa.  Someone told me once that you'll fall in love there, and I did.  I'm already scheming how I can get to Botswana.  And Zimbabwe.  And South Africa.  And back to Namibia.

native village

petrified wood

one of the longer logs

Bushman carvings

rhino carving

Twyfelfontein view

Swakopmund Pier view

view from my camp

Dunes

Climbing Dune 45

Atop Dune 45

Dune 45

Dunes

Sesreim Canyon

Sesreim Canyon

sunset at Sossusvlei lodge

I love this little guy

sea lions

Namibia Part 1- Wildlife

I'm not really sure how Namibia came about.  I hadn't even thought about going there until a couple on my Uzbekistan tour RAVED about it.  I started looking and it looked extraordinary.  I wasn't convinced, though, until a couple on my India trip also RAVED about it.  Given that there is a looming curriculum shift towards more geography, it seemed like a good chance to see a new part of the world.  I booked a tour with Wild Dog Safaris in March for a May departure, and after some back and forth trying to get the payment sent, everything was arranged. 

Getting there wasn't quite so easy.  I was squeezing this in between Ecuador and an Archaeology Field School at the end of June, and many tours were already booked because it was so last minute.  Plus, flights were CRAZY expensive.  I ended up flying from Quito to Madrid overnight on Monday, then sleeping pretty much all of Tuesday in an airport hotel in Madrid.  Wednesday morning I had an early flight to Lisbon, from where I connected to Cologne.  Once in Cologne, I got my back, rechecked in and was on my way.  Except for one thing.  I had 2 blank pages left in my passport, and the EU exit immigration agent used one.  I got to Namibia pretty sure I wasn't going to be leaving the country again with the same passport.  I emailed the embassy there, who were nothing but helpful, but also starting their Memorial Day long weekend.  In the end, I had to get an emergency passport once I'd finished my tour in Namibia, and fly back to the US to get a real one before Field School started.  It seemed convoluted, but it was the cheapest way for me to keep moving.  Go figure. 

Anyway, after the passport drama was somewhat resolved, I began my adventures in Namibia.  I had thought I was booking a group tour but it turned out that for the first week, it was just me and the guide.  That seems to happen to me a lot.  I was disappointed- I've made some great friends along the way on these group tours, and being alone meant I was more likely to fall asleep in the car and miss things.  My guide was very nice.  His name was KK and he'd lived in Namibia his entire life.  He knew so much about the history and wildlife in the country.

I wasn't sure what to expect in Namibia.  I'd read about the Skeleton Coast, sand dunes, and animals, but I was wholly unprepared for the amount of wildlife that I'd be seeing during the next week.  The tour started at Mt Etjo Safari lodge, a lovely spot right on a huge waterhole.  There were a variety of antelope there as we drove up, and more came and went throughout the day.  I was told there was a hippo, so I staked out a spot by the water the first afternoon trying to find out.  I saw a lot of birds but no hippo.  Before dinner, we went to a Cheetah feeding.  They have a rescue cheetah and her two children on site.  They have free run of a large enclosure (I couldn't see the ends of it) but aren't able to live in the wild. They were much taller than I'd expected, and so sleek and powerful.  They devoured a hunk of giraffe (why did it have to be giraffe??) pretty quickly, and then the vultures finished the rest of it. 

The next day I got up early still looking for the hippo, but didn't find any.  Alas.  As we were driving away though, out in the distance, there were two in the water.  You could only see the top of their heads with a good zoom lens.  Then as we came around the corner... hippo butt! There was one standing up on an island in the lake.  So I got to see 3 hippos, at varying angles, which was pretty cool.  I hadn't even known there were hippos in Namibia! 

Day 2 was a long day of driving to get up to Etosha National Park.  We arrived in time for a late lunch at Mokuti Lodge.  It was a nice place to stay, but I was way more interested in the park!  Once we drove in, the action came quickly.  A few impala crossed the road, then a giraffe walked across right in front of us!  It was unbelievably cool.  Wild giraffe. 

We went to a watering hole, where there were more animals- giraffes, springboks, impalas, and a lot of vultures eating a dead elephant.  Sounds great, right? It smelled pretty bad.  It was pretty amazing to see all of the animals just milling around together though. 

We drove through several different sections of the park, seeing a flock of ostriches (one male and three female!), more varieties of antelope, and then stumbled upon a watering hole just behind a huge herd of elephant.  There were more than 30 of them, from babies to young adults to adult females.  It was spectacular.  They drank, splashed, doused themselves with mud and dust, and then at the signal from the lead female, disappeared almost silently back into the bush.  As they left, zebras came in, a mass of black and white taking their turn at the water.  There are SO MANY ZEBRAS in Northern Namibia. 

It was late as we were leaving, but we stopped to see another watering hole with some giraffes, and then encountered more elephants on the road.  They were eating from a tree and very decidedly NOT MOVING out of our way.  Knowing that the park was closing we were getting pretty anxious, but it was so very cool to be that close to these animals.  Eventually they moved aside so we could drive by, and we looped our way back to the entrance the exact minute the gates were closing.  Safe.

The next day, we started at the same waterhole.  That dead elephant- completely gone, scavenged overnight.  But in the field nearby were lions!  There was a male and a female.  We couldn't get too close to them, but it was still great to check another of the "Big 5" off the list.  We drove around a lot that day, stopping at one of the lodges in the park for lunch.  We lucked upon a leopard crossing the road in front of us, then turning and walking parallel so we could follow him for a ways.  We saw one rhino at a distance, and I saw another at the lodge watering hole that evening.  I believe the one at a distance was a white rhino and the one at the waterhole was a black rhino.

Driving out the next day was less exciting. I was hoping to see more lions but my guide really just wanted to get on the way.  We saw some beautiful giraffes, more zebras, and some baboons.  We saw a new type of zebra, Hartman's Mountain Zebra.  The stripes don't go under their bellies. 

That night I stayed at the Hobatere Lodge.  I did an afternoon game drive with a German man and three delightful ladies from Florida.  I had such a good time with them that I paid to do the night drive too.   We stopped at sunset for a drink with the zebras and sprinbok.  While we didn't find lions, we did find secretary bird, which was new, and some mighty elephants storming through the bus.  The night drive found more elephants, several small cats, and an owl. 

The only animal I really wanted to see and missed was the hyena.  But I was more than impressed with the variety and abundance of wildlife in Etosha and Hobatere.  I WILL be back here.  I hope to come with friends. I hope there are still rhinos when we make it.