12-21/6 Northern Namibia, Etosha, Himbas and the Epupa falls

After spending some days in Windhoek I went with two French friends, Delphine and Anthony, the Swiss guy and Patrik, the new intern replacing me at the Swedish Trade Council, to Etosha and Namibia's largest national park. Since it is a bit tricky to find a car for the weekends unless you book it far in advance the only car I had found was a big Volkswagen bus, but it turned up to be just perfect for our trip! Etosha is a beautiful place with all the african animal life that you would expect. The Saturday we saw big heards of zebras, girafs and antilopes, seemingly peacefully eating their way through the savanna. On the Sunday we went for a early morning safari in our hippie bus and has the luck to have a whole group of lions crossing the way just some meters ahead. Their red faces in the early sunlight in the chilly morning told a story of a not so peaceful surrounding as we had experienced the day before and we were happy to sit inside our bus as we drove on.

After a couple of days in Etosha I continued to the north by my own since the rest of my hipie group headed back to work. From Outjo I found a taxi heading north via Kamanjab to Opuwo, some 600 km away. The taxi driver stopped sometimes to buy himself a beer (they only sell them in 1l bottles) and went faster and faster, while it was getting darker and more and more cattle and donkeys on the road. As an answer on the question if he could slow down, our driver had a long talk to himself that Jesus was the God and Satan was the lion. That made of course perfectly sense (?), and I was quite relieved when we finally reached Opuwo.

Opuwo is an exciting and colourful little town and a complete mixture of the different tribes in Namibia. Big herero women walk around in colorful dresses and matching hats that represent cow heads, red-colored himba women with children on their back are waiting for lift back to their villages, bare-breasted ovambo women with beautiful hair filled with pearls are lauging and joking, small boys are running around in too short pants and already drunk men are drinking beer at 10am outside the never closing bars. The liveful little town is full of sounds, from the talking and singing people, from the goats that are to be auctioned or slaughtered, from the homeless dogs or the donkeys and horses on the roads.

The next day I moved on to a little himba village, Omanguete, where I were about to teach English and Maths to the children in the village for a week. The time was without a doubt one of the best of my life, and it is hard not to want to stay forever when you have 10 small himba children fixing your hair, singing ba ba white lamb in Swedish.

8-12/6: Brandberg, Twyfelfontain and Cape cross

From Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, me and my newly found travel company Anna, a Spanish girl working in Mozambique and Tizian, a Swiss on his way back home from studies in Cape town took the minibus to the coast and Namibia’s premier holiday resort Swakopmund. Minibuses in Namibia are the main mean of transport between the towns of Namibia since there is no developed bus or train service. Swakopmund is however one of the few cities where the train is passing, but since it takes about 11 hours instead of 4 and is freezing cold (I know, I’ve done it) we decided to take the minibus.

Swakopmund can not be considered the most joyful place on earth during wintertime. While all the rest of Namibia is drowning in sun, you enter Swakopmund and you are situated in a constant greyish cloud. The streets are strangely wide and every corner has a stop sign, intriguing considering that there are no cars on the streets, nor any people and every street name or shop is German. We’d tried to book a hostel in advance during the opening hours, but since no one responded we went directly to the hostal, which was literally deserted. After a little while a man approached and told us it was full. Since it was clearly not full (not a single light, nor a single person and soon dark) we tried again but our friend insisted that it was full. After arguing some time we finally got to see the rooms, clearly empty, and had the opportunity to choose a room either with two beds and shower, three beds and toilet or 20 beds and both. We chose the second.

One the Monday we received our rented new and brilliantly white Toyota Corolla and were happy to drive out from Swakop to the north. We were about to follow the coast to Namibia’s highest mountain, Brandberg (2573m), which contains some of the world’s famous rock paintings, dated 6000-2000 years back. Our Damara guide, one of the local ethnical groups speaking the ‘click’ language, tried patiently to teach us the names of birds and trees on the way, but it was doomed since none of us could pronounce any of the clicks right, making them bad words instead. The next day we went on to the Twyfelfontain, a magical place covered with engravings, some dated over 6000 years old, and with a magnificent view over a vast typically Namibian landscape with high yellow grass and acacia bushes.

From Twyfelfontain we decided to take the chance/risk and take a D-road, maybe a little crazy considering that our car was fairly low underneath, still new and brilliantly white (well almost) and there is no mobile signal in that area thus we would be hours away from help if something went wrong. But said and done we were on our way. As we proceeded into the vast amazing and constantly shifting land our gravel road became worse and worse. Each time we passed a specifically difficult part where we almost buried ourselves in the sand holes we were inventing a happy song. On a specifically difficult part we encountered a 4x4, deep stuck into the sand. As there was nothing we could do to help them we promised to call for help when we reached the coast, which we finally did, four hours later. Finally at the coast we made it just in time to see the Cape Cross seal colony before sunset – just an amazing experience to see the life of the somewhat 80,000 seals so close and with the sun slowly setting over the sea.