Swakopmund, Sand-boarding and New Years

We spent the last of 2011 in Swakopmund.  Basically means the mouth (mund) of the brackish (swakop) river in German.  Its not tough to tell this is a town with strong German roots just from looking at the architecture if not to listening to the locals jabber on in German.  Its a very nice town and is the Adventure Capital of Namibia (much like Queenstown is for New Zealand).  They have all sorts of optional activities here... ranging from tandem parachuting from 10K feet (opening at 1500) to quad ATV biking through the dunes.  I wanted to try paragliding off one of the dunes but it conflicted with our Sandboarding which Jen and I had promised the kids.

We arrived in Swakopmund after another LONG (are you sensing a theme here?) day with a 5am start.  We basically had time to line up our activities for the following day and explore the town a bit on foot.  The stores and shops were open so Jen and the kids had a field day.  Jen was on a mission to find a wooden Giraffe for our landing back home and Lapise (our resident South African nature teacher) had instilled in Shawn a love for rocks so he spent the afternoon haggling with vendors for rock samples.  Both he and Rachel have become very able negotiators and view it with a lot more enthusiasm than Mom or Dad.  

Obvious German influences

They don't call it the Skeleton Coast for nothing!

Its a very neat and tidy town... we felt completely safe

Very pretty too!

The view from the top of the Sandboarding dune.

Rachel getting ready to go down the hill for her first run.

The view of Swakopmund from the top of the dune.  We were WAY up.

Shawn and Bar hiking up the dune

Sandboarding is a lot of fun but is a lot more work than Snowboarding as you have to climb the hill with your board, wax it every run and then go down a hill that is a LOT steeper than anything you'd do on snow. They got some of the guys on mats doing 76kmh on radar.  They didn't clock the Sandboarders.

As mentioned before I had a bit of a wipeout (crossing one of my previous tracks) and the front came to a screeching stop and I went ass over tea kettle over the front of the board and broke my fall with my left wrist (dumb move on my part... I know better than that but wasn't thinking as it surprised me as I was right at the end of the run and was boarding confidently - and fast - by then).  My arm felt numb at the time and my finger tips were immediately bruised but everything felt relatively OK so I did 6 more runs (Shawn did 8 and Rachel did 5 more) before we couldn't lift a foot to climb the dunes again.  You can't imagine what work it is to climb the dune with a Snowboard, your boots when it's 35 degrees and blowing like crazy.    We were told these dunes were over 250 metres high and I believe it.  That's like doing a full run at Blue each time but there isn't a run at Blue or even Georgian Peaks that is as steep.

Anyway, I later discovered that I actually fractured a couple of bones in my hand and perhaps even one in my arm just above my wrist.  Once I got a splint on it I was fine.  Cammie, the next time you break something go out drinking on New Years eve and you won't feel much pain.  :-)   I would still have done the Sandboarding but its not something we'll all rush back to because it is so much work.  They even had a jump which Shawn of course spent every run going over.  Rachel and Shawn also tried their hands on the mats for a run.  I couldn't hold up the end so didn't try it.  They both got over 65km/h on them.

A little Scorpion that tried to interrupt our lunch at the dunes.

The "girls" on New Years Eve (Rebekka, Rachel, Monica and Gerti)

Rachel has been spending all her money on bracelets.  She's got one of the on here but usually wears about 5 at a time.  She and Shawn had a great time with the Aussie kids... learning what they have/say vs what we have/say.  Everytime I hear Shawn imitate Rebekka ("Oi MAAARTIN, You WAAANT to PLAAAY?") I crack up.

Both Craig (the Aussie Phys Ed Department Head from the Gold Coast) and I are worse for wear!

After dinner, we went down to the beach where they were having a big bonfire and party to bring in the new year.  We wandered around with about 5000 happy but peaceful party goers and Shawn set off some more of his fireworks.  By about 10:30pm, we were tired out due to the string of 5am starts we'd been doing and headed back through a pretty much vacant Swakopmund to our hostel.  We couldn't have felt safer in Barrie.  It was a great way to ring in 2012 (or at least celebrate surviving 2011).

Happy New Year!

Spitzkoppe

Today it was on to Spitzkoppe, the African "Materhorn".  Its actually a lot like Ayers |Rock in Australia as well.  Its a large group of HUGE rocks in the middle of the Namib desert.  The granite is ore than 20M years old and rises about1 784m above sea level.  (700 m above the desert floor).  There are ancient bushmen cave paintings that we weren't able to catch before our camera battery died.

Our guide and chef Gerti explaining how deadly this plant is (like poison ivy if you get the sap, fatal if you burn it and inhale the fumes) to Shawn, Jen and our Austrian friend Martin

Matti, Bar and Fabio (seriously) looking for the African Bush Toilet

Monica spent a lot of time with Rachel, doing French Braids.

Rising out of the Namib Desert... Spitzkoppe

These are mountains on the back side of Spitzkoppe

The back side of Spitzkoppe

The bridge

Bushmen paintings of Shawn, Rachel and Rebekka

Here they are in person

Shawn jumped from one peak to the next giving his Dad his first heart attack since Shawn was 2 and did a similar prank. I honestly thought he was going over the edge (a 50' drop onto stone)

That evening we all sat around the campfire and the group had me give them a talk on Astronomy.  They said they enjoyed it.. I got lots of great questions.  Someone even pointed out the Southern Cross.  We were literally hundreds of miles from the nearest light bulb so it was a perfect spot for it.

The Himba Village

A relatively short drive today... only 280kms.  We ended up in Kamanjab, Namibia at a Himba Village.  This was setup by a gentleman who fell in love with a Himba lady who had luekemia.  She managed to make it, so they setup a village for the Himba's where they could live in their traditional lifestyles and be safe from western temptations.

The Himba are the most photographed people in Africa as the women paint themselves with Red Ochre and fashion mud hair extensions.  Their sullen looks are very endemic to African photos.

Note the Redish tint and the mud hair extensions

I want CANDY!!!

Rachel, Rebekka and a Himba baby... they'd just put their arms up to be picked up.  We couldn't hold them as the red die would wreck our only decent clothes.

Himba house

Showing us how the Hiba women take smoke showers - they use no water.

You see this expression on posters everywhere here

Dingy and"Crocodile Steve" - note the sausages!

Shawn - "I'm king of the world!"

One of the interesting facts about the Himba is that they knock the bottom four front teeth out of the males when they turn 16.  Apparently it helps them speak better.  Yikes!

Etosha National Park

Today is Sarah's Birthday.  Happy Birthday Sarah!!!!

Its another LONG drive...  550 kms to Etosha National Park.  We are in hills nd mountains for most of it now so its a BIT more interesting at least.  Etosha is the home of the lage Etosha Salt an - a 5000 sq km FLAT clay baked pan.  The optics around such a flat area really play havoc on you as you can see below:

I've got my whole world, in my hands...

I have some more accurate versions of this but they were all getting annoyed with me so the faces look progressively more intolerant. :-)

Etosha is more than just the pans.  It has a very large scrub area and is home to the big 5 although we didn't see the Leopards this time - but we did get to see some Rhino's up close at the watering hole at our campsite. That was one of the best features of Etosha actually... both campsites had nice swimming pools and then watering holes where we could sit for hours and watch the wildlife come in.  We spent hours at each of them spying on Zebra's, Giraffes, Rhino's, Springbok, Jackal's, Wildebeast and various birds.  It was quite enlightening to see how timid all the animals were around the watering hole (except for the Rhino's... they were fighting each other).  The Zebra's would take about 30 minutes to take the first drink.  Clearly, they were very wary about predators - although they didn't seem the slightest concerned about us.  They also had bright spotlights on the watering hole so we could watch the action at night - which was when we saw the Rhino's.  The camera's had a challenge with it but our eyes worked fine.  It was one of the highlights of the trip.

We also saw lots of animals on the plains as you can see below.

Hey it's Rusty and the Mrs!

Its a Raptor of some sort... told it was rare to see them.

Just hanging around with nothing to do or to watch....

Couldn't resist... they are getting annoyed at me now!

Shawn and Bar slip sliding away...

A Bushman's favorite meal - Oryx

They can't out run the bushmen.

There were hundreds of these vultures circling around... no kill in sight

The watering hole at sunset

A Jackal looking for prey

Our trusty Jackals

And at night

The strange two headed antelope

A "Sociable Weaver's" nest... there are actually thousands of them inthere... and it weighs up to 2 tons!  I saw them come out in the am... what a racket!

Took them 15 minutes to get this far...

Ghanzi, Bushmen, Windhoek and Christmas

After we left the Delta, we drove for about 400kms ( a very long day) to a little town called Ghanzi in Botswana.  This was really nothing more than a stop on our wway to Windhoek which is the capital of Namibia and is over 900kms from the Delta.  This is nearly 900 kms of the Kalahari Desert which as I mentioned is flat, sandy with low scrub vegetation (because of the record rains there last year).  We saw the occasional Ostrich, Kudu, Oryx and Elephant but very little else.  Even the towns were stretched out by 4-500 kms so other than good roads (with no powerlines or other obstructions), we didn't see much.

Our camera battery had died on the last morning of the Delta and we weren't able to charge it until we got to Windhoek so we have a dearth of pictures, but here is one that shows what the Kalahari looks like.

Even the Elephant was bored of the surroundings!

The Kalahari has its charms, but the sheer size of it is whats most astonishing.  We drove for most of three days to get through it and the details were fascinating, the kids found it a little tedious at times.

The pace of this trip was a little hectic!

The kids (all 7 of them plus a few of the young women who Rachel had attached herself to (and Shawn had crushes on - Monica and Mattie) usually sat up front and played Scum - an Aussie Rules card game they really enjoyed where the winner is the Emperor and the loser is Scum.

Anyway, after a very long day on the 24th, we arrived in the bushmen's village in Ghanzi in time to setup our tents (we were getting extremely good at this by now) and set out on a short hike with a bushmen tribe.  This was nothing like the one we did in Tanzania with the Hdazabe as instead of a nice small group of 4, we had 23 but they wore the traditional clothing (women topless in all their glory and men in loin cloths - which Shawn/Rachel didn't bat an eye at).  They showed us some of the indigenous plants and their purposes (roots for brushing teeth and curing kidney stones, etc.) and then made a fire with sticks - I guess this is the big tourist draw item.  I timed them this time and they did it from start to finish in a shade under 2 minutes.  I wanted to tell them that there was a tribe in Tanzania who were twice as fast! :-)

They had some babies and small kids with them (carried in skins on their backs) who were completely adorable.  The bushmen are a very attractive race as they have slightly Chinese features and ready smiles.  Its hard to believe that they were hunted to within an inch of their existence - in early times for being seen as poachers on livestock, and later by the South African's because they were excellent trackers to use in their wars with Angola.  The bushmen also have two other physiological differences.  They have an amazing capability to store water and fat in their buttocks.  You can almost watch their butts grow as they gorge themselves after a kill.  In this way they can store large reserves to last them for the next meal which may be days away.  The other is that they are extremely fast.  Another tour group joined us (so we had about 40) and one of the other guys was a sprinter and challenged two of the boys to a race.  He bet them his shoes he could beat them (against their shawls).  They setup a track about 300 metres long and we all lined up along the sides.  He went through all the motions of stretches and practicing his start with the bushmen watching him curiously.  Then they lined up and took off.  The bushmen jumped into the lead right away and then despite his size (he was 6' or so), kept increasing the lead so that they left him in the dust.  It wasn't even close.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone run that fast.

We later learned that the star of the "gods must be crazy" could run down an Oryx which is one of the fastest antelopes.  We also learned that he died a few years ago.  We don't have pictures of this yet, but our tour compatriots will be putting theirs online so I'll add some as I get them.

After Ghanzi, we left for a 500km drive to Windhoek on Christmas Day.   Windhoek is a very modern town with obviously German influences.  The Churches were Luthern as you'd expect and the streets were neat and tidy.  We also saw lots of Mercedes and VW's.  The wealth and prosperity of the locals was astonishing after the past 6 weeks in Africa.  Obviously Namibia is in even better shape than Botswana - astonishing when you consider it was a war zone in 1990.  We wandered around town and went into a shopping centre (stores closed of course) with eyes drooling after our depredation.  Then it was off to our campsite outside Windhoek to setup the tents and then back in for Christmas Dinner which we did as a group.  We did a Secret Santa  which was fun and Shawn ended up with a load of fireworks which helped kick off his Pyromania.  Every time you'd turn around he was setting off some firework when you'd least expect it.  We all missed our families but this was different and nice as we were with good friends by now.

Instead of turkey, and all the fixings we had a continuous round of African dishes including most of the game animals you can think of.. Zebra, Kudu, etc.  Merry Christmas!