Angola, Namibia
Week 20 - Mar. 24th - 30th
day 134 - bush-camp to Ondjiva to Oshikango (border) to bush-camp
day 135 - bush-camp to Ondangwa to Oshivelo to Tsumeb
day 136 - day in Tsumeb
day 137 - Tsumeb to just outside Etosha NP
day 138 - game drive in Etosha NP, Namutoni to Halali (camp-site)
day 139 - game drive in Etosha NP, Halali to Okaukuejo (camp-site)
day 140 - game drive in Etosha NP, then to Outjo to Otjitotongwe Cheetah Farm
Week 21 - Mar. 31st - Apr 6th
day 141 - Cheetah Farm to Kamanjab to Brandberg Mountains
day 142 - Brandberg Mountains to Cape Cross to Swakopmund
day 143 - day in Swakopmund - solo skydiving lessons!
day 144 - day in Swakopmund - sand-boarding and quad biking!
day 145 - day in Swakopmund
day 146 - morning skydive, Swakopmund to Solitaire to bush-camp
day 147 - bush-camp to Sossusvlei to bush-camp
There was a reason we all wanted to make it through Angola in good time. But before I mention it I should point out that the transition from Angola into Namibia represented so much more than just making it before a certain deadline. Entering Namibia we would effectively be back on familiar ground for Gav and Summer. They had been travelling this section of Africa for years as tour guides and were now experts on the place. Now we could ask questions and actually have them answered. Not that I'm complaining about their lack of west coast experience, in fact I was delighted that they had never driven the western trans before because it made the whole trip seem like a real adventure and not a guided tour. But now we were travelling areas that Gav and Summer knew which was a good thing since there was much to see, starting right away here in Namibia.The reason we had wanted to make it through Angola in time was due to our bookings in Etosha National Park. If we missed this booking then we wouldn't be able to game drive through Etosha. Which would have sucked. Yet we would have still been charged for the booking. So we had to get there in time.
Well that was close...but we made it
Fortunately we did make it to Namibia in time. Unfortunately we did arrive in extremely unfortunate circumstances. Apparently Chilean citizens need a visa to enter Namibia, a fact that was unbeknownst to our unfortunate Chilean passengers. We had to abandon them at the border without so much as a goodbye due to the fact that we were also in a hurry to exit. Because we were all a little worried about the US$140 per day fine that we each would have had to pay if we overstayed our transit visas. Since we were already four days over we were dreading a $560 fine which would have left many of us broke. After checking our passports and stamping them the immigration official suddenly realised he hadn't checked something and asked for our passports back. We refused to hand them back and ran for the border leaving our poor Chilean friends behind to negotiate their way out of Angola by themselves, something that we all felt rather terrible about. Nevertheless we were still delighted to be in Namibia and the differences between Namibia and Angola, indeed Angola and the rest of West Africa, were immediately obvious. Fully stocked shops were everywhere, there were strange looking multicoloured signalling devices all over the place apparently called traffic lights (I don't know it's been so long since I've seen one, buildings seemed to actually be made from brick instead of mud and sticks and the roads were actually maintained. Normally I like to get away from the boredom and familiarity of western civilization but now we were just pleased to find shops with refrigerated food and plentiful supplies. We reached the town small town of Tsumeb where we enjoyed some sorely needed showers, laundry and sleep.Big-game driving without a gun
After leaving Tsumeb feeling clean, refreshed and ready for more we headed out towards Etosha National Park where we would be spending a couple of days game driving on the truck itself. We bush-camped near the boundary of the park in order to avoid the overpriced camping fees and entered the next day. We hadn't even made it as far as reception before we started spotting wildlife all over the place such as zebra, antelope and giraffes. We spent the next two days driving around on the truck keeping an eye out for animals. Our truck was easily the best equipped vehicle in the park for a game drive. After all we had open sides, an open roof and we had the height advantage that allowed us to see much further than any smaller trucks, cars or jeeps that were also game driving. But best of all we had Dave in our truck. That man really does have the eyes of a hawk. Several times he spotted animals hidden in the bush that we all had trouble spotting even when we stopped and had them pointed out. At one point we even came across a rhino off in the distance, a rare sight especially at this time of year. Several other vehicles stopped to see what we were looking at but they didn't have the height advantage of our truck and so they carried on.
Another highlight came when we spotted a big cluster of vehicles off in the distance, barely noticeable from where we were and we decided it could only be one thing: a lion. Only a lion sighting attracts that much attention from so many vehicles. We sped off down towards them and sure enough we found an enormous male lion chomping on the remains of a springbok. It must have been an impressive kill, the animal looked like it had been shoved through a sawmill, it was completely ripped in half, its head hanging down as the lion grasped the torn remains in its powerful jaws. We also drove out to the edge of the Etosha Pan for a photo stop. We spent a couple of nights camping at the actual park. On the first night it absolutely poured down with rain in the evening and at night. This wouldn't have been a problem since our tents were of course waterproof but unfortunately I had inadvertently pitched tent in a very slight sink-hole. I was dreaming of being on the ocean, not an unusual occurrence since I work on ships, when I woke up and suddenly realised that my air mattress seemed a little more buoyant that normal. I stood up in the tent and heard a distinct splashing sound which wasn't entirely reassuring. I couldn't be bother getting up to see how bad it was since I was tired but when I awoke the next morning I noticed that the tent had started to fill up. I got out and found myself standing in ankle deep water, not exactly the kind of wakeup call most people like to have but at least it was a laugh. Fortunately the camp-site on the second night remained dry. On the third day in Etosha we had one more game drive before heading south out of the park. We headed down to a town called Outjo for supplies and then drove to a place called Ojitotongwe, a cheetah farm where we set up camp and then went to visit the farm.Hug a giraffe today it makes everything better!
The cheetah farm was an absolutely wonderful place and quite possibly one of the best bargains on the entire continent for animal lovers. The farm was set up to rescue cheetahs and to prevent them from being shot by famers. Because wild cheetahs can often attack and kill livestock and so they often end up being shot by the landowners. So the farm was set up as a refuge for these beautiful creatures. Most of them are wild and are left in a big field where the owners feed them every day. Sometimes they even rehabilitate them and release them into the wild. They even have a few friendly cats that we were able to get up close to and even pet. For an utterly paltry fee we were able to get a tour of the place, first to meet the friendly cheetahs and then to go out in amongst the wild cats in a vehicle and watch the owners feed them.Surprisingly enough it turned out that the highlight of the farm wasn't the cheetahs but the friendly giraffe that lived in the area. Apparently the farm owners had found a baby giraffe with its head caught in a barbed wire fence. It would have died if they hadn't helped it so they freed the little guy and brought him back to the farm. He's free to come and go as he pleases but he loves it at the farm so much that he always returns! Everybody was delighted as the giraffe came over and stuck his head into every single window of the truck, getting much affection from everyone on board. I even got a photo of myself hugging the animal which might well have been the best thing I did on the whole trip!
The next day we left the camp-site at the cheetah farm and headed down towards the Brandberg Mountains, a beautiful area of Namibia which looked so uncannily like the outback of Australia that I would easily confuse the two of them if I mixed up my holiday photos. We went for a hike into the mountains to see some ancient rock art that had been there for thousands of years before settling down and bush-camping in one of the most scenic areas we had ever set up camp in. The next day we made for the Atlantic coast and towards Swakopmund, the adventure capital of Namibia. But before that we made a brief stop at the Cape Cross seal colony not too far north from town. I really bothered about the idea of watching seals from a distance, after all I'd already seen them before in New Zealand, and so I wasn't that exited about seeing them. That is until I arrived at Cape Cross! There were literally thousands and thousands of seals as far as the eye could see! I'd never seen so many animals together in the same place in my entire life! I'm not sure why they had chosen this place at their home but there they were lying in the sand or on the rocks making the most extraordinary cacophony of sound, try to imagine five thousand sheep bleating and burping at the same time and you're still not quite there! After beholding this incredible spectacle we left for Swakopmund where there were all manner of death defying activities to spend our money on.Meet the Weekenders
When we reached Swakopmund we encountered a number of other overland trucks, now that we were on the 'milk run' we would be seeing lots of them. The milk run is the term most overland drivers use to describe tours between Cape Town and Nairobi, usually in condescending terms because it's considered the easy part of the full trans-Africa experience i.e. plentiful showers, fresh food, electricity, refrigeration etc... and of course hundreds and thousands of tourists. We had already seen some of these trucks driving around in Etosha and some of the group were already adopting a mocking tone when describing the other trucks, weekenders as we somewhat scathingly dubbed them. One favourite activity of some of our group was asking how long they had been overlanding for and when the reply of 'oh about six weeks' came our lot would reply in sarcastic tones along the lines of 'oh that must be SO hard for you!' Aah it's hard not to boast about our trip when we've been on the road for that long. We had also decided that none of the other trucks were as awesome as ours. After all most of them had forward facing seats, seat belts, glass windows and no open roofs that you could sit on all day and spot wildlife from. They were basically glorified coaches not overland trucks. They were also shiny and didn't look like they'd been through any Angolan dirt roads!Fun with gravity...and hairstyles
Since we were in Swakopmund, the adventure capital of Namibia, we were given a presentation by one of the local booking agents on all the extreme sports that we could partake in around town. Naturally I wanted to do every single one of them but since we only had three days in town I had to narrow it down and only choose a few options. Some of the group decided to sign up for tandem skydiving but since I'd already done that three times I asked if the local drop-zone did solo skydive training. To my delight it was revealed that they did and so I signed up for a course the next morning. Phil and Jeremy also signed up for the solo course. I also signed up for sand-boarding out in the sand dunes, quad biking also in the dunes. Later that day we all went out for a meal at a restaurant that Summer recommended as 'her favourite restaurant on the face of planet earth', quite a glowing appraisal I think you would agree. It turned out that her accolades were not misplaced and I found myself returning to this extraordinary restaurant four times during the four nights we spent in town, sometimes even returning twice in one day.The next day we arrived early in the morning for our skydive training. It took up most of the morning and we weren't ready to jump until later on in the afternoon. First things first we were familiarized with the equipment that we would be using, and which would be saving our lives and preventing us from being a little red smear on the landscape, in other words our parachutes. We briefly went through a number of rules and through basic procedures such as canopy control but most of the training was taken up with telling us what could, and almost certainly would go wrong during our skydive. It was not exactly the most reassuring thing to hear when we were told that most first solo skydives end up with some kind of malfunction, whether parachute tangle, failure to open or failure to work at all whatsoever but we spent much of the training time learning about how to deal with the expected problems and how to either fix them or to cut away from our main parachute and deploy the reserve. And if the reserve didn't work then god clearly didn't want us to live and we should say our final prayers during our last few seconds of earthbound plummeting.
After our training we stopped for lunch and then came back to run through the reserve procedure. This involved us repeating over and over again the necesarry steps required to cut away our main parachute and deploy our reserve should we need to. We had to physically act out the procedure and shout it out at the same time over and over until we had thoroughly got it hammered into our heads. Others around us watched us with mild amusement as we stood in the middle of the courtyard with our backs arched in the freefall position shouting out the steps of the reserve drill: 'ARCH! LOOK! HANDLES! RIGHT! (cutaway) LEFT! (reserve) ARCH!' The reason for all the yelling was to occupy our minds should we find ourselves falling like a brick through the air, apparently the shouting gives us something to think about so that we simply don't just panic and suffer a brain freeze and do nothing until our insides impact with mother earth and are charmingly splayed in a very non fung-shuei manner around the entire surrounding area. Because that does happen to people sometimes.We drove to the airfield and dropzone which consisted of a couple of indistinct little shacks in the middle of the endless desert outside of town. The only landmarks, which we would have to spot from way up in the air, were the runway, a tiny little skid mark in the sand, the windsock and the aforementioned little shacks. After a couple more run throughs of our reserve drills we finally boarded the plane and began our ascent. We were running through the exit procedures in our mind over and over again. This also involved lots of shouting, in this case counting loudly to 5 while arching our backs in the freefall position. We didn't actually pull the ripcord of the chute ourselves, it was hooked up to the plane via a static line so all we had to worry about was whether or not the bloody thing actually deployed properly or even at all. After counting to five we had to look up, ascertain whether or not our chute was OK and then make a split second decision whether or not we needed to cutaway and use our reserves. Jeremy was first out of the plane, he dropped out of sight in a split second and I managed to just overhear him get halfway through counting to one before he was too far away to be audible over the propeller of the aircraft. It was my turn next, my turn to entrust my life to a sheet of polythene and some bits of string and so, after a final equipment check I shuffled over to the edge of the door, leaned over the edge, reported in to my instructor and after being given the go ahead I flung myself into space.
Sure enough my parachute did suffer a minor malfunction: entanglement. Basically the cords connecting my harness to the canopy had become twisted up in themselves during deployment in a similar fashion to when you sit on a swing and rotate yourself around 20 or so times. I had to decide whether or not I should abandon ship or fix the problem so I yanked hard on the lower cords in an attempt to pull them out. Nothing happened at first, probably only for a couple of seconds although it felt like an eternity. 'crap!' I was thinking to myself as I pulled hard at the strings but eventually the chute began to unravel. It was painstakingly slow at first to I started kicking in mid air trying to use the momentum of my body to untangle the parachute. Eventually I found myself free and after a steering and brake test I found myself in control of a fully functioning parachute and so I took it through a few twists and turns in midair before I was low enough to start thinking about landing and approach. I lined myself up to be close the the dropzone and soon I could see my other instructor on the ground with a couple of large signalling paddles ready to guide and steer me down. I followed his directions exactly, turning as he waved his paddles around to signal which way I should turn. As the ground rush towards me he signalled me to flare my chute, causing me to slow my descent and step gently down onto solid ground. And then fall on my arse. It seems that I didn't release the canopy controls soon enough and the wind caught the canopy before it could deflate and I was dragged backwards rather embarrassingly before I managed to fold up the canopy and take it back to the shacks.Right after landing I would have shook hands with and thanked my landing instructor but he was already off, running like the wind as fast as he could while waving his paddles around like a maniac. Because Phil had overshot the drop zone by more than a kilometre! But this was OK because it was actually Phil that suggested that the furthest away from target gets the beers in that night. Which was nice. Eventually we were all reunited and our instructors signed our logbooks and evaluated our performance: I had not exited the plane so well and of course I did fall on my arse but they were pleased with my canopy control and were satisfied overall. Later that day most of the rest of group turned up to do their tandem skydives and we made sure to have a beer on hand when they landed, ready to hand them over right away as soon as their tandem master unstrapped them. So that was one activity down, time for another one!
Testing out my new go-faster-stripes
The next day we had booked a double-bill of adrenaline sports for the day: sand-boarding in the morning and quad-biking in the afternoon. They were both a good opportunity to see if my new hairstyle would make me go faster. I had basically started the day before by shaving a big line down the middle of my head, kinda like a reverse mohawk or something like that. It looked horrendous and so the next day I got 'PS2' Gav to shave around the sides, effectively creating 'twin mohawks'. Or skid marks as I thought they looked like. Or 'badger stripes' as my Dad described when he saw the photo. At any rate I thought that they went well with my new 'tache and 'soul patch' which is apparently what you call that little patch on the chin just under the bottom lip. Hey I'm new to facial hair what do I know?!So first up was sandboarding, a rather fun activity that was very much like snowboarding just a tad warmer. I'd never snowboarded before so I was rather slow to start and I can't say I ever really got the hang of it in one short morning but it was a laugh anyway and quite fun. The experienced snowboarders were making it all look easy of course, some of them even jumping the ramp that was on the side of the dune and getting some air time. The more fun activity was lie-down sandboarding, basically we got a small sheet of wood that had the underside waxed and we launched ourselves down one of the steeper slopes reaching speeds as high as 70 kilometres per hour. We went back to Swakopmund for lunch before heading out in the afternoon for quad-biking.
Now the quad-biking was really fun. In fact I would say it was one of the highlights of the entire trip through Africa. It was basically a high speed race for a couple of hours through the stunningly beautiful dunes just outside of town. I'd never ridden a quad bike before but I soon got the hang of it. We rushed through the dunes at a tremendous speed or at least tremendous for me through perhaps not for the seasoned motorbike riders in the group such as Kev or Shaun. But it was fast enough for me anyway. Now and then we would stop for a rest and to admire the views out in the middle of nowhere. The highlight of the quad-biking was driving up the sides of the big dunes and then turning down towards the bottom and speeding back down the sides again. Those two hours flew by far too quickly and we were soon back in town wishing that we could just buy quad-bikes and just follow along behind the truck all day.Me vs. gravity: round 2
I had hoped to go on a second skydive on our third day in Swakopmund along with Phil but the weather just wouldn't cooperate. Fortunately however we managed to squeeze in a quick jump on the day we were leaving Swakopmund. We got up early and headed out to the dropzone where the weather was just perfect. Once again my chute suffered line entanglement, apparently it's common during a static line jump because the turbulence of the propeller causes spin which twists up the ropes. Still I knew exactly how to deal with it this time and I once again found myself soaring freely through the air having the time of my life. This time I managed a smooth landing, I stepped down onto the ground gently, released my canopy in time without falling on my arse and I gathered up my rig and took it back to the base. This time I'd also exited the aircraft in a far more satisfactory manner and overall the jump had gone almost perfectly. I would have gladly gone again but sadly it was time to return to the truck and leave Swakopmund. We returned to find the other packing their stuff away and stocking up on supplies at the local supermarket. We boarded the truck and left for our next destination: Sossusvlei.Lawrence of Arabia, or Namibia or whatever
When we left Swakopmund we spent a whole day driving, stopping to bush-camp out in the middle of nowhere near a town that was appropriately named Solitaire. The next day we rose early so that we could get to our intended destination early and avoid the crowds. Our destination was Sossusvlei, an area near the centre of an impressive desert park with endless beautiful sand dunes that stretch out as far as the eye can see. We reached Sossusvlei and headed out on a walk to climb one of the bigger dunes that would promise some impressive views of the surrounding area. Climbing the dune was easier said than done. Although not high by most people's standards the soft sand made climbing quite tricky as you would keep slipping back down every time you took a step. Eventually we reached the top and we were treated to an amazing panoramic view of the barren and desolate, yet beautiful sandy wasteland that lay around us. The highlight of this walk was coming back down though, we picked the steepest slope of the dune and charged down it as fast as we could manage, often falling down deliberately onto the soft sand.After leaving Sossusvlei we bush-camped once again and almost got in trouble with the law since bush-camping is technically not allowed in Namibia. Late at night, while we were preparing dinner, a vehicle with some irate locals came along and they told us that we weren't allowed to camp here. Gav tried to placate them with some random made-up excuses, such as telling them that our driver was ill and we had to stop, but they weren't buying it. They told us that they would come back to kick us out and we spent the rest of the night expecting to be kicked off of the land at some unpleasantly late hour in the day but nothing happened. Evidently they left and probably realised that they couldn't be bothered taking any further action. Nonetheless we got up early the next morning and left just in case they came back again.
But sssh! Don't tell anyone that we were bush-camping in Namibia! It's actually not allowed!
another successful jump!
Jeremy surveys his domain
The dune climbers in Sossusvlei
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