NAMIBIA
Windhoek
First stop in Namibia: Windhoek, the capital city. Only stayed there a short time over Sunday lunchtime, nevertheless, I got a good impression of the place. It was something of a shock for us. It's modern, clean and developed. Yes, we have seen a progression of this since East Africa but this is the most modern yet. It has the first real KFC since Morocco (not so exciting), there are many white people living there (from the recent days of South African rule and from German colonialism long ago). There are a few old German colonial buildings and the city has a European feel. A large industrial estate in the suburbs was something new to us too!

Next brief stop was Okahandja, a town north of Windhoek (was an extended stop for diesel really) but what was interesting there was the congregation of women from one of Namibia's tribes, the Herero tribe. The German colonialists once tried to kill all Herero people - another genocide! Herero ladies, congregating, were dressed in traditional clothing with their colourful dresses (like a ball dress or something) and their strange hats ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4623516.stm scroll down for a picture - recommended viewing!)

Etosha National Park
Etosha National Park was our destination for 3 days, a large national park in Northern Namibia dominated by the Etosha Pan, a large area of grassland and salt pan where little can grow. We did several game drives and stayed in the rest camps in the park. It is undoubtedly one of Africa's best game parks and definitely one of the best value for money but driving around for hours on end staring out of a window and taking 20 photos of an elephant standing doing nothing just doesn't do much for me I'm afraid. The 1st time it was great but 2nd less good, 28th time a little dull. Sound spoilt now, I know but honesty is a virtue. Seeing animals in research or rescue centres or doing more than eating is really interesting. Walking with the lions for hours on end in Zimbabwe, for example, is something I much prefer to staring at lazy lions lying in the sun in a game park. My opinion is not particularly shared by others...some people never lost enthusiasm for game drives and were less enthusiastic about animals in a research centre for example that get wheeled out for show when tourists turn up!
On the viewing front, there is little to report other than managing to get past an irate elephant on one road that a load of cars had been attempting to pass for an hour! One afternoon, I decided to not go on a game drive and instead watch the world cup in the house of one of the rest camp workers. Unfortunately, people who did go saw the very elusive leopard rolling all over the road, which is very rare as they are shy. Not too mortified though...I'm sure there are leopards in London Zoo ;-)

Cheetah Park
Otjitotongwe Cheetah Park, I was more excited about. We saw 3 tame pet cheetahs before going on the cheetah feeding drive where huge chunks of donkey are thrown to each cheetah, one by one. The family used to be farmers from 1931 up until 1994. They became dismayed that farmers would kill cheetahs when they threatened livestock and nothing was being done to protect them so they converted their farm into a cheetah park and now promote cheetah conservation. There are just 7500 cheetahs left in the world of which 2500 are in Namibia. The Namibian government prohibits breeding and disallows exporting cheetahs despite some countries begging for cheetahs to be reintroduced to some of their national parks! Cheetahs are treated as pests under Namibian law and by Namibian farmers. The project is failing to promote wild cheetah population, which begs the question why they are still running the project. Apparently, they want to keep the captive cheetahs (albeit in a growing large fenced area) in case cheetahs ever do get wiped out in Namibia, which is possible given noone cares for them. For the keen: http://www.cheetahpark.com/
It was at Cheetah Park that the meat eaters ate kudu (a large antelope that can jump 4m into the air) for the first time - people rave about this meat. It is very tender and red and apparently has a distinctive taste.

More malaria
Next morning, we stopped in the tiny town of Kamanjab where Nick went to see the Dr about malaria. Yes...he had it. This is his 2nd time, making him case no. 3 of round 2 and case no. 18 overall I believe! I also think this is the end of my "malaria counter" as noone has had malaria since then as far as I know and almost everyone is home now.

While Nick was with the Doctor, we met some more Trans Africa people. There are quite a few couples or groups of people travelling across Africa depending on your viewpoint, normally with their own vehicle. We have met a handful. The ones we met have the following websites:
http://www.bigyellowmog.co.uk/ and another site I can't find. They had some interesting stories to tell us about their experiences, such as one Ghanaian-British traveller with them who used her Ghanaian passport to travel through Africa. She didn't have entry or exit stamps for Ghana for obvious reasons. The Angolan authorities thought that she had been up to no good because she had been with her friends for the whole time who did have Ghanaian entry and exit stamps. All of them were nearly denied entry to Angola for this.

Desert and rock carvings
From here, we went into desert territory once again, although this Northern part of the Namib desert has a lot of rock formations, which gave us some great scenery :-) There were a lot of huge hills that consisted of piles of huge boulders. They are natural but I can't explain how they would form. Through the desert were dirt roads that were very smooth, even in the rockiest of areas. We visited Twyfelfontein, which means "doubtful spring" dubbed this by a German settler who believed the 1 cubic metre of water each day originating at the spring was not enough to support life. How wrong he was! The area has thousands of 6-thousand year-old rock carvings. They helped the San bushmen of the time to get into a trance, develop their hunting techniques and to pass time.
It will interest some that the visitors' centre at Twyfelfontein is environmentally friendly, built from local stone, bones, waste oil drums. It's powered by solar energy and liquid petroleum gas. Interestingly, it cost just £120 per square metre as opposed to £400 per square metre for a standard building of that type.

Seals
From here, we headed through the desert towards the coast where the landscape changed to almost no vegetation at all on the flat open land of very poor soils. The temperature change there was sudden - dramatic change from hot to cold as we crossed the meeting point of the desert winds and prevailing cold ocean current. The soils become very salty as well as we drove in the far south of the famous Skeleton Coast towards the Cape Cross seal colony. The seals there are actually eared seals, which makes them sea lions. The several thousand of them on the beaches here live here because the Beguela current brings them much fish and seafood from the south. In fact, the seals eat 1.3 million tonnes of fish per year, which is 300,000 tonnes more than the Namibian and South African fishing industries put together. Government has tried to cull seals to favour the fishing industry but that just provides less competition for whales and other marine life who then grow in numbers, hence Japan's, Norway's and Iceland's strange reasons to continue whaling again and them paying poor African nations to support them in international negotiations! There is some market for seal products. Seal genitals are sold in Asia as aphrodisiacs; meat is sold to Taiwan and the skin is sold in Europe. The rest of the seal can be made into a proteinaceous sludge for cattle feed!
It was really cool to see the seals lollopping (lying) around, being noisy and very smelly. A lot of cubs were feeding off their mother's milk and the females were very aggressive towards other females to protect their cubs. One seal had a fising net stuck around her.

Swakopmund - SKYDIVING, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Britney Spears
I hope not too much promised by that title! This is a section everyone can find interesting. Let me justify the title first. Swakopmund, a coastal city, is where Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt chose to have their first baby. He or she (I forget) was born about a week or two before we were there so you may have seen Swakopmund in Hello magazine or something. Rumours are that Britney wants to go there too but she denies it. Maybe she wants to set her own trend?

After a wet night (the wind was coming from the sea overnight and brought moist fog, which soaked all of us who slept outside that night, including me), we arrived in Swakopmund on a cold, grey morning. First impressions were that it is a cold-feeling, tacky, artificial town trying to make itself like Las Vegas but failing. It quickly grew on me though and I realised it wasn't as I first found. There is actually a lot of old pretty German buildings, making it one of few places on the trip with cool architecture.

Swakopmund was also the first place where we stayed in a youth hostel. The camp site is far out of town and is known for crime apparently. The city was perhaps the first town where the majority of people were white. May seem shallow to even notice this but I write this to show the heritage of the place. There is a lot of German and Afrikaans around and I would often be spoken to in one of the two until I said "sorry?". It was also a place with a lot of Western shops. It was really a South African city. It was the first place with the South African chain store Mr Price...more than half of the truck bought new clothes to replace their clothes of the trip that progressed to the orphan bag! There is clearly a lot of spare income in the city with lots of shops, restaurants, cafes etc., many of which really are not aimed at tourists. It was a comfortable place to spend 4 days.

It was also the place for adrenaline activities. It's Namibia's answer to Victoria Falls!
1st thing for me: sandboarding. This involved walking up a big dune (surprisingly easy if you follow other people's footsteps) and sliding face down on a piece of flimsy piece plywood at speeds between 40 and 80 km/h. Some others did stand-up sandboarding that is like snowboarding but harder. All that was cool and the lie-down was very easy. That didn't stop a South African woman messing it up every time, spinning around as she went down or once, rolling down the dune for about 10 turns before she stopped. Paul had a bad accident on the very last dune when he requested to go extra fast so they gave him 2 boards and greased them really well. Unfortunately, it is also the dune with a lip in the middle, allowing you to leave the dune and fly in the air briefly. This meant he flew to a position where he was almost standing in mid-air, span and landed on his head. We wore helmets but this wasn't enough to stop him getting concussion to the extent he didn't even know he was in Africa.

2nd activity was quad biking. Sounds bad for the dunes. It is, although we stick to specific tracks to allow the wildlife to live in the other areas. Not so much to say here but it was a lot of fun making circles on the side of dunes at a 45 degree angle or going down steep sides and the like.

3rd activity for me was a sky dive. Not so sure how I ended up deciding to do this one. Wasn't pressure from anyone else. In fact, most chose not to do this. I was quite anxious about it beforehand as the 3.5 second freefall at Vic Falls was scary. The thought of a 30 second freefall here sounded horrifying. Myself, Matt, Amelia, Jason and Jamie (with his arm in plaster!!) all did tandem skydives. We went up in a light aircraft with a roller shutter for a door and only one seat (the pilot's). The rest had to sit on the floor next to the windows taped up with gaffer tape to stop them falling out. Still, I was taking my safest flight ever with a parachute attached to the guy I was attached to. Jumping out of a plane is not normal and it's hard to imagine what it's like beforehand. When on the plane (we all sat on the floor cramped up and the windows were attached by strong tape), I was quite chilled out, enjoying the views of the dunes, bays and the ocean for 30 minutes before the sliding door opened and Matt who had to go first edged around for a couple of minutes with a sheepish look on his face. Then it was my turn and I sat on the side straight away with my feet dangling out. After about a second (all the time it takes to concentrate on getting your position right), we were out and after about half a second, it was just fantastic...hard to describe what the free fall is like. You're hardly aware you are falling when the ground is so far away - you just feel the rush. Then when the chute is pulled, it's a pleasant 5 minute glide to the ground :-) Think I may have a taste for that now - oops! Speed for this activity: 220 km/h from 3300metres (10,000 feet).

Red sand dunes and desert
From Swakopmund, we headed to the area with Namibia's famous red runes. We saw sunrise on the imaginatively-named Dune 45 and spent more time at Soussusvlei, which is the highest dune here and I believe could be the highest dune in the world, at least the highest red dune. This area is beautiful.

We drove through the desert with a lot of attractive rocky mountains, grasslands and the occasional desert lodge for tourists to Fish River Canyon, the deepest canyon in Africa and 3rd deepest in the world I believe.

The last night was spent bush camping - our last ever bush camp! After an hour or so, we were approached by a vehicle. One can never know who this is so people approaching us understandably makes us wary. It turned out to be a couple from the US/Romania and their servants. The man was a Dr in Biology and the woman was apparently (he said) a figure skater he smuggled out of Romania in the Communist days to France on the gypsy trains. Whether this was true, who knows because the couple entertained us for about an hour. They weren't aware of the entertainment value though. They told us of biology that the rest of the world is unaware about such as:
1. A Sasquatch-like creature they are researching. They have seen its enormous footprints but have never seen the creature.
2. The "3-stepper" snake that takes 2 moves from first sight to biting a human to kill. More lethal than a black mamba, which is widely regarded as the world's most venomous snake. Another snake in their area is also more venomous than a black mamba, they say.
3. A mammal species that was reported to be extinct since 150 years but they have seen on their land.

Their eccentricity and more stories I forget made every line they spoke seem less and less believable but they kept us entertained.

Politics/History
Briefly, Namibia became a Germany colony in the 19th Century, South Africa seized it during World War I and ruled over Namibia or "South West Africa" under a League of Nations mandate. The UN eventually changed its policy to support Namibian independence, which was only achieved in 1990 after a long war within Namibia. South Africa gave Namibia independence on the basis that Cuba would withdraw its troops from Angola and South Africa would also do the same.

Now, Namibia is a stable country with economic growth. White migrants have stayed in Namibia and race relations are relatively good compared to its neighbour, South Africa. Land is now being bought from white settlers and given to landless natives.

That's it...nearly in South Africa and out of the malaria zone by this stage.