WEATHER: Hot and 34C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: More great viewing on our last safari drive
BUMMER OF THE DAY: The heat is starting to wear us down
BUYS OF THE DAY: My African bead bangle for 7AUD
WORD OF THE DAY: Money shot referring to awesome animal photos
ANIMALS SEEN TODAY: Zazu’s, jackals by the dozen, vultures, ostriches, Oryx’s, dic dic’s (my favorites), elephants, rhinos, giraffes, zebras by the hundred, prides of lions and cubs, Helmut guinea fowls, kudu’s, wildebeests, springboks by the hundreds,
CAMP SITE RANKING: Awesome – it has a pool so everything gets an automatic 5 out of 5 stars no just for this!
An early start this morning. After an awesome day yesterday game viewing, we try and contain the excitement and also the disappointment all at the same time, hoping to see more of what we saw yesterday, but at the back of our minds we are thinking can it get any better?
So up at 6am, breakfast at 7am and we departed at 7.30am. We have 180km to drive today plus whatever actual game driving we do. As we are already in Etosha National Park, we are literally travelling to the other side and staying a night in the western side. So even though we need to travel 180km, we are still in the national park itself, so if we see animals on the ‘drive’ section then all the better for us. First thing I noticed as we rolled through the park is just how dusty it is. Etosha means White Plains, and I can see what they mean. The dust is a fine white like powder, and gets onto everything. After rolling into our second camp of the night in Etosha and setting up our tents, there is no carpet and we have set up on the ‘white’ ground. This stuff is already in our tents and our feet are white as well. There was also a bit of a wind when we first got there, so the dust was just flying around everywhere. Needless to say we are all sneezing and it really makes the air so dry that our skin is just screaming out for moisture. The last 3 days Lisa and I have been applying moisturizing cream 3-4 times a day (our favorite friend at the moment a brand called ‘Dawn’), and the air has just been that dry, and I guess it doesn’t help when we are in the sun3/4 of the day, so we are also trying to re-hydrate our skin from that as well. But on that note I am looking quite brown, always an upside right?
Etosha has and is known for its salt pan that it has in the park. More recently the British TV series Top Gear filmed an episode here racing a car across the plain. We got a view point stop mid-morning and then drove further along at a point where you can actually drive on the salt pan also known as the Etosha Pan. It was pretty cool, just a flat expanse of dried and muddy salt. It did make for some great photos, even if it was a little whiffy on the nose. Ben took us a little way down for the photos and then we reversed back up and were on the road again at 11am.
So after more animal spotting on our, we rolled into our second camp in Etosha National Park. We have seen a gazillion Springboks and were lucky enough to see 2 of them jump / spring this morning. Not a great stat out of a gazillion, but to see them do there spring was a sight to see. The Springboks are like the Thompson Gazelles of the Serengeti. They are everywhere and in large numbers. Lucky they are cute and don’t tell Dave, but they may even be cuter than the Thompsons. So after arriving into camp and after eating lunch we got some free time at the, I would have to call resort. The camp ground was only a small section; they also had free standing chalets, a post office, a general store and a curio shop to name a few shops in the smaller complex. I was lucky I went to the post office when we first got there to register, as it was closed when we went back after lunch. I managed to get my Namibia stamp for my Globetrotters book and it was an awesome one with an elephant and the national parks name – score!!!! It looks awesome.
So you can guess where you are going to find us – yep in the pool, again! We are now starting to rank the pools water temperature from the ones that we have been into date. Chobe still has to take the cake on the coldest pool so far, followed closely by Rundu I think. Okaukujo (our camp) had the warmest water to date and it was actually quite pleasant. As mentioned previously, we would still be in there no matter what anyway – but it was nice to finally have a pool that we could swim in without freezing our little you know what’s off.
GAME DRIVE – our last official drive was at 4pm. The morning drives are so different from the afternoon drives, and you can see why you do both. Besides different animals roam at different times of the day, just the colours of the landscape also change so much with the sunlight etc. This afternoon was full of yellow brush and a beautiful cloudless blue sky. It made for some amazing photos and I got some great zebra photos of a herd of around 300 drinking from a watering hole and some great giraffes on the plain. Once again we thanked our safari god’s, half way through the drive we stumbled onto a big male lion resting under a tree. We were parked about 10m from where he was and we got some amazing ‘money shots’. I am so glad I bought a camera with a massive zoom of 28 optical, as I can just about see up his nostrils with the zoom I have and they look amazing. He was zapped from the heat, so he didn’t get up to much; he sat up a few times, but mainly just slept under the tree. He really did look just like a cuddly cat and he had his paws crossed over at the front like a cat, well till he yawned and you saw these massive pointy teeth sticking out. We also did see, we think, the same lion pride from yesterday, but only 10 of them today, it was super cute to see the cubs again. GG said we have been very lucky, as you generally see lions in the park, but normally around the water holes, where we are seeing these guys roaming the park, so it is just chance we are getting to see so many. Apparently Namibia only has 500 lions all together, private parks included and we have seen around 20 of them in the last 48 hours, yeah I think we have been quite lucky!
So another sun sets on our last game drive. What an amazing 2 days we have had in Etosha and an incredible way to finish 50 hours of game drive viewing in the last 7 weeks. We have been insanely lucky and besides not seeing meerkats, we pretty much saw everything we wanted to, and more than once. Thanks Africa, you have been awesome to us on the animal front. Once we got back to camp, we had 40 minutes till dinner, so we went and had a look at the water hole to see what was lurking there and we were greeted by a marvelous sunset, with an elephant silhouette, a few giraffes and chervil (cat thing). Not bad at all and 300% better than what we saw at the last camps hole. This was also an amazing set up to view from, with chairs lining the hole, and they also had a thatched roof with bleacher style seating at the far end of the hole as well to accommodate around 100 people I would say. As the camp ground is so massive, there were a lot of people vying for vantage points with their cameras and tri-pods and others setting up for the night and then there were us, just having a quick sqizz before dinner. The sunset pictures were great, and as I have said all trip you can never have too many sunset photos!
Dinner was served at 7.20pm. Simon is quite particular on his serving times and they always have randomness to them. 6.40pm, 7.10pm, 6.55pm. It is hilarious, but no-one is ever late. Poor Simon hasn’t had cooks for the last 2 days, but he has managed splendidly again with another mouthwatering culinary delight! Some of the crew was going back to the water hole to see if this one fares any better than last night’s boring hole. Lisa and I decided it wasn’t worth it, we had seen it, what could you see at night time that we hadn’t seen already during the day and night photos just don’t work out – oh and we had a vodka and gin and tonic in hand, so we decided to wait for the full ‘we saw nothing’ report in an hour or so. Well you could imagine our surprise when Rolf had to come back for his binoculars and the first thing he said was ‘girls get your butts to the hole-there is a lion chasing some giraffes’. Well you should have seen Lisa and I move, we did the right thing and waited for Rolf and then we all headed back to the hole, albeit it was the long way as we got lost, but when we got back there were 2 rhinos, around 8 giraffes and we could see 2 lions. Amazing!! I stayed for around an hour till 9pm, and I did see the lion make another attempt at the giraffes, and to see all this right in front of you was pretty amazing, like National Geographic kind of stuff, but in real life. After I left, elephants turned up, some more lion action and then the cubs appeared, so we think the lions were teaching the cubs how to hunt, as they weren’t really trying that hard. But what a difference to last night! Thanks Rolf for coming back for your binoculars, otherwise we would have been oblivious to what was happening only 100m away and missed the whole thing. Hopefully one of the other posse would have come back for us anyways – right Sean? Right Dave? Right Manu?
Son into bed we climb after another massive and successful day. Tomorrow we have to drive only 16km to get out of the national park, so we sort of like get a mini safari drive in the morning, so there maybe one last chance to see some more animals before we leave animal kingdom.
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