Scenic flight sights!

1 hour flight over the Okavango delta. O yes!

Yes yes you can see it from space, but we chose a more practical height for scenic photos - 500ft.  That, and you know, space travel is just that $100million or so extra.

Our pilot, Captain no-name, took us on a loop above the spectacular, word thieving Okavango Delta.  Completely lacked personality and flare, this guy – ‘hi, here we go, great, enjoy your day, bye see ya later’.  Talk about clocking up the hours, and Stuart said he even stalled the engine when we came into land.  He was no bigger than a hobbit, I was sure he couldn’t see the runway when we were taking off.

 ‘Beautiful view’ doesn’t even begin to describe what we saw.  Nothing I write will be able to do the Okavango any justice, you simply have to see it for yourself. As I have never seen anything like it… nothing compares.  Sinead O’Connor, you beaut! 

The sights I am seeing on this trip are just incredible.  Mum and dad, be prepared for some very lengthy photo viewing sessions with me when I return.  Think, B and her cute pictures of puppy bones… now times it by a million.  Sorry B, I might out do ya there.

 

Here are two hippos trying to hide from us, but a terrible effort:

 

 

Heading to Maun

Nervous about going into a big city after such a long time on our own and enjoying the serenity of wildlife sounds by day and night, we reluctantly rolled into the frantic town of Maun. (pronounced Maung) 

Maun is no bigger than Greerton was in the 90’s – Chadwick road only.  And if it were any bigger I don’t think we would have been able to cope. It was small, very dusty and quite busy, which at that time was enough to make our heads spin.  Nowadays, (writing from Tanzania) we look back at Maun with confidence, almost as the stopover town that it is.

 Sedia Hotel & campsite.  Another great host and accommodation encounter to write home about.  Andy, the engineer man from Manchester who came to Botswana to work on the roads many a year ago, fell in love with the country, a local woman and this very hotel. You would not have thought he was the owner at all, but I thought he explained his misleading presence extremely well – “I don’t want anything to do with running the place, I’m just the man that walks around trimming the hedges. Would you lot like to come for marshmallows around the campfire tonight?”.  He was so cool.

3 nights later we finally left for Moremi Wildlife reserve in the hopes of seeing some great wildlife –which we definitely did indeed.

I had to add this in, just one of the many hilariously named shops here.

The mission to Nguma Lodge, no wait, Guma Camp.

GPS reliance. 2 camps,1km apart. We like it when we have options you know? Since we haven’t chosen yet, we’ll just enter the first destination we see on the GPS and head down to the other camp if the first one is terrible.

Phone call to reception : “Do you have a 4x4?”

Fiver : “Ha, yup we sure do” ... “Ooo must be quite the track huh”, she wondered.

45 mins driving up, down and around giant sandy bumps, 3 shallow water crossings (they’re still water crossings!) and constantly dodging mountains of elephant crap we finally turned up at the wrong campsite… No problem, we’ll just drive down the road to the other camp like we planned.

Nope, damn you Murphy!

Due to the two camp owners having a massive personal dispute/war, one had put up a fence and gate to make their property totally inaccessible from the other camp.  This actually has not been uncommon on our trip. We have experienced many accommodation sites where the owners are having neighborly issues, just like you lot back home.  Think ‘Neighbors at war’, safari style.

Guma camp turned out to be fantastic; the serendipity of nearly all our accommodation decisions really is a fortunate wonder. Such a treat. During our stay, I did dad proud by feeding the many different species of birds every morning, Stuart caught some great photo ops of bird fights.  We also ventured on a 2hour, two-stroke boat ride; crocs birds and a beautiful sunset. The whole package really. We also saw a tiny cute, but very confused and (dare I say it but he really was) very batty… bat.

Over the 4 days, a few overlander groups came and went while we kept requesting to stay ‘just one more night’. 

 

The alternative story of Tsodilo Hills, aka ‘I’ve got the runs’.

I enjoyed learning about the rock art a lot, even if I didn’t get to hear it all. Fifteen minutes in, my stomach churned the biggest, most cramped up churn I have ever experienced. I gave Fiver the camera and walked very briskly (not sure I could run with confidence) back to camp. 

The thing with ‘Africa Belly’, ‘Bali Belly’ or any other ‘travellers’ belly’ for that matter, is that it usually attacks at the worst place or time possible. After this incident, if one of us three are ever summoned by the ‘spirits’ of Tsodilo hills, a particular saying has become our handiest code yet. Instead of publicly announcing to my peers that “oh man I’ve got the shits, again”, I can now politely (and almost always sporadically) tell them “I’veGotTsodiloHills”. It is a much more pleasant way to break the news, they understand my pain straight away and they don’t experience that terrible visual.

 The reality of having ‘Tsodilo hills’ on a 470km drive where the roadside is constantly occupied by people, scattered houses or curios stalls, definitely is not.

 

Tsodilo Hills stories

Our first stop in Botswana was Tsodilo Hills; a very ancient site known for its original rock art and ancestral history.  After driving a while down a dusty and bumpy road, unsure when the campsite was going to appear, we suddenly approached an on-coming car containing two Americans.

“How far is the campsite up there?” Stuart asked. 

“O not farrr, we didn’t stay therrre though….it’s a bit grubby”.

A bit grubby?  A bit GRUBBY? Were they serious? Uh-oh a grubby campsite! There I was thinking those two words couldn’t be in the same sentence without each other.  Come on guys, what were you honestly expecting?  I bet this couple would have loved Alte Brücke campsite in Swakopmund you know.

The site wasn’t too bad at all, just dusty (grubby?), with some stray dogs that loyally slept outside our tents all night, in the highly optimistic hopes of receiving any means of food.  They were serious. One even chased away a very thirsty, very cute, and pouty looking donkey who was innocently just trying to survive another day by catching drips from the camp water tap (which we just used to filled up our kettle only moments before).

Yeah it was dusty, but then again, the whole of bloody Botswana was dusty so who cares.  You should have seen my shower water running into the drain. All I can say is thank goodness for concrete decor showers and the total lack of white tiles here.

The next morning we took a tour walk around the famous Tsodilo Hills. Our guide, K-T (who has eaten leopard before and swears it tastes like chicken) showed us around the hills and told the stories behind each rock art drawing.  Penguins, rhinos, whales, giraffes, men with dancing penises - you name it, he told it.  It was very interesting – the first 15 minutes of it anyway, until I had to leave…

Botswana border a breeze.

After a very pleasant drive through the Mahangu wildlife reserve (although, I was cooped up in the back seat with a ragingly sore stomach, I still enjoyed it) we got through the Botswana border with nothing but pure, sweet ease. No queues, no troubles, no fuss.  It was very quiet there, so not much to tell.

The scenery and roadside action changed drastically compared to Namibia though; people walking along the roadside everywhere, small township settlements scattered every few km, the houses were built with different materials, and donkeys and cattle walked aimlessly across the road almost every time we reached top speed!

Dare I say it, but I felt we were now officially entering ‘Africa’. I feel bad saying this, but why?

Actually, a better way of putting it is: I felt I had been officially introduced to the Africa which I was pre-programmed to envisage due to a lifetime of outside exposure; selected media coverage and constant learning of stereotyped images - Wow, I saw one of those real straw huts, and there goes a malnourished kid…tick, I must be in Africa.  As bad as this mentality is, deep down it was all I had been expecting from the day I stepped off the plane in Joburg. Why was I expecting this? And how dare I build up such a prejudice as this in my head when I have never even come close to any African experiences in my life?   

Obviously, there is a lot more to the countries that make up this continent than what we are able to experience from the comfort of our own homes.   I am extremely grateful to be given the opportunity to bridge my own gap between what I perceived as ‘Africa’ and what I am actually seeing! Thanks Five and Stuart, you two are unreal.

 

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.

Rundu Robbers

We arrived in the frantic town of Rundu after a late morning drive from Sachsenheim camp, just outside Etosha.  We had stopped at the Tsumeb museum on the way for a light history lesson (and some ab-fab mineral rock viewing) before heading into Rundu, which really was no more than a ‘border town’. Check me out with my traveller lingo ay.

Our camp was nice, yet slightly questionably empty.  What I mean is, it was on the river -  always lovely,  however the river was the border to Angola - hmmm.  Need I say more as we had a guard who sat by a fire near our site for the entire evening, on watch for illegal border crossers attempting to enter Namibia via our camp.

We watched another pleasant ‘African sunset’, saw a bushbaby in the trees, and the fantastic outline of an owl, had some dinner and were in bed by the average 7 year-old’s bedtime. Early.

Morning came and we were all up at funnily enough the same time any average 7year old would get up on a Saturday morning to watch cartoons. AKA sparrow fart.  We had to pack up and get ready for a big day at the internet café.  I was rummaging around in my tent as per usual; rolling up my mattress, shuvving the sleeping bag back into its bag with brute force, and being astonished at how much stuff I accumulated in my tent overnight. Fiver had briefly emerged from the roof tent to use the bathroom and Stuart was wandering around watching the sunrise while the water for the tea was boiling.  This was the tiny window of time when the roof tent was unattended, and robbed…quite possibly by a couple of tree swinging children.  That was the unanimous decision anyway.

 

This was our wake up call.  Now we are much more cautious of leaving the car and belongings unattended for more than one minute at a time.  Hmm.  Luckily, the only items that Stuart and Fiver are now less of, are; a couple of pieces of dirty washing, 2 empty bags and Stuart’s recently extracted tooth from Windhoek.  Too many lollies at the Swakopmund movie theatre, I think.

We thanked our lucky stars this was all, and I pretty much kissed my passport after finding it was still in its original place.  My question is though, who robs a bloody roof tent when the back doors are almost screaming out ‘please, someone, anyone, take these three conveniently charging laptops from this wide open and unlocked car’? 

Whoever they were, we were glad they preferred empty bags, dead teeth and dirty washing to apple technology and cloning identities