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.