WEATHER: Min 12C – Max 38C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing lions on our first afternoon in the park
BUMMER OF THE DAY: It’s a tad hot at 38C
BUYS OF THE DAY: My bottle of Smirnoff for 8AUD!!
WORD OF THE DAY: Ellie-bit
ANIMALS SEEN TODAY: Helmut guinea fowl, black rhino, elephants, big lizard maybe a monitor, zebras, jackals, Corey bustard, 11 lions – 8 cubs, 2 females and a male, elands, dic dic’s, springboks by the hundreds, wildebeest, kudu’s, blackface impala’s, giraffes, vultures, Oryx
CAMP SITE RANKING: No carpet, great showers, flushing toilets, a pool, no internet but 5 out of 5 stars
We only have 250km to travel today to get us to Etosha National Park, not counting the kilometers that we will do on the game drive this afternoon, but in the scheme of things anything less than 300km is a walk in the park. It also helps that we all have 2 seats each, so the travel days aren’t as bad now as we can now stretch out. I really don’t mind travel days as long as I have my IPod charged and just watch the world pass us by!
So up at 6am, breakfast at 7am and we left Roy’s camp at 7.30am. We have such a good group where everyone is always on time, most mornings we are even leaving 5-10 minutes early which is awesome. I can’t stand people who are late – it’s one of my pet peeves. We only drove for 90 minutes before our shop stop for Simon. As we have had so many shop stops, there really isn’t too much more I need to buy at the moment. I hate to see one go to waste though, so I bought another packet of chips, which when I got back to the truck, I added them to the 4 packets I have bought on previous stops, yeah I don’t think I need any more of them. I also bought some more credit for my phone, the text messages here to back home only seem to cost around .20c a pop, so I think that is pretty good value. And last but not least is the top up of the bar. Dave and I are both out of vodka, so I think this will be the last bottle that I will have to buy in Africa. The bottle shop had like 15 brands of vodka and the Smirnoff was the second cheapest at 8AUD for a 750ml! How cheap is that!? Meyouki has found this drink using Amarula and Gin, so Lisa and I have also gone halves in a bottle of Amarula, to give it a crack and make our own. To buy the A&T at the bar it is only 2.80AUD which isn’t too bad considering there are 2 nips of alcohol in it, it is a little like a baileys mix, but a little nuttier and smoother. Lisa loves them!!!
So after our 45 minute stop we only had 2.15 hours getting us to the entrance of Etosha National Park. While GG signed us in, Sean and I jumped out to get some photos of the gate and also my Bernstar jump. Welcome back jump and thanks to Sean for keeping onto for me as well always asking if I want one taken. The camp we are at tonight is pretty cool. They have their own water hole that they keep lit at night, so after dinner we are going to go down and see what animals are lurking around the hole. But in the meantime, we got to our camp area, pitched the tents, had lunch and we then had 2 hours free time before heading out on an afternoon game drive. This is the last place we get to do our game drive, after this no more wild African animals, which means in turn that we are coming to the end of the trip. I wish I could say I am over the drives, but when you are in the truck looking for the animals, the time goes so quickly, and each park if different and even though you may have seen a hundred elephants, they are always doing something different that warrants another hundred photos. Just trying to justify my thousand elephant, 500 giraffe and 600 zebra photos – is it working?
So no need to guess where we headed after lunch. Yep to the pool. We are getting too accustomed to these pool gigs and I am not sure what we are going to do when we actually don’t get a pool. They are pretty clean, it just seems like they don’t have skimmer nets, so there are a few dead bugs, normally bees and wasps that are just floating in the pool, but we just scoop them along with any leaves out, but in the big scheme of things, it is a small price to pay to be able to cool off. The water here for the record was freezing as well, but once you are in and you sit in the sun, I stayed in there for over 1.5 hours reading my book. My tan is cracking along at a great knots, I am now just trying to protect my poor nose that cops a flogging from the sun and is now the only place that gets sunscreen on it these days to stop me looking like Rudolph!
No special game drive cars in Etosha, we get to jet around in our massive truck. There are a few other trucks game driving, but most of the vehicles are private cars in this park. The national park itself is pretty flat, dusty and dusty. There aren’t too much tall trees or shrubs at all. They have a few water holes, some natural, some man made. The man made ones were built because the natural ones were too far apart and animals were dying as they couldn’t reach them, so there are a few holes spread around the park and the best place to be able to see them. So our first waterhole was the jackpot for us as we found a pride of lions. There were 2 females, 1 male and 8 cubs. What a find and within the first 30 minutes! They were probably 200m away, so with the engine switched off we were able to just watch them for a while. They weren’t too active, like us, the weather was so hot; they were just relaxing in the shade of some trees, but what a great spot. We were right near the watering hole, so we also saw a herd of giraffes, 4 eland’s, vultures to name a few all drinking from the watering hole! It was pretty cool to see these animals all co-habitating all together with no worries in the world, well beside the 11 lions not far from the hole, I guess they are just lucky the lions weren’t hungry! The other major highlight, well besides seeing a black rhino which is apparently quite a find as well, was seeing an elephant at a watering hole, on his own, and another bull coming up, and there was a little bit of a tussle, backing up, trying to make friends, a few no’s and then after about 30 minutes they were friends for a few minutes and then the Mexican standoff started again. It was amazing just to see nature at its purest, untouched and well just natural. I think it was something that you wouldn’t see every day and it was another amazing experience we could add to the bag full we seem lucky enough to have started. It was a great and successful afternoon game drive, which I think was due, as the last few have been a little lean on animals let alone special moments like the lions and elephants.
Once we got back to camp, Simon had worked like a dog and dinner was ready to be served. What a champion, and even better when we were on cooking today! Woo hoo – Arse Muffs got a night off! So once everything was done and dusted, we had the quickest PFT from GG on record and then we headed up to the water hole to see what animals we could see at night time. It was a pretty good set up; there were long benches under a thatched roof and 2 flood lights that lit the hole, but not too much. There was a massive sign telling everyone for SILENCE and so we sat down and waited for the action to begin. And we waited and waited and waited and we saw nothing! Manu and I sat there for 30 minutes, and I was starting to get sleepy, so we said we would leave at 9pm. So I kept checking my watch every 3 minutes and it got to 8.45pm and said to Manu let’s just go, to which she replied in her Swiss German, if we leave now and we miss some animals I will kill you! It was so funny and she makes a strong point and needless to say I was happy to wait till 9pm after that. We even went by my shitty watch and not by her Swiss time piece which is 5 minutes slower than mine, but how can I argue with Swiss timing!? We found out the next day, David stayed till 10pm and not a single animal, oh no wait, we saw a bird move, but that was it for the whole time we had some-one down there. BORING – but this is wild animals and it is just a patience game really right! The animal’s probably just wait till no-one is at the viewing platform and then they all come out to play! Yeah I rekon that is what they do.
So a great game drive today, another 3 hours chalked up making it around 45 hours of driving. I wonder how many extra kilometers that adds to our final kilometer check at the end? That would be an interesting stat. We were talking today about which national park was better. Etosha or Serengeti and it was a tough call. There are certainly more animals in the Serengeti, but we pretty saw pretty much all the animals in Etosha. They are really different in scenery as well and if I was asked which one I thought would be better, I would have to play ‘Swiss’ and sit on the fence and tell people they would still need to go to both. Soft, but both parks are pretty awesome.
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