Sossusvlei and Etosha 10/7/06 Hello everybody! How are you all? We hear the English weather is back to it’s usual trick for Wimbledon! And we didn’t quite make it in the World Cup! Before I forget, Jas has up dated his photography website if you want to see many more of his pictures. Well you’ll be glad to hear that we have now made it in to another country, WHEY HEY!!! ‘Took you long enough!’ you say, I know! We had a straight forward enough border crossing from SA, which only took us 3 hours, not bad for this territory! Once on the other side, we were heading straight to the famous sandunes at Sossusvlei. We stopped for the night on the way in a smallish town called Skeetmanshoop which is famous around here only for having the most petrol stations per km2 than any other place in Namibia! Which really sums up what most people do there, fuel up on the way to somewhere, and not a lot else. From SA in to Nam. we leave the smooth tarmac roads behind (there are only a couple of main tarmac roads in Nam.) and enter the world of gravel roads, which to be fair are very well maintained, and have only the occasional rough patch. Of course our landy is raring to get the rugged terrain under her wheels and she is quite at home! She can’t wait to get to the sandunes! Scenery wise we are travelling in semi arid desert areas, with large hilly parts popping up regularly. It is visually dramatic, but as with anything, after a few hours of the ‘same old, same old’ it becomes pretty monotonous. Good job we’ve good lots of music to listen to! As we drive to Soss, it doesn’t seem as if we are heading towards anything and thoughts of ‘I hope this is as good as they say’, and ‘Why does it have to be so far, my bum aches’ do creep in to the mind. But I can safely say, now that we’ve seen them, they are definitely worth the wait! The dunes are stunning and really one of the most impressive landscapes we have seen. They are a deep orange colour and majestically rise from the very flat desert around them. It is recommended that you see the dunes at sunrise and sunset. Well those of you that know us well will understand that getting up before the sun rises it quite alien to us. However, when a suitably amazing reward awaits us even we can defy nature! So one morning we decide to be ready for when the gates open at 5.45am and make our way down to the dunes for day break. Well, we made a little mistake which threw our plan out just slightly! We do have a few grey cells between us, I think, but we both failed to realise that the clocks might change between SA and here, as they are on the same meridian line. So we turn up to the gates an hour early!!!! AARGHHH! We got the poor guard up to let us in and he scratches his head and says ‘But is only 4.45, no open gate now, must wait to 5.45’! Oh boy do we feel like complete idiots! After profusely apologising to him for getting him out of bed and blaming our foolishness on the fact we are silly tourists, we then have to sit there and wait in the pitch black, cold, starry night – oops! So at (the real) 5.45am, when other people are now turning up (we did wonder why we were the only ones around earlier on!) we are now back on track and get down to the dunes as the sun rises and the dunes do look amazing in the morning sunlight! Part of Soss is the Deadvlei, which is a large flat pan with lots of dead trees in it, surrounded by the dunes. This area really was the highlight for us. Imagine the scene, clear blue sky, deep orange dunes, white pan and black dead trees. It feels like you are in a Salvador Dahli painting it is so surreal! A fantastic sight and one for great pictures, we could have stayed there all day! As the sun rises over the dunes the pan is lit up and the shadows of the trees are very striking. Jas’s pictures will show you what I mean. We also walked up one of the dunes, which is actually a lot harder than you would think. It’s not a great height, but it is very steep and trying to walk in the sand is so tricky! Your feet sink in to the sand so much that it feels like that for every 2 steps up, you sink one step down again! And the wind doesn’t exactly help! It blows against you and whips up the sand constantly, it’s in you mouth, eyes, gets everywhere and I think I will be finding sand in places that I didn’t know existed for many weeks to come! The views were fantastic though and we really did enjoy being there, I would love to be able to go there again one day. It has definitely been a highlight of the trip so far! After leaving Soss we headed to Windhoek for a stop off for a few days. It’s a fairly regular capital by African standards, plety of shops and eateries and well stocked supermarkets. It’s very nice to stay in a backpackers again and be able to have a long hot shower to get rid of the Soss sand! We met quite a few people in the BPs and got chatting to a really great English guy, Stu (Hi Stu, how ya doing? Hope the conference is going well), who now lives in NZ. He was heading up to Etosha and was looking for a lift, so as we either going there or the Skeleton Coast next we made the choise to go to Etosha first. So we have just spent a week up there and it was brilliant. The first few days we spent at a campsite called Namutoni with Stu and had a fantastic time driving around spotting things. Again I’ll list what we saw, with a few details in a minute. Kudu, ostrich, lion, leopard, cheetah, warthog, giraffe, wildebeest, eland, impala, springbok, elephant, rhino, hyena, steenbok, zebra, pale chanting goshawk, battleur eagle, stork, flamingo, terrapin, chameleon, oryx, lilac breasted roller, hornbill, eagle owl, fork tailed drongo, pigmy falcon, hartebeest, snake (not sure what type, but big!). The Etosha pan is a massive dried out ancient body of water, and looks very formidable in the scorching heat. There are very few waterholes to see, even after apparently the most rainfall Namibia has had for a few years! So it is hard to believe the area is home to such large herds of grazing animals. It was lovely to see so many zebra with young and watching numerous giraffe regally parade across the grasslands makes you feel like you’re in Jurassic Park as they look very dinosaur-like! We had several highlights which I’ll keep short, firstly we saw a big male lion wandering towards us through the grass and he sauntered pretty close before disappearing in to bushes. We took a chance that he might be headed to a waterhole nearby and drove there to await his reappearance. Never did I think we would be that lucky, but Jas was right and after about ½ hour he strode down to the waterhole and had a good long drink before walking round it and off again. It was amazing to see him so close, we were very pleased! We then left Stu to join the tour he was meeting and went to another campsite called Halali. On the way there we were getting close to time the gates shut and we thought we would just drive around a little more and round a corner there was a leopard lying in the road! She moved off as we approached but only a short way to the side of the road and we happily watched her watching some springbok. At this campsite there was a beautiful waterhole that you could walk to. We had heard it was a good place to see stuff so we spent the afternoon and evening there and after a few hours of nothing, our leopard showed up and had a drink, very nice! The next day we drove to another waterhole and were very glad to find 3 cheetah there, a mum and 2 older cubs. We watched them for ages, the cubs were running and around playing, the mum keeping an eye on them. They eventually went on their way and we decided to try the ‘predict where they are going’ technique which had worked so well before. This time is was not to be, they must have gone the other way! At the waterhole that night we had a fantastic time watching a herd of over 30 elephants (adults, kids and babies) drinking and playing. It was the best thing I have ever seen (elephants are my particular favourites) and we were mesmerised for ages. They left and we thought nothing could top that, but to our amazement shortly after a rhino and her calf turned up for a drink. Before we could get over the sight, the mother gave a big snort and we heard another snort further away in the dark. Moments later another mother and calf joined her. Now we were really counting ourselves lucky! Never did we expect what happen next……three more rhino came through the bushes and it was a sight to behold, 7 rhino around the waterhole only metres away all quite calmly drinking and grazing. ‘Oh what a night’ as the song goes!! We spent another couple of days there, although nothing topped what we had already seen apart from coming across a chameleon in the road! Then we said good-bye to Etosha and came back to Windhoek. Tomorrow we are off to Swakopmund to the west and will drive up through the Skeleton Coast. We are then going to meet up with an English family we met in Etosha, to go to some areas in the very north of Namibia where it is recommended you go in convoy as the terrain is pretty rough! We will go through a section where desert elephants live, whether we see them or not is another thing, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed! So that’s us done for now, another lengthy instalment I’m afraid, but as you know I’m not good at short and sweet! We wish you all well and hope you are having fun whatever you are doing!