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Today is our last day in Southern Africa. We leave bright and early for Milan tomorrow morning. Here's the what we've been up to since the last update.
We were stuck in Windhoek for a few days as the truck we were travelling in needed some repairs. Unfortunately, it couldn't be repaired until after we had to leave Namibia so we never got to ride in that vehicle again. We rented a car to drive up to Etosha National Park in the North by ourselves for 2 nights of "camping". We borrowed an old-school tent from Lionel, the Aussie guy we were travelling with, and attempted to set it up. Camping in Africa consists of sleeping in gravel lots so we couldn't even get the pegs in the ground. We improvised by tying the ropes to a tree, a garbage can and to rocks on the ground. Afterwards, we went to the watering hole for the evening where we watched so many animals. When we first arrived, there was over a dozen elephants and a couple of rhinos drinking. The elephants left and then the giraffes arrived. As it was a fullmoon, we could see the animals coming in the distance. It was quite a sight. Giraffes are very untrusting animals and they would look around for predators for 15 minutes before they would take a sip. And when they would hear a sound, they would jump up out of their vulnerable position. It's quite a site seeing a giraffe bend over to get a drink. It's quite comical. We watched the animals for 2 1/2 hours and it seemed like 15 minutes.
When we returned to our camp, our tent had collasped.Our neighbours told us that jackals knocked over the garbage can and our ropes snapped. We remade our tent and climbed into bed and that's when we started to hear sounds. We looked out our tent to see a jackal knawing on the car. We had enough and slept in the car that night.
Next day, we set out early in hope to spot some big cats. At around 9.30, we saw 2 lionesses covered in blood. They had just finished eating last nights prey. We followed to a watering hole where they washed up and drank. We followed to a culvert where they went for a nap, but on the other side of the road were 3 young male lions with new manes dozing. Amazing! We moved on to another watering hole where we saw 40+ elephants drinking, washing and playing. Our jaws dropped in amazement. But our attention moved onto the leopard we spotted. One leopard made us forget the 40 elephants. They are rare to see and we saw one in day light even! We watched him for over an hour and so were some springboks. At one point, the boks decided to go for a drink and we saw the leopard get into hunting position and we waited...but just as we thought he was going to attack, a very loud tour bus showed up and broke his attention. Grrrr....
Throughout the day, we saw 4 more lions and plenty of zebras and sprinboks. At one point, we were completely surrounded by zebras. After 10 hrs on the road, we returned to camp, but this time we decided just to sleep in the car. Good thing because it rained (which is an oddity as Namibia is a desert).
Last day in the park was pretty quiet as the animals could find water pretty much anywhere because of the rains. Our last 2 hours were by far the best. At one point, we found 2 giraffes drinking water in the middle of the road for over 30 minutes. After they got b*****ed by us, we continued driving and found a dozen giraffes in the distance. It was incredible seeing all these heads bobbing up and down over the tree tops like an oil pump in the prairies. We finally had to force ourselves to leave the animals behind knowing that this is our last safari for now.
We met up with the guys to go to Sossusvlei in Namib-Naukluft National Park to see the sand dunes. Really, the photos will do all the talking. These are some of the (if not the) highest dunes in the world. The colours of the sands are incredible. The contrasts with the shaded and lighted parts are what makes for dramatic photos (to come, we promise). We hiked up one of the tallest dunes getting ourselves severely dehydrated in the process but it was absolutely worth it to get a bird's eye view of the scenery.
After Sossusvlei, we drove up to Swakopmund on the coast where we did a little sandboarding. It was our first attempt at boarding (sand or snow) so we had a lot of learning to do. It was a lot of fun. The biggest rush came when we lay-down slid down the hill. We basically were on a crazy carpet and went down a hill 200m tall at 80 km/h headfirst! What a rush! But, the crappy thing was that we had to climb our way back up the hill.
We spent our last night in Namibia in a place called Spitzkoppe. It was community run camp ground. Most parts of Namibia seem quite well off by Africa standards with the exeption of this area where people are absolutely dependant on tourism money. Most people sell rocks as their main source of revenue. It felt good to be supporting a community project like this. The attraction in the area was the spitzkoppe monoliths; these huge rocks that we climbed. The spot we climbed was called Bushman's Paradise where there were bushman paintings. Fitting spot for our last night in Namibia.
Since then, we returned on a grulling 18-hr bus ride and have spent our last days in Cape Town just getting ready for our next adventures.
As you can probably tell, we are doing well although we are little sad about leaving Africa behind. This is an incredible and beautiful place that can only be understood by visiting it. Most people make the mistacke of thinking of Africa as a homogenous place but it is much more diverse culturally than Europe. We definitely glad to have spent half of our trip in Africa as we certainly learned a lot about the dark continent.
Take care
j & m
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