Vacation! The Living Museum of the Gentle People

looking back to September 2016:

As we headed east and south from Etosha, Kit and Karen and I enjoyed the view of a much more verdant Namibia, here in the primary cattle-ranching part of the country.  We were aiming for Grootfontein, where we would find the Hoba meteorite, at over 60 tons (estimated) the largest known meteorite on earth.  It is also, according to Wikipedia, "the most massive naturally occurring piece of iron known on Earth's surface."  Per me, it is not especially interesting to see.  I suppose I'm glad I did, though.

Not even all that large, really.  But high in iron.  Or something.

What was interesting, though:  a visit to the Living Museum of the Ju/'Hoansi-San.  The museum is well-designed, fascinating and beautiful.  It's akin to those living history museums we get all over the eastern US -- Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village -- where 'interpreters' recreate the living conditions of some past time, churning butter and shearing sheep with straight razors or whatever.

My rondavel at Roy's.  No mosquito nets!

The manager of Roy's Rest Camp, where we were staying, drove us out to the museum as the road is deep sand, and Kit was very understandably tired after five days of gravel-road driving.  Once we got there, we had a choice of singing and dancing, crafts, or a bush walk, and chose the bush walk.  Our primary guide was /Kun, who introduced himself as Elias.  He introduced his colleague N/a!ad as 'the hunter' and referred to him that way throughout our walk.

/Kun, displaying arrows

N/a!ad preparing a fire, which he will start with two soft sticks he carries in
the quiver on his right, and a handful of dried grass.

N/a!ad with his covered quiver, bow, ax and drinking straw.

He's setting a snare for birds, rabbits, lizards.

Digging for water stored in the tree's roots.

Sneaking up on a pretend springbok.

Preparing to shoot the mock-springbok.  He missed!

I recommend the heck out of this museum.  I also really liked the gift shop, where I bought many Christmas presents, each labelled with the name of the maker (jewellery, fire-starting sticks, pipes for smoking bark and rabbit dung (you 'pow' the bark and dung together)) so that she or he would get a cut of the purchase price.  Also a cute baby.

She's in shadow, or you'd see how light-skinned the San are before they start
spending long stretches of every day in the sun.

And as we drove away south again, I thought I spotted monkeys.  But the only primates around here are humans and baboons, so I didn't like to say anything.  But no one wants to miss anything, so I mentioned it, and Kit asked should we turn around, and I asked would they be pissed if it was just baby baboons (we'd seen plenty of baboons at this point), and they said yes, and I said well, better turn around anyway, and we drove back a kilometer or two and found vervet monkeys, who do live here but not that many so not commonly sighted.  So you see.  Did I mention the rhino I said we had better check out in Etosha, even though it was probably just two suspiciously rounded ant hills (termite mounds) suspiciously close to each other?  Well, it was actually a rhino, surprisingly well hidden by tall grass.  Rhinos.  What kind of a morally-bankrupt idiot kills one of those things to pow its horn and snort it.  Save the rhinos, please!

There were a couple dozen on the other side of the road, but this one was close and eager to pose.
According to a Wikipedia citation from the American Journal of Human Genetics, "They have been noted for having human-like characteristics, such as hypertension, anxiety, and social and dependent alcohol use."

Vacation! I Visit Etosha for the Third Time and am Never Once Bored Even a Little

Looking back to September 2016:

I first visited Namibia's Etosha National Park in November 2013, for two days and one night.  I met two wonderful game guides, saw a rhino munching and lions mating and giraffes, springbok, oryx, elephants, gnus, zebras, jackals and more all gathered at a waterhole at the same time, and leapt briefly and maybe illegally from our van to pick up some trash by the road.  Adventure!  Then Lysias drove us through in October 2015, and we saw so many elephants!  And springbok and zebra and ostriches and many, many gnus.

When Kit and Karen proposed spending three days there, I concurred enthusiastically.  I think I shall always be willing to spend time at Etosha.  We stayed in a fancy waterfront chalet at Okaukuejo Rest Camp, inside the park near the southern gate, for two nights, and at the even fancier Mushara Lodge near the eastern gate for our last night.  This part of the trip is best told in pictures, so that's how I'll do it.  The only experiences of note that didn't have to do with critters were the blown tire: Karen saying, from the shotgun seat, "I think we might have a flat," and being right -- and thank goodness she perceived it, I don't know how, before we'd done real damage -- and then some German I think tourists helping us figure out where we had to put the jack as the official instructions were wrong; and maybe the very fancy dinner by torchlight at Mushara.

Otherwise, it's all about the animals.  You can see all my photos here if you like.

Our first-night rhinos, at the waterhole right outside our chalet.

Ground squirrels use their tails for shade.

A beautiful bee-eater.

Probably adolescent males, goofing.  Or practicing for adulthood.

That's a social weaver birds' nest.  Sometimes they get heavy enough
to pull a tree over.

Mongoose, right at my feet as I watched the waterhole for bigger critters.

You see photos like this all the time, because giraffes pose like this all the time.

Oryx, one of many kinds of antelopes.

You know this one

Elephants coming up on the left, springbok down front.

Drinking giraffe

Babies and everything

We spent hours peering intently into the brush because rhinos hide shockingly well, and then we just drove past this
open field, and this beauty was ambling along with some branchy thing laced into her horns, and we thought
someone had tied them together and spent several minutes staring in grateful amazement and wondering why
anyone would tie a string to a rhino's horns, and then the branchy bit fell off.  So okay.  She walked across the road
probably no more than five meters or so in front of our car.

Red hartebeest; we saw, I think literally thousands of springbok, but only
these two (maybe there was a third one?) of this breed of antelope.

A dik dik; very small and almost always seen in pairs.

Everyone loves baby pictures!

Kudu; another antelope and a popular game meat.  The most amazing horns.

This was an amazing spot by Kit and a very rare sighting:  three cheetah with a freshly-killed springbok.
Cheetah camouflage very effectively in this dappled sunlight.  They also usually live and hunt alone, although
females keep their cubs with them for up to two years.  Males sometimes hunt with a brother or two, which is probably
what this group is, though it could be a mama and two kids.  We were the only vehicle stopped for ten minutes or so;
when another car stopped they had to ask what we saw.  That's how well camouflaged they were!  By the time
we drove away, there were about a dozen bakkies, buses and cars full of thrilled spectators.

A lot of my Namibian friends have never been to this park.  I've got to figure out a way to take some.  This place is so very worth seeing!

Moving Right Along

My Peace Corps service ends two months from today.  I've got a lot to do.  Nonetheless, I mostly manage to keep up with my friends' and colleagues' PCN blogs.  I really like this one; in her most recent post, Krystal answers a hodge-podge of questions from her non-Namibian friends and relatives.

Enjoy!

Vacation! Many Rocks and...

Looking back to September 2016:

Away from the coast, and into terrain technically not desert.  It's savanna, which is apparently defined, amongst other things, by having trees too widely spaced to form a canopy.  Check.

So we had two days of rocks and rock paintings and...

Getting just a bit lost, as the Brandberg rock painting site isn't well sign-posted, we decided to check out entirely natural rock formations first.  Our guide books weren't terribly enthusiastic, but Burnt Mountain is right next to the road, and it's free, so we went along and peered.  It's a very dark inselberg (freestanding mountain, literally 'island mountain' in German) that supposedly lights up fiery red when the sunset light hits it -- but we were there in the morning.  And then a ranger popped up as we drove away, told us she'd just arrived from the house or something, and charged us fifty bucks each for looking at the hill.  They instituted the fees a couple of years after the guide book was printed.

We believe the tourist attraction is the darker splodge, behind our white bakkie.

Just down the road are the Organ Pipes, which are interesting and quite attractive, even before sunset.  Hundreds or probably thousands of red-to-dark-purply-black columnar slabs of, I think, dolomite, the rock that also gives the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy (formerly southern Austria) their name.  They were mildly beautiful and a useful reminder, not that anyone needs one, that nature is weird.

We were now closer to Twyfelfontein's rock drawing than Brandberg's, so we 'took a turn' as they say in Namlish.  Kit and Karen had been already, but there are three guided walks, and they were somewhere between willing and eager to try one they hadn't seen yet.

Twyfelfontein in Afrikaans means 'uncertain fountain,' the name given to a farm that had trouble keeping a reliable water supply from its wells sometime in the mid-20th century.  Its Damara name is /Ui //Ais -- that's a tsk (/) and a cluck (//), and maybe the only name more intimidating than 'twyfelfontein' -- and it means 'jumping spring,' apparently.  Under the native name, it became Namibia's first World Heritage Site, just ten years ago, in 2017, because of the wealth of rock engravings made by hunter-gatherers many thousands of years ago.  (I have found citations that say as much as 10,000 years old and not more than 6,000 and various estimates in between.)  And, actually, the combination of rock engravings and rock paintings, which are much younger, is apparently very rare, so that probably impressed the World Heritage people, too.

You scrape through the dark layer of sandstone to reveal the lighter rock beneath.

Our guide, whose name I've forgotten although I knew it well seven months ago and learned it again when sharing a hike with the lovely guide Grizelda a few months later, was excellent.  He and his cohort get thorough training, and add personal reminiscence of their own and their families' histories in the area to the anthropological and cultural information they share.

Giraffes are the most-commonly pictured animal at /Ui //Ais.

This was the first place we spotted dassie, the adorable and apparently tasty (though not kosher) rodent famous for claiming its closest living relative is the elephant, although the dassie is a cute, furry, snub-nosed critter about the size of a not-that-large bunny.  Their incisors and testes are similar in some ways, though (to elephants, not to each other).  Take it up with the zoologists if you want; I just report what they tell me.

You can hunt them with dogs, or just take their picture
and tell them they're cute.  "Cute as an elephant," as we say around here.

Back at the lodge, we kept our eyes and ears open for elephants, but did not get lucky.  The next day we asked directions and found Brandberg, and toured its rock paintings with another knowledgeable and amicable guide.  Brandberg is notable both for being the tallest mountain in Namibia and the location of some well-regarded rock paintings, including the iconic White Lady, who is actually more likely a ritualistically-painted black shaman from about 2,000 years ago.

Painting is a newer technique than engraving.
This mural is probably about 2,000 years old.

The painting is significantly protected by its location under a natural overhang.
However, tourists did a lot of damage in the first half of the 20th century;
there are protective measures in place now that still let you see it quite clearly.

As mentioned, this guide was also excellent -- I like the part where he forgot how many children he had; "Five.  No, six!" -- but his work was complicated by the prevalence of elephants in the area.  Elephants are beautiful and wonderful and thrilling and oh how we adore them, but they are also very dangerous.  (In case you didn't know, hippos are the most dangerous wild animals, judged by number of humans killed.)  As he led us down the trail toward the paintings, he consulted with colleagues -- not by shouting, which might irritate an elephant -- and asked us a few times to step into a bit of a layby while he clambered uphill to a vantage point, and the second or third time he did that, he had us take an uphill detour from which we could a) stay out of the way of, and b) view from above, a big, adolescent, male elephant.  Wowza!

The locals - guides, their families, small farmers - have to try to live
with these guys, which of course is not always easy.

We saw another one coming back, from rather closer and more level, and at one point he started ambling toward us, which was a bit exciting.

We saw more dassie, too, some insects, and many birds, including this handsome grouse.

Not a close relative of elephants, as far as I know.

Then we went to Khorixas and had a very late lunch with my local PC colleagues, and then we (well, Kit) drove to Etosha, found our fancy bungalow by the waterhole, poached a braai stand from a less-fancy but better-equipped-for-cooking and unoccupied camping spot, made dinner, and moseyed briskly back to the waterhole when we heard a commotion of many tourists stampeding that way on advice of a rhino siting.

Only slightly closer.

Vacation! Many Seals and Much Driving

looking back to September 2016:

After our desert tour, we woke on Friday to a reasonably lovely morning for Swakop, continuing Kit and Karen's complete mis-education in Namibian weather.  We spent a bit of time at the flamingo lagoon -- I love them so -- and then clambered back into the bakkie and settled down for about a week of spending most of our waking hours therein.  More or less.  Kit did all the driving, and is a hero.  (Karen doesn't drive stick, and Peace Corps doesn't allow me to drive unless I'm on leave and insured, and we could not figure out the insurance language in the rental car agreement.)

Flamingos, both Greater and Lesser, and some kind of duck.

Also avocets, with the oddly upturned bills, and more ducks.

We headed north, stopping to see more lichens!  Kit and Karen were thrilled to be able to pull the car to the side of the C34, step over the low safety barrier keeping off-roaders off the lichen field, and tiptoe about, occasionally pointing or poking, until they'd had - for now - their fill.  Then it was back into the bakkie and onto the salt road -- these are common in the coastal area of Namibia.  The road is unpaved, with a surface of the local earth bed, which is mostly sand and salt.  Occasionally the roads authority sends a tanker truck to spray them with water (salt water, I think and very much hope given the dearth of fresh water in this area), and somehow they come out looking the same blue-black as a tarred road.  And they usually make for a very easy driving surface.  Often in areas where the local 'soil' gets wet, it forms into gypsum, a soft mineral that forms as a crystal, sometime creating 'desert roses' that the miners at Ûiba Ôas sell.

Desert roses - or calcium sulfate dihydrate, or gypsum.
Not the kind in which you drive.

We got offered a few crystals by informal vendors at the site of a quite boring shipwreck.  I get all my crystals at Ûiba Ôas, but these guys had spent time and energy building a lovely welcome to the Skeleton Coast (so called, at least in one version of the story, for its shipwrecks), so I gave them ten bucks.

They said they used seal bones for this, which given the number of dead
seals I pass on the Swakop beach, seems entirely likely.

We stopped at the beach in Hentie's Bay, and it was a revelation.  The strand - the sandy part - was about 10 meters or so below the street, with a pretty sharp drop from one level to the other.  I loved it.  I think we ate sandwiches there, or leftover pizza or something, Kit and I enjoying the brisk ocean breezes while Karen enjoyed the snug interior of the bakkie.

The drop-off is much steeper and more dramatic than it looks in this picture.
I am tidier when seen in person.  Okay.  Not really.

Much, much more driving, and we came to the Cape Cross Seal Colony.  Ever been to a seal, or sea lion, colony?  It's an olfactory experience par excellence.  You should definitely visit this one, but there's one just north of Santa Barbara, California, if that's more convenient for now.  These are called cape fur seals but are actually a species of sea lion.

Fuzzy baby!

Nursing baby!

A fairly small portion of the colony.  All the dark spots in the water are seals.

Have you read Doris Lessing's The Cleft?

Actually, I could not be surfeited with these guys.

Surfeited with surf and stink, we headed south again and turned inland, and the roads changed from the relatively smooth salt to the bumpier 'gravel' in local parlance.  And so it would go for much of the next week, and I believe worth every skeletal shake.