Getting Colder

We left Swakopmund for Etosha National Park on Friday June 4th after having the car checked out by good mechanics and getting everything cleaned up from all the dust of Damaraland. We went on a buggy ride in the dunes near Swakopmund and saw 4 of the “little 5” – Chameleon, Gecko, legless lizard, and beetle – all native and unique in Namibia. The only one we missed was the ghost spider. During our nature drive we also went sandboarding, which is like sledding but on sand dunes, and Will got to do a little hot-dogging on the dunes. Will has started uploading photos on his Flicker site, the link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/photos_by_will/.
Swakopmund is a bit like Vic falls in that it’s an area of extreme/stupid sports. We’ve been pretty conservative with just an ultra light flight and sandboarding so far. I’m sure there will be more opportunities for extreme sports such as great white sharks in South Africa, plus all the soccer hooligans.
Etosha is a very large national park that is 100 years old. Most of the game comes to the water holes so it’s very easy to see animals but it’s much more sitting around waiting than the Kenyan driving safaris. We’ve seen lots of elephants, black rhino, black backed jackals, black faced impala, kudu (not sure if lesser or greater), mongoose, giraffes, mountain zebras and springboks. At first we stayed outside the park and drove in during the day since camping is much more expensive in the park. Then we moved to Halali lodge inside the park for two nights. There’s spacious camping and a great waterhole at Halali lodge. The main benefit is that you can stay up late game watching and we’ve enjoyed cooking out more and being less rushed.