End of Week One – and Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas Eve and we’ve been camping for a week now and continuing to have an amazing time. Namibia is a real surprise – absolutely gorgeous and enormously diverse. It is, not surprisingly given its history, a lot like South Africa with South African banks, shops, petrol stations, attitudes – but a much less populated version with very different geography. I could live here…

It is Christmas tomorrow and it’s going to be an odd affair. We will be in Etosha National Park today for 5 days and thus will be spending Christmas Day there. The Oracle of Google tells us that the weather is going to be about 40C with chance of rain/thunderstorms for most of our time there – not exactly a traditional white Christmas. The kids have been told (repeatedly) that they’re getting two little presents each (we don’t have the space for lots of presents) and that we’ll do another Christmas at the end of the trip – but they live in hope that Father Christmas will somehow find some generosity and a chimney. They have requested tinned spaghetti and meatballs for Christmas dinner followed by a marshmallow roast. Who are we to deny them such yuletide luxuries?

Sossusvlei was incredible. We got up at 5 am – after a mostly sleepless night camped next to a herd of singing, binging and loquacious Frenchmen – to pack up and try to catch the sunrise on the dunes. Fiona suggested that she and I sleep under the stars which we found out the next day was not such a good plan as there had been a hyena attack a week earlier. The half-asleep boys were moved from the tent straight into the back of the car, sleeping bags and all, and we drove the 45 minutes into the park. At the end of the tarred road in the park there’s a deep sand 4×4-only trail over which we somewhat nervously led a convoy of 5 vehicles into the dunes. The pressure… The dunes are incredible, enormous – about 100m high of red sand – and they stretch for more than 100 kms to the Atlantic Ocean. Awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Swakopmund, billed as “more German than Germany” really wasn’t but is a lot like Cape Town, complete with half of Gauteng there on holiday. The 5 hour drive there from Sossusvlei was incredible despite yet another tire puncture. Our campsite was a lot different from the previous sites – a lot less exotic – but it was great to spend two entire nights in the same place without the daily pack/unpack routine and get some relax time – as well as reading up on how to repair tires and time to buy some Woolworths underwear. Our neighbours at the camp were a funny “A-Team” couple from Pretoria and their 3 girls with whom we laughed and chatted until the wee hours of the morning. The highlight of the hilarious stories was when Erns, the dad, had a lawyer sue Swissair for $150,000 and place an seizure injunction on a Swissair plane in Johannesburg on the grounds that Swissair staff had libelled him by accusing him of being drunk on a previous flight. The South African courts complied, seized the plane and Swissair settled for $4,000 to get their plane back. Don’t mess with Erns.

We spent last night in a camp just outside Otjiwarongo and had the run of the place. It was the first night we were really on our own – and the boys spent a lot of time clinging to parents and sweeping the bush with flashlights. We are in cheetah and leopard country so they were given a bit of a speech about sticking close to parents – and they followed those instructions admirably, even annoyingly!

Happy/Merry Christmas to all!