Namibia: getting wilder and wilder

Another hard lesson was to result in us shedding our default trust in google maps.  The truth is that google has done a really good job of mapping the dirt roads, some of which appear to be changing at least as often as seasonably, but mapping the directions between two places is a complete fail.

Our trip from Otjiwarango to Halali lodge in Etosha was supposed to be a reasonably quick trip on a major highway (single lane tarred).  The tarred roads are classified as "B" roads, while "C" and "D" roads are dirt but well maintained in Namibia.  Google pointed out that the C38 - the main road North to the Anderson gate was closed in multiple places and suggested an alternate route to us as the most favourable.  This alternate route turned out to be a big mistake because it took us up dirt roads east of our destination and then across a dirt track directly to the Halali lodge that is actually a closed road because it has no entrance gate.

What should have been around 5 hours ended up being 7 and with the restriction on driving after dark we drove without stopping in the park, missing a wonderful sighting of an elephant and her baby near the road and several other places where cars were parked to admire the wildlife.  I was concerned about arriving to find the lodge gate closed.  As it happened we got there half an hour before dark and were able to get our tent up on the rental 4x4 before nightfall.

We met up with the person who originally organized the Skeleton Coast trip for us.  He was off on his own post-Skeleton Coast trip up river beds and into Angola and was stopping at Halali for a night.  It was cool to meet him, his partner and friends for the first time since the mid 80's when were knew him as a masters student at Rhodes University.  A lot of time has past and we ended up reminiscing about those years.

He said that they had been to the waterhole that is reachable by foot from the campsite and they had seen black rhino.  We decided to head there after dinner.  Black rhino are endangered and a fairly rare find but this waterhole had a group of rhinos that apparently were dominating it for a period. 

Black Rhino mother and child with adolescent male behind  Photo by Anne

A mother and baby where there when we arrived and then three adolescent males appeared and began to fake spar with each other, practicing for when they will be forced to leave their father's group and fend for themselves.  It looked quite aggressive and after two nights we saw the numbers dwindle as the sparring became more aggressive and they ended up drinking individually and making an agressive show if another one showed up.

Two young male black rhinos sparring at the waterhole

A group of zebra appeared well after dark on the third night which seemed surprising considering that the lions in the park are active after dark.

We had three nights in Halali and the waterhole was a big highlight.  Our friends, who joined us for the second night said that the infrastructure of the campsite had deteriorated quite a bit since they were last there 14 years ago and we were frustrated by blocked drains in the ablution wash basins and weak luke warm showers.

It turned out that this wasn't true of all the ablutions and I think if we had gone on a recce we might have found a suitable one not too far from the campsite.

After arriving fairly late on the first night we were able to find a much better campsite for the second night because the campsite (with more than 50 sites) emptied out by around 10 in the morning.  I think there were only about 4 groups of people who didn't move out.

On the second day Anne and I paid for an afternoon game drive which was very informative and we saw a lot of antelope,

A tiny Steenbok - a small common antelope

zebra

Group of Zebra at a waterhole

, giraffe

Giraffe at a waterhole

, elephant

Elephant kicking dust in our direction with the salt pan in the background

and a black rhino

Rhino after dark at a waterhole

but then we went on a self-guided game drive with our friends which featured the Etosha pan itself

Our travel companions on the Etosha Pan

and also sightings of elephant and various antelope.

On this self-drive game drive we had a curious encounter with a starling.  We had noticed how they hung about at the camp site not realizing how tame they have become over the years of being given or stealing food from tables there.  This one, as we stopped to photograph it, flew to my open window and landed on the rear-view mirror, looking at me with accusing eyes.

Starling insisting on being fed

Anne had some crumbs and sure enough it was quite willing to eat them out of my hand.

On the second night I took my 200-600mm lens from my carry-on bag.  I had used for years to photograph sport (mostly soccer) in Boston but after shooting 56 photographs it stopped working and no amount of research and cleaning of the connections in my camera or the lens would bring it back to life.  It is heavy and has become a useless boat anchor that I am lugging around - at least until I get back to Portugal and can find out if there is a service center than I can send it to to be fixed.

I also have a 70-200mm lens which is suitable for fairly close encounters so many of my extremely zoomed in pictures of far sightings of birds or animals were taken for identification purposes rather than as nature portraits.

The morning of the 3rd night in Halali was the 15th day after eye surgery and as predicted by the surgeon the bubble of air in my eye, which had dwindled until it looked like a tiny planet in my eye when I looked straight up in the air, disappeared completely.

From Halali we went to a second lodge in Etosha called Namutoni which had a fantastic infrustructure and great hot showers.  There is a fort there that was built by the German colonists and then destroyed by the locals and rebuilt a few years later.  It offered an overlook of a waterhole. There were mostly birds to view there.  

On the road we came across some giraffe behaving strangely with their necks extended and their heads facing the sky.  It turned out that they were eating bones in an area that was littered with bones. 

A giraffe eating bones

We wondered if this is a way of supplementing calcium.  We had been told on the game drive that the elephants have stunted tusks due to a calcium deficiency in the Etosha pan area. 

Just before we arrived there we saw a family of mongoose on the side of the road.

Mongoose family

The campsite featured a family of mongoose who visited looking for food.  Apparently they, like the starlings, are used to finding food where people are camping.

We watched the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain at Namutoni with a very excited spanish family sitting nearby who were hugging each other at the end of the evening.

The next leg of our trip was to a campsite near Rundu. 
Though we were not relying on Google maps I look at it and then ignore if there was a discrepancy in which case I'd favor the "satellite view" or the very detailed maps we had bought of the region.  In this case google thought the campsite was on the other side of the river which is in Angola and showed a 10 hour drive via a border post and then back along the Angolan side of the river.  In fact it was only 15min from the supermarket in Rundu that we stopped at to buy provisions for the next few days.

This one-night stop was at an absolutely beautiful campsite with sounds of a hippo in the evening as it emerged from the water for its night-time feeding along the banks.  This was our first experience of camping where there are no fences keeping wild animals out and we were warned to be careful at night if we needed to go to the bathroom because a hippo was a fairly frequent visitor, and there are crocodiles in the river that come on to the banks on occasion. 

A night-time trip to the bathroom is more or less unavoidable so we had to figure out how to make the that work.  Given that our tent was a roof-top tent the ritual included setting the headlamp on its brightest and scanning the area during a slow descent.

We saw a group of barn owls in the tree above us after dark.  The owner said that they lulled her to sleep each night.

We could have stayed there for a few nights and the owners chastised us because they had heard us playing guitar and singing.  They told me we should have come into the bar and played for them too.
My friend and I both had guitars on the trip.  His Skeleton Coast trip had left him with fingertips that were split from the dry air and working with his fingers securing his tent and equipment, so it took him a few days before he could play with me.

After Rundu we camped at another Namibian campsite further into the Kaprivi Strip called Mahangu.  This campsite was another gem. 

A pair of Bee Eaters

A hippo was in residence not far from our vehicles at night.  They make these low burpy growls and there was plenty of evidence of footprints to show that our campsite was a frequent spot for feeding at night.

In 1977-78 I was stationed for 8 months in a small airport at the end of the Kaprivi Strip that is now the Katima Mulilo airport.  I was in the army as a conscript.  This was at the tail end of the so-called "Border War" when South Africa had laid claim to South West Africa in defiance of a United Nations order to vacate it.

Sunrise on a game drive near Mahangu

There were alluvial diamonds to be had along the shores of Namibia and South Africa were "fighting insurgents" who turned out to be indigenous Namibians looking for independence.  Cuba had offered military support to these insurgents which made it easy for South Africa to claim that it was also a fight against communism. 

African Roller near Mahangu

At the time I had no idea about any of these details having been fed a diet of information curated by the South African government and the military.  I learned a different take on it all at university once my military service ended.
I did have a nostalgic desire to visit the site because it was a significant part of my coming of age and included some fairly dramatic moments.  It would have been an extra five hours of driving to get there and I concluded that it has actually been a fairly crappy time after all and why revisit it?  I have a few stories from those months but it is so many years ago that they rarely get retold these days.

On the opposite bank of the Mahangu campsite is a really large game reserve (Bwabwata National Park).  We learned that we could have camped in the Bwabwata reserve but having made all of our reservations months ahead of time were weren't motivated to make any last minute changes.

One evening we watched about 5 hippos who had spent a portion of the afternoon on the bank entering the river as a prelude to finding their night-time feeding spots.

Hippos entering the river at sunset

We went on a bird walk with a very experienced birder who showed us a Bat hawk and a little owl right near our site.  

We got back from the bird walk before dark and one of our friends called out that a lioness had appeared on the opposite bank.  I had enough time to bring up my camera to catch the moment she took a small warthog.  It was our first (and only) sighting of one of the big cats in the wild.

Lioness and prey

A visit to the Bwabwata reserve would require a 34km drive just to get to the entrance gate and so we decided to visit the Morombe reserve that spans the edge of Namibia and Botswana.  It is a game reserve that has a border crossing in it but we visited only a few kilometers of it to view a large Baobab tree

Large Baobab tree near Mahangu

 and we had some really lovely sightings of elephant, monkeys

Monkey on the side of the road

and miscellaneous antelope.

We were due to go to Botswana for the remainder of the trip the next day.  Little did we realize how much wilder it would be there.  None of the game reserves in Botswana that we would visit were fenced so animals roam freely between them including into the campsites. 

Namibia: better late than never

The sudden emergency of a detached retina put paid to the idea that we would be able to join our friends on the first leg of the planned trip to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia.  What remained was a followup appointment with the ophthalmic surgeon about 6 days after the surgery.  In the meantime I had strict instructions to not drive in a car (even as a passenger), not lift anything heavier than 4kg, not exercise - including even walking, and not move my head about too much.

Luckily the world cup soccer and Wimbledon were on TV so I spent the six days with our hosts' two dogs in front of the TV, with the gas heater going to keep me warm, and a brilliant excuse not to do any cooking or washing up.

I spent quite a few hours preparing for the followup, looking at the elevation gain between Cape Town (18m/59feet) and Windhoek (1700m/5577feet) and how to plan a trip that split the elevation gain into stages with overnight rests in between to allow my eye to adjust to the pressure.   Apparently the gas pressure in the eye can increase very quickly as elevation increases and this could lead to pain in the eye and all sorts of complications that are not worth chancing.

West Coast near Cape Town

The doctor was a little disappointed that the gas bubble was not smaller when he examined me.  The meniscus was at around 80% of the circle of vision and reported that the bubble was 50% of the volume after surgery.  Looking through the gas was like looking through a bottle of water at a distant object.  Everything is magnified but out of focus - excepting things a few inches from that eye.

He had a plan, though.  He was going to prescribe medicine that inhibited the body's production of fluid to be taken on days that I was experiencing great elevation gain.  He had some colleagues in Namibia with whom he had studied and sent a text message to a couple which secured an appointment for me, on day 13 after the surgery, in Windhoek.  I needed a "cleared to fly" letter from an ophthalmologist and another examination once the bubble was below 30% of the volume of the eye.

The "no heavy weights and no driving while my right eye vision was distracted by the bubble" restrictions were still in place but he was happy for us to drive up to Windhoek in stages.

We left on the Saturday for the first of 4 legs that were each going to be 4-5 hours with stops and one or two side trips to see scenic attractions that had been identified in advance.

I was able to take a last walk with the dogs who had kept me company on our final evening there.

Day 6 after eye op, first outing with the dogs (photo by Anne)

The first stop was the West Coast National Park Marine Protected Area in Langebaan.  This is a wonderful natural park with long roads that people regularly use for biking.  There are long beaches which I believe are open to the public during the summer.  An extensive lagoon supports many bird species and  some wild buck.  At this time of year we didn't encounter multitudes of birds but we did see a few shrikes, swifts, bright yellow weaver birds and sacred ibises.  We saw a beautiful kestrel on our short walk (at this point a little walking was also allowed) to see two of the bird hides that are right out near the lagoon.

From there, after a brunch at the top end of Langebaan, we had a short walk on a beach and encountered horse riders.  One of them stopped to ask if we wanted a ride - she had seen the graphic of a silhouetted zebra on the side of our rental car and thought we were part of a horse related outfit.

Horse riding on the beach in Paternoster

Anne was driving for the entire first day which ended at an overnight stop in a small town about 3 hours south of the border crossing into Namibia.

I had pills and eye-drops intended to lower the pressure in my eye (by reducing the overall production of water in my system).  The pill's side effects are alterations in taste (in particular carbonated drinks which taste like bicarb) and a tingling of the extremities.  They felt close to pins and needles but more like the buzz you feel if you run your fingers across the metal of a poorly earthed electrical appliance.  The elevation gain was 900m (3000ft) and aside from a feeling of pressure in my eye the expansion of gas in my eye did not become painful which would have been a signal to turn around and seek lower ground.

The main road leading into our first stop after Langebaan was dirt for a section and it slowed us down a bit giving us taste of what was to come.

The border into Namibia was an interesting experience.  We were shuffled from one obscure office to the next - all accessible from the outside on a porch on the ground floor.  I suspect the officials are used to people who know their way around the border post and they were a little impatient with us novices.  But, when we hesitated they pointed us in the right direction.  You need paperwork for your car.  I was surprised to find out that UK citizens need to pay for a visa (obtainable at the airport and probably at the border post as well).  We were traveling on our South African passports so all was good.

The Namibian side of the border included hosing down our tires with disinfectant and waiting for us to put the soles of all our shoes (worn or packed) unto a basin with a cloth soaked in disinfectant.  Foot and mouth disease is endemic to South Africa and because Namibia exports a lot of meat to Europe, they are very strict about keeping the source of the disease out of the country.

We stopped at a small town called Grunau overnight at an AirBnb which included what seems like a fairly common scene in that area - a rusted old American car with a tree growing out of it.  

Namgate AirBnb evening view

We were out reasonably early to take a side trip to see the Fish River Canyon.  This is the second largest canyon in the world (based on its length).  It is not as deep as the Grand Canyon but we had impressive views from the two lookouts on the way. 

at one of the Fish River Canyon overlooks

The road to the canyon lookout was dirt and I persuaded Anne that my vision was well enough for me to drive.  The gas bubble in my eye had shrunken quite a bit and was only visible in the lower quarter of my vision as a sphere.

Fish River Canyon

After visiting the canyon we stopped at the roadhouse near the canyon for fuel.  It has a lot of character, including the rusty cars

"The Roadhouse" near the Fish River Canyon

and a bar inside with a "filling station" banner over it.  

Gasoline for the body

The attendants at the Rodehouse gas station assured us the dirt road was good and so we decided to keep going on the dirt road to the next town (Keetmanshoop) rather than backtrack to the national highway.

This turned out to be a mistake.  The road deteriorated as we were going along and at one point I pulled to the side to put in eye-drops.  Pulling off again I discovered that the road clearance was not what I expected and we heard a scraping sound underneath.  Towards the end of the road we drove past the downstream side of the Naute dam and saw a 4x4 coming out of what looked like the river.  As we approached we saw that it was a flooded concrete spillway.  I asked Anne to keep an eye on the water level as we pulled on to the bridge because it seemed likely that the level would be constant all across.  It was probably 15cm (6in) deep.

Once we were on the highway again we were able to speed up to 120km/h (75m/h) but we ran into difficulty with a slow double length tanker with a following and leading car warning of an oversized vehicle.

I discovered to my horror that you can't trust the dashed lines on the road in Namibia.  After looking ahead a few times and hesitating we came to a stretch where I could see the electricity poles curving off to the right for the foreseeable distance and I assumed that the grass that was shielding my view of the road surface was low enough that I would be able to see any car coming towards me so I hit the accelerator.  Too late I realized that all my assumptions were wrong.  An SUV was bearing down on me in the single lane that I was passing on.  I braked and swerved and came to rest at the side of the road in a cacophony of hooting.  The driver of the SUV had reacted quickly and stopped a few feet away from where my car would have been had I not left the road.  I had managed to stop off the road on the verge which had luckily only small bushes and no rocks.

Padstal cafe, Mariental (by Anne)

We were both very shaken and we drove slowly to the next town where we stopped for petrol.  A station attendant was bending over as we pulled in and came over to tell me that something was loose under the car.  Within moments there were about 5 people under the car like in an F1 pit stop.  Two young boys and three adults found some string and a knife to secure the engine splash shield and then made appeals for cash donations to each of them for the work they had done.  The man who pumped our gas joined the chorus.  We drove off with considerably less cash than we had entered with.  

We stopped overnight at a small town called Mariental, about 3 hours from Windhoek.  The AirBnb guest rooms were in a gated area with a Padstal (roadhouse) general dealer, cafe and restaurant that we had dinner and early morning coffee at.

The next day would be another elevation gain day, going up from about 900m to 1700m.  Again, as before the effect on my eye was minimal, no discomfort this time at all.

As we pulled out (this time with Anne driving) we saw 2 of these oversized tankers, each with a car in front and one behind ahead of us!  Fortunately when we caught up with them a few minutes later they were both pulled over off the road with the drivers having a discussion and (perhaps) a coffee break.  We were both pretty relieved to leave them behind.

The next morning we were due to see the ophthalmologist we were referred to in Cape Town for a check-up but we discovered in the morning that she had been booked off work and that someone in their practice who also works at the state hospital would be coming over at 3pm and we could hopefully see him instead.  It gave us an opportunity to buy the rations we had planned to buy the following day.

The ophthalmologist confirmed that the bubble was at 25% which was the threshold that our doctor in Cape Town had said would be enough to clear us for the flight back to Portugal on the 31st. 

I had already reached out to some friends of our South African friends in the US who live in a town between Windhoek and the Etosha Pan because we knew that we would not be able to make the distance without stopping somewhere overnight.  They run a cattle farm but also are very involved in development work with a community living in their vicinity.  They have an AirBnb and are in the process of developing a lodge that will offer opportunities for tourists to stop on their way to Etosha to visit a traditional Himba village.  

In our case we were desperate for a place to stay because our plan to drive up had been scuttled by the late appointment.  

It was such an enjoyable experience!  Even though they didn't know us at all they treated us like family.

We arrived just after the sun set.  

Sunset on Otjiwarongo Farmstay

Another golden rule of the road in Namibia is to not drive after dark because of the risk or running into an antelope, the big ones sometimes try to jump over a car and they are bigger than a horse and therefore very dangerous on the road. The guest apartment we stayed in has a balcony outside and I was able to capture a night shot of the Milky Way from there.

Milky way from the back ports of our room

On the way up to Etosha we started to feel as though the Namibian vacation was finally starting.  So many obstacles, a close encounter with my eye (and on the road) were behind us.