Graptolite - Safari Day 1 to 3
Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Sun 4 Apr 2010 14:34
After a lean winter of not getting out too much, or at least not getting
out too far from Europe anyway, we have headed for pastures new. After
some DVD research watching Ms. Streep and Ms. McKenna in “Out of Africa”
and “Born Free” and a bottle or two of Amarula, we have decided to go to
the ‘Dark Continent` for some long overdue safari-time. Actually, this is
a birthday surprise for me from Heike and I had nothing to do with the
planning apart from some last minute stuff.
Friday April 2nd
After an overnight flight from Frankfurt we found ourselves in
Johannesburg and on a flight to Windhoek, Namibia. Heike had to persuade
some hapless woman to swap seats so we could sit together but otherwise
all went well. We had rented a 4WD truck but the tyres turned out to be
all worn out and there was no spare. By the time it was all complained
about and fixed it was getting late and the shops where we had hoped to
provision at in Windhoek were shut so we raced up the Trans-Kalahari
Highway, a very warthog and baboon infested road, to our first lodge.
After leaving the highway and announcing ourselves at the gate, the place
was only another 45km down a red dirt track, thick with gemsbock and other
antelope. The lodge itself was lovely and we had a very nice bungalow with
a picture-window overlooking the wildlife. The lodge is also a big cat
conservation area for leopards and cheetah but none were seen in action
despite lying a-bed watching the sunset.
At dinner, the woman that Heike moved on the plane, we will now call Norma
from South Africa, and her husband Allen originally from Wales, were
seated across the table from us. Nice people, luckily. A small enough
world as it was and it got considerably smaller as we discovered we had
many business, sporting and travel interests in common. The night safari
turned up half-a-dozen porcupines chasing each other around, very
carefully, but little else.
Saturday 3rd April
After breakfast we headed off to a small town to the north for food and
fuel and then on to Etosha National Park even further north. The first
wildlife we encountered were again the irrepressible Norma and Allen who
were also paying their fees at the park gate but then it got really busy
with big herds of zebra, ostrich, giraffe and springbok all over the
place. On the edge of the Etosha Pan, a huge salt flat, we saw a lion
lunching casually on a wildebeest watched patiently by marabou storks and
jackals. This was the real red-in-tooth-and-claw Africa. The 4x4 came in
useful on the rough and muddy tracks leading to our first night stop in
the park at Halali Camp.
If all goes well then we are staying another night in Etosha then moving
on to the Caprivi Strip, then the Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park
in Botswana, then the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, then the Kruger
National Park in South Africa.
M