Sporting a huge variety and quantity of animals, spread out over a massive rocky desert and salt pan dotted with a few popular waterholes, Etosha National Park is one of Africa's great game reserves, and it was the next destination for our group. Leaving Botswana, we made a quick stop in a small doctor's office in one of the few villages we passed, picking up some antibiotics for our group leader, Jo, whose normally energetic and outgoing persona had been reduced to a few days of sleep and rest thanks to a nasty virus. Soon we came to the border with Namibia, where we found a tiny building in the middle of nowhere serving as the border post with the nicest immigration official that any of us had ever met (perhaps she was just excited to get a few visitors). Within minutes, we were into the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, a long, narrow strip that looks like a panhandle on the map of Namibia. Only about 40 kilometers wide and featuring one paved road running right through the length of it, sandwiched in between Botswana and Angola, this strange piece of land was mostly covered in shrubs and some yellow grasses, with larger trees coming along as we made it closer to the Angolan border and the river providing water and life to the vegetation and accompanying wildlife. Wars have been fought over this strategic piece of land, most likely for the importance of allowing the German settlers of Namibia to make it across to the Zambezi River and then across the rest of the continent to the Indian Ocean and their former settlement of Tanzania.
Namibia itself was one of the main reasons I came to this part of the world, featuring wide-open landscapes, rock formations and fabulous desert scenery, all together on a large land mass with only about two million people. I knew that would mean lots of driving through beautiful bits of desolate countryside, and that's exactly what I was looking for. It is also home to the part of the oldest desert in the world, along with some of the highest sand dunes colored with a brilliant red hue, ancient rock art and a few remaining cultures that have attempted to resist large changes from the outside world. With the combination of natural attractions, desolation and never-ending panoramas, I had high hopes for the place before even booking my trip.
Our first night was spent in a lovely campsite just along the river with a series of strange, themed outdoor bathrooms featuring showers with trees running through the middle and things like that. We were also told there was a possible upgrade from our tents to a set of incredible two story treehouses overlooking the river with large balconies and open showers facing the water, though these were all booked for the night, so we would just have to be content with our tents. Another treat was the fact that we had a group dinner at the restaurant, sitting on a large deck just above the water, again an upgrade from our typical meal around the fire which was good, though never quite this luxurious. On top of the nice meal, nature provided the main attraction with the rising moon, just a day past full, shining a brilliant orange above the winding river below. I have never seen the moon this color, and it kept the brilliant hue far up into the sky, possibly tinted by dust particles in the sky of this arid land.
The next day we passed further down the Caprivi Strip, just about two kilometers from Angola at one point, before turning down to the Southwest for a quick stop to get some local currency and pick up some supplies for the next few days. The money changing at the banks turned into a fiasco as tellers were going on lunch, unable to handle our transaction or trying to deal with system outages, so we spent about 90 minutes before the last bank in town was finally able to help us out. Later in the afternoon, we arrived at the park gates of Etosha, excited about what we might find inside. Being in a park/game reserve, that also meant we had the chance to use the custom built roof hatches above our seats. Park rules always restrict visitors from leaving their vehicles or hanging out the windows, but our vehicle found a way around that, with pop-up roof hatches, allowing us to stand up on the lockers in front of each seat, putting us about chest level out of the truck, with an amazing vantage point for spotting wildlife, admiring the views of just feeling the wind in your face.
The beauty of Etosha National Park is that much of the area is a massive salt pan, so animals from hundreds of miles in each direction congregate in a few select areas of the park where the waterholes (some permanent, some seasonal) exist, making wildlife spotting much easier, as you can mostly just show up to the water sources and wait for the thirsty animals to come to you. Early on in the park, we spotted a few interesting birds and the ubiquitous springbok, a small antelope with a dark brown stripe running horizontally across its side. We also saw a few impala before hitting our first waterhole where we waited just a minute or two to find a solitary elephant drinking while spotting a cumbersome giraffe strolling over to have a drink from the opposite end of the shallow pool. I was quite excited by the first major spotting (and the first giraffe I had seen in the wild only a few minutes earlier), but this was nothing compared to what was to come later.
Our night was spent at a former fortress used by the German military, tastefully converted to a whitewashed complex with a huge courtyard and a nice viewing platform from the top of the walls. Though I missed it after gazing at a few zebras and heading back, thousands and thousands of small birds came swarming into the adjoining waterhole and marshland just after dusk, causing quite a spectacle from what I was told. Back at the campsite, we prepared for dinner as darkness set in, bringing out a few daring jackals trying to dart among the site looking for scraps. We chased the small canids away from the site, but they were always lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right opportunity to pick up some unattended food. During the night, you could hear their strange calls, something like a bit of a scream in the distance and not nearly as majestic as coyotes or wolves. We'd just be staying on this Eastern edge of the park for the night, taking a long game drive the next day on the way to our next waterhole and campsite. Along with the jackals and birds, there were also a few large groups of banded mongoose hanging around the reception area of the campsite, allowing us to get right up next to the grey weasel-like creatures with a few parallel white stripes wrapping around their midsections as they played and dug around the area, mostly desensitized to the human activity around them.
In the morning, we got up early and were soon in the truck, a few of us braving the chilly morning hanging out of the windy roof hatches, looking for any sign of wildlife below, as the cool mornings and evenings are definitely the best times for spotting animals. As most of us were busing scanning the horizons, Stuart, one of the older British brothers, made a great spotting from his seat, noticing a camouflaged rhino just a few yards from the truck. We quickly stopped and backed up, finding it to be one of the rare, endangered black rhino of the park, of which only about 4,000 are remaining in the wild. The black rhino, differentiated from the more common white rhino by a prehensile lip, thinner front horn and ridge on its back, was just grazing in the brush, almost hidden by its grey color in the dry vegetation. I had certainly not expected to see one of these on the drive, making it an early highlight to the drive. Down the road, we spotted ostrich, impala, duiker and dik-dik (tiny variations of antelope about the size of medium dogs), zebra and oryx. Oryx (also known as gemsbok - which is pronounced very glutturally like ghhhhhhhhhemsbok here) are spectacular creatures, large, powerful relatives of the antelope with a beautiful light grey coat offset with a few splashes of black lines down the bottom and side, topped with a beautifully painted black and white face and two imposing, long, straight horns about a meter long, ending in a sharp point that can be used for protection. Given their chosen desert and arid habitats, they will most often not run away from predators as they don't have the food and water supplies to replenish the energy it would require, so they usually just wait and then turn their sharp horns towards the predator as it draws near. I hadn't seen many of these before coming to Etosha, and I was in awe of the incredible creatures, walking along the endless horizons of tall yellow grass and the occasional broad acacia tree spreading over the plains, a bit like some views I've seen of the Serengeti, though obviously a little more arid. Warthogs, kudu, wildebeast (with their prehistoric looking bodies and ridged mane), and others finished out a fairly successful game drive before the heat of the day took over, leading many of the animals back to shady spots under the few trees around. Stuart again made an impressive spotting, finding a honey badger hidden alongside the road before the black and white animal ran down the track for a while and headed off into the woods, quite a rare sighting of the elusive creatures.
As the animals disappeared, we headed straight for the salt pan of Etosha, whose name actually means Great White Place of Dry Water in the local language. The massive, faded white pan stretches off into the distance in all directions, composed mostly of a dirt base topped by layers and layers of coarse salt, long ago left behind by evaporated water from the area. I would have expected the sky all around to be a pure, clear blue, but with the dust in the area, it appeared as more of an ominous blue/grey in most places, sort of looking like a bit of a looming storm ready to roll in at any minute, though the sun still shone brightly above, not obscured by a cloud for the entire day. In the salt pan, we took a few experimental pictures, playing with perspective and scale in this place of infinite horizons, standing so it looked as if we were giants crushing other people or holding them in the palm of our hands. Leaving the pan, we got a tip about some lions around a nearby waterhole, so we rushed to find them, hoping to spot the kings of the jungle. We did see two of them, though they had finished their drink and we just lazing around on the grass far off from the dirt road to which vehicles are confined, so we didn't see much more than two brown lumps, resting in the late afternoon. We had another quick stop at the last waterhole to find more ostriches, springbok, oryx and a few others, though these animals were almost becoming so common that we didn't stay long for pictures before heading off to our campsite for the next two nights at Okakuejo (O-ka-KWAY-yo) Waterhole.
(Once in Etosha National Park, we finally had the opportunity to use our roof hatches to view the surrounding wildlife. We stood on our small lockers in front of each seat to stand up through the hatches.)
(Some of us were more interested in the wildlife than others. That's Simon with the big camera and Slavek with the enthralling book.)
(A row of oryx/gemsbok making their way through the tall yellow grasses. These beautiful antelopes have huge, straight horns and wonderful black and white markings on their grey bodies.)
(One of the giraffe that we saw along the way. Despite standing through the roof hatches, the giraffe were still probably taller than us.)
(Springbok were everywhere, so much so that we ceased stopping the truck when we saw herds of them.)
(An angry elephant trying to look ferocious as it was protecting the young guy barely visible behind the bush on the right.)
(Out in the salt pans of the park, we took a few shots playing with scale and perspective with the infinite horizons. Here Simon holds a mini-Derek in his hand.)
(Changing things up, David, the Aussie, tries to perfectly line up a shot of me pinching Simon within my fingers, though the final result turned out a tiny bit off.)
(A group of zebra tried to take over the road, but they eventually moved as our truck passed slowly by. Their camouflage was no match for our big blue/green vehicle.)
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