Africa Part Two

Moving on from Okavango, we went to the Etosha National Park. The campsites there were really quite amazing, with swimming pools and amazing floodlit waterholes where the animals would come up to within 5-10 metres of you. One night there were a few rhinos (and I had never even seen one in the wild before!!) and the next night a herd of elephants.

Couldn't stay up too late though, since every morning it was "fully packed and ready to go at 6.30am!!" And I'm really not a morning person, so waking up before dawn every morning was a bit rough!!! I soon got used to not really unpacking at all, and wearing whatever fell out of my bag in the morning!

The wildlife is not quite as abundant as elsewhere in Africa, but I still got to see cheetah, rhinos, oryx, springboks etc. as well as the usual giraffes, zebras, lions, etc. And thanks to my old work colleagues for the fabulous binoculars...

Still missing the elusive male lion sighting, as well as leopard. I guess I'll just have to keep coming back to Africa!!






Moving on, we passed through a petrified forest. No photos, but it is number two on my list of "really stupid tourist attractions" I've been taken to. Number one by the way was the "bee keeping museum" in Lithuania. Anyhow, petrified wood really just looks like a pile of rocks, but I suppose they needed to break up the long driving days somehow...



We finally then made it to the coast, to a great town called Swakopmund. Here there were loads of optional activities to be done. The first afternoon, I opted for quad biking on the massive sand dunes outside of town. There are parts of Namibia where it rains once or twice A YEAR!!! What a great place to live after such sunny places as London and Vancouver!!! Of course that means there is an awful lot of sand around!

Anyhow, the quad biking was a lot of fun! (not so fun was picking the sand out of my teeth later) Next time though I think I'm going to be less of a wimp and go for the really powerful quad bike, instead of the automatic bike for novices...

The next morning, I went in a dune buggy with Raquel, the Spanish girl in the group. This was actually intended as an "educational tour" to try to find scorpions, snakes, lizards, chameleons, etc. in the desert, but there were still a few opportunities to do some crazy driving in the dunes - even more fun in the dune buggy than on a quad bike!!! As a more powerful machine, I could do little jumps over mounds of sand and do some turns where I thought for sure I would flip it over. But no crashes at all, so all of my bones remain unbroken...