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Post date: Jul 11, 2010 3:23:42 PM
Day 9 started off with the first (and only) real service issue that we experienced in our trip. Getting up a 4:30 to depart at 6:00, we found that the Alluvia estate had forgotten to provide their showers with either a) hot water, or b) water pressure. So, instead of starting the day off with a warm shower in anticipation of spending 2 1/2 days camping in Etosha, we got a dribble of cold water. Although the receptionist was very pleasant for being awakened at 4:30 in the morning with a service call, it was very disappointing, as Alluvia was far and away the most expensive place that we stayed at during our entire trip.
As we headed into the Cape Town airport, we noticed locals walking along the sides of the freeway. This in itself is not surprising, as walking is the predominant form of travel. What was surprising was that one of the locals decided to cross the freeway just as we were coming up to him. At 130 kph (that's a little over 80 mph), it took a significant swerve to avoid splattering him on our windshield. Oh nimble Picanto, we shall miss thee!
After saying our goodbyes to Lee at the Cape Town airport, Carla, Janie, and I headed to Windhoek, Namibia. There, we were met by Pendy, our guide for the next two and a half days. He stuffed our items into his truck, and we headed off for the Etosha National Park in northern Namibia.
Pendy had been promising a dish which, at first, sounded much like springbok. We were quite excited to eat springbok again, and were, admittedly, a little disappointed when we discovered that he was talking about "spag bol" or, as we know it, spaghetti bolognese. It was still quite tasty. However, in my eagerness to help, I offered to boil the spaghetti and dropped half of it onto the dusty ground. We managed to grab the gravitationally competent noodles with a minimum of dirt, although a combination of embarrassment and snickering prevented us from telling Pendy the truth as he, muttering, scooped up a layer of dirt from the water which had risen to the top. "Basil and African seasoning," we kept telling ourselves as we giggled. It was funnier in person than it probably is in the reading. After dinner with a few crunchy bites of spag bol mixed in, we walked over to the lit up watering hole hoping to catch some animals drinking, but saw nothing and headed back to the tents to go to sleep.
Pendy is from the Caprivi Strip in northeastern Namibia, and he explained the differences between the tribes of Namibia and what his culture was like. He had left the Caprivi to go to school in Windhoek, but was the only one from his family to have left the region. There was quite a long conversation about the Caprivi tradition of paying for wives and children out of wedlock. If a man gets a woman pregnant, according to Caprivi tradition, then he must pay many head of cattle to take care of the child. He also must pay a bridal gift - a dowry - of head of cattle to the family of the bride to be before he can marry the woman. It makes economic sense in Caprivi to marry first and then have children to avoid the cattle tax.
The road up to the Etosha National Park was long and, for the most
part, flat. It consisted of large plots of privately held reserves and farms and a lot of scrub land interspersed with compact mountains. According to Pendy, during both German and South African colonization, land was divvied up and given to large landholders, and even after Namibian independence, those farms were still held by their previous owners. The Namibian government was trying to slowly buy back land at a fair price, but funding and finding willing sellers was slowing the process.
We were supposed to go to the Halali rest camp in the middle of Etosha, but had arrived too late to make it there. At Etosha, you are not allowed to drive on the roads after sundown, and they close the gates to the rest camps. This is to protect the campers from the wildlife. So, we signed into the Namutoni rest camp, and as we were heading to the campsite, we came upon a South African car which was stopped on the side of the road. We waited for a moment, and then the car motioned us on to pass it, but as we got almost side-by-side with the car a hand popped out of the window signalling us to stop. We rolled down the window to see what was happening.
"Do you want to see a leopard?" inquired the driver of the other car.
Well, that was almost a rhetorical question, as, arguably, the leopard is the hardest of the so-called Big Five (leopard, lion, rhino, water buffalo, elephant) to see. It was getting towards dusk, and the leopard was hiding in a bush grooming itself, so it was difficult to see, but see it we did. Unfortunately, the light was not good enough for Janie's camera, so we'll have to live with our memories rather than a picture, and you, Gentle Reader, will simply have to trust that we are not making up a story about it!
We then headed on to our campsite, with the slight worry that, even though it is a reclusive animal, we did have a leopard inside the grounds rather than outside. We just hoped we were less tasty than the other people inside the camp.
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