In Etosha
16th - 19th April, Ian
On Saturday (it's so hard to keep track of the
days) we drove from Waterburg to Etosha, which is Namibia's richest national
park. Our days have the same structure that we developed in Botswana: up at 6
am, and out quickly, maybe snatching a cup of bush tea and a biscuit if we're
doing well, and then out on a morning game drive. Much of the game - well, the
cats - rest lazily in the heat of the day and, being naturally camouflaged, are
hard to see, so game drives usually take place around sunrise and sunset. The
drive takes maybe 3 hours and then we return to camp for brunch or lunch. After
washing up we have a few hours for showering, lessons (maybe) or swimming in the
pool and reading. Then we prepare to leave for the second game drive of the day
some time before 4 pm, returning at around 6 pm. After dinner and washing up we
do some reading and before you know it it's time for bed, which, given how tired
we're getting is not too far after 9 pm most
nights.
There are a couple of differences at Etosha, which we previewed first at Waterburg. The first is that we're on our own, having left Alan at Maun in Botswana. Next, we have our Nissan Off Road, with its two roof tents. The fact that the transport and the accom are the same requires that we interpose a tent packing and unpacking stage into each day, even when we're not moving sites. This doesn't take too long, and adds virtually no elapsed time, since, adopting gender roles perhaps too quickly for some, I do the tents while Paula cooks. But it is a little bit of a drag, especially folding the tents back up (getting them out is a breeze).
The other difference, as I mentioned before, is that our campsites are now fenced in from the park. As I write this I can hear the very noisy whinnying of nearby zebra just outside the camp, and at the last place there were jackals everywhere; but no hippo rooting around on the other side of the mozzi mesh.
The book we're reading at night. as I may have mentioned, is No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which is approximately suitable and certainly interesting for all of us. I did intend that the four of us would rotate the reading but that's not happening, and I don't mind doing it. By the time we get round to this it's all the girls can do to stay awake to hear it.
The entry into Etosha was propitious: we almost immediately came across a giraffe, ponderously ambling across the track. Since we've been here we've seen numerous ostriches and giraffe, often in family groups, and herds of wildebeest, zebra, impala, gemsbok and springbok. The gemsbok and springbok are new to us (leaving aside the pan-fried Springbok in Joe's) and unnecessarily pretty, and the impala, which are less ubiquitous, are here black-faced. We have had a few brief and/or distant and essentially uninteresting glimpses of lion; nothing comparable to our encounters in Morembi, when we were within a metre or so of 11 lionesses and then a couple of lazy males. Don't know whether I mentioned that in Savute on one of the evening drives we disturbed a cat, too slender to be a lion, that Alan opined was a leopard - we only saw it for a few seconds and even though it was close it was not immediately obvious that it was a leopard rather than a cheetah. No time (especially with my Olympus, which fires up in about the time it takes to get into The Ivy) for a photo.
We added a couple of interesting entries to the animal roll call yesterday. In our afternoon game drive I spotted a pair of ears rise above the grass line, which Paula quickly fixed with the binoculars. While we were trying to determine what it might be, Heidi piped up from the back, as far as I could tell without losing a beat on Super Mario, with the answer, "bat-eared fox". And she was right (she'd been slyly reading the Lonely Planet guide to wildlife in Southern Africa). With it only briefly bobbing into view I couldn't get more than a grainy zoomed snap:
(When I update our homepage at the end of this month I hope you agree that I have much nicer slides than I'm blogging. But how many of you have seen a bat-eared fox?)
And later at night we walked up to an area where from within our campsite you could view a waterhole just over the fence. As we arrived a rhino was rummaging around only 5 or 10 metres from where we sat. Formally, if we accept Alan's tendentious leopard ID, this completed our Big Five checklist. (I'd recommend instead the Big Five B list of impala, elephant, zebra, giraffe and hippo, which, while much easier to find, just do more interesting things more often - the chances that your lion, for example, will be chasing down a wildebeest when you see it, if that's what you want, are about nil, since when they're not on TV they do this at night). After watching him for a while I did run to get my camera but just before I returned the rhino moved and re-surfaced about 75 metres away, well out of range of the night-time capabilities of my camera (I tried).
There are a couple of differences at Etosha, which we previewed first at Waterburg. The first is that we're on our own, having left Alan at Maun in Botswana. Next, we have our Nissan Off Road, with its two roof tents. The fact that the transport and the accom are the same requires that we interpose a tent packing and unpacking stage into each day, even when we're not moving sites. This doesn't take too long, and adds virtually no elapsed time, since, adopting gender roles perhaps too quickly for some, I do the tents while Paula cooks. But it is a little bit of a drag, especially folding the tents back up (getting them out is a breeze).
The other difference, as I mentioned before, is that our campsites are now fenced in from the park. As I write this I can hear the very noisy whinnying of nearby zebra just outside the camp, and at the last place there were jackals everywhere; but no hippo rooting around on the other side of the mozzi mesh.
The book we're reading at night. as I may have mentioned, is No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which is approximately suitable and certainly interesting for all of us. I did intend that the four of us would rotate the reading but that's not happening, and I don't mind doing it. By the time we get round to this it's all the girls can do to stay awake to hear it.
The entry into Etosha was propitious: we almost immediately came across a giraffe, ponderously ambling across the track. Since we've been here we've seen numerous ostriches and giraffe, often in family groups, and herds of wildebeest, zebra, impala, gemsbok and springbok. The gemsbok and springbok are new to us (leaving aside the pan-fried Springbok in Joe's) and unnecessarily pretty, and the impala, which are less ubiquitous, are here black-faced. We have had a few brief and/or distant and essentially uninteresting glimpses of lion; nothing comparable to our encounters in Morembi, when we were within a metre or so of 11 lionesses and then a couple of lazy males. Don't know whether I mentioned that in Savute on one of the evening drives we disturbed a cat, too slender to be a lion, that Alan opined was a leopard - we only saw it for a few seconds and even though it was close it was not immediately obvious that it was a leopard rather than a cheetah. No time (especially with my Olympus, which fires up in about the time it takes to get into The Ivy) for a photo.
We added a couple of interesting entries to the animal roll call yesterday. In our afternoon game drive I spotted a pair of ears rise above the grass line, which Paula quickly fixed with the binoculars. While we were trying to determine what it might be, Heidi piped up from the back, as far as I could tell without losing a beat on Super Mario, with the answer, "bat-eared fox". And she was right (she'd been slyly reading the Lonely Planet guide to wildlife in Southern Africa). With it only briefly bobbing into view I couldn't get more than a grainy zoomed snap:
(When I update our homepage at the end of this month I hope you agree that I have much nicer slides than I'm blogging. But how many of you have seen a bat-eared fox?)
And later at night we walked up to an area where from within our campsite you could view a waterhole just over the fence. As we arrived a rhino was rummaging around only 5 or 10 metres from where we sat. Formally, if we accept Alan's tendentious leopard ID, this completed our Big Five checklist. (I'd recommend instead the Big Five B list of impala, elephant, zebra, giraffe and hippo, which, while much easier to find, just do more interesting things more often - the chances that your lion, for example, will be chasing down a wildebeest when you see it, if that's what you want, are about nil, since when they're not on TV they do this at night). After watching him for a while I did run to get my camera but just before I returned the rhino moved and re-surfaced about 75 metres away, well out of range of the night-time capabilities of my camera (I tried).
Posted: Wed - April 20, 2005 at 01:52 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM