Hippo gas relief at night. My lovely Namibia-Botswana lullaby

For our last two days, we stayed at another awesome camp site (on par with Naukluft and Abiqua).  Mahangu/o camp was just outside the Namibia-Botswana border.  This border required you to venture through a small game drive in order to get there, how awesome is that? ‘What are you doing today?’ ‘Oh you know, just going to do the Mahango game drive on our way through to Botswana, might see an elephant croc or hippo. No biggy. What are you doing?’

 Mahangu/o camp was beautiful, right on the river, not facing Angola though, this time we had the privilege of seeing part of the Okavango and it’s inhabitants.  During our stay there we also saw the birth of the Merryl Peddie Hilton.  I have to say, as much as I was loving my sweet little pup tent from Fiver’s brother, Mark, the hobbit sized door had had it in for me since day one; I had experienced my fair share of temper tantrums whilst struggling to crawl out of it every single morning that it was time to change.  In order to get out of the tent required an enormous amount of skill you see.  I had to find the motivation every day to shimmy through the minute doorway and developed a technique for the days when I just couldn’t face it with strength. 

It was something like a hovering squat-walk.   Slash tripping over some string and tumbling out on top of my once clean but now dirty, dusted or damp pillow, sleeping bag and mattress.  Yeah yeah, I know- I could have just made 3 separate trips, taking each item out one at a time, but that would have been too productive, and I was trying to be efficient!  Anywho, this did get tiring after nearly 4weeks, so I have been temporarily  upgraded to what I like to call, the Merryl Peddie Hilton.  Actually, I should probably name it after the tent, ‘Coleman’s Hilton’, imported from NZ.  This was Five and Stuart’s ‘land tent’ for when we park up for a few days and they use instead of the roof tent, but since they like the roof tent so much more, I have been blessed with the big roomy dome – I can stand up in it and everything, what more could you want?

So easy to please… 

 My first night at the camp was a little bit restless.  For one I was far too excited about my fabric walled hotel that I couldn’t nod off as easily, I kept opening my eyes and seeing giant amounts of space around me, then I would smile and then attempt to fall asleep again. This was joined by another factor contributing to my interrupted sleep - the sounds of hippos at night.  Have you heard the noises they make? Good god, its loud!  I cannot type a bunch of random letters together that would even begin to give you an idea of what they sounded like, however it was kind of like (but nowhere near), a bunch of people who had serious flatulence issues, all letting rip at separate but consistent intervals on a megaphone, no wait… a delta sized sound system.  Whether or not that is what the hippos were doing, perhaps they were just cruising round on land making big whoppee cushion noises while they hung out, I’m not sure, but it was a very different noise to cars passing at night or a party going on down the road. 

I couldn’t help but lay there, in the early hours of the morning all wrapped up in my sleeping bag, and laugh.