A Little Local Wildlife and Tribal Culture

Today we travelled south-east to Etosha National Park (still in Namibia), where the relatively open plains allowed some spectacular game viewing from our elevated truck. We stayed at two different campsites/lodges - Halali and Okaukuejo (which we can really recommend for your next trip, Roy and Nini, assuming you haven't already visited of course). During our two days there, we managed to see 6 or 7 lions, though none of them very close; several hundred plains-zebra (the difference between this and their mountain cousins being that these are 'blek, wite and rrrrust', rather than simply 'blek and wite', to quote Gettie; one usually very elusive leopard, having an exciting stand-off and skirmish (but not quite an all-out assault) with a cheetah, who was obviously guarding her 4 young, we soon realised; a white rhino, and one of the more rare black rhinos; thousands of springbok, as well as eland, kudu, oryx and .... ; a secretary-bird and a kori bustard (the latter being the largest bird in Africa, if not the world, able to fly); several elegant giraffes, hundreds of blue wildebeest (gnu); a mangy-looking jackal; one lone, rather aroused bull elephant, and another who walked slowly but purposefully towards our truck and across the road right in front of us. So, rather to our amazement, all the 'big four' for Namibia, which has no buffalo (which would have made it the 'big 5') were out to play.  

Yesterday, en route to Etosha, we stopped at a petrified forest (where all the trees had turned to stone several millenia ago, and where we saw some fine examples of Namibia's national plant, the Welwitschia, which can apparently survive for more than 2,000 years, despite desert conditions, high winds and nibbling animals of all descriptions!.

Before that, we'd had a fascinating visit to a village where some of the semi-nomadic Himba tribe now live. They are a pastoral people of between 20,000 and 50,000 living in Kunene region - and possibly amongst the most photographed tribe in the world. They wear scanty goat-skin clothing, heavily adorned with jewellery of shells, copper and iron, according to the tribal hiearchy. The distinctive red colour of their skin and hair is a mixture of butter, ash and ochre, which protects them from the harsh desert climate. We were horrified to learn that, after the young girls/women have their first menstruation, they are never again allowed to wash themselves with water, despite slathering this horrible-sounding mixture all over their bodies, hair and headresses; instead, once a week they 'bathe' using smoke from a small fire lit in a little bowl, holding the bowl close to their chin, under their arms, under their headresses, and other body parts which we won't mention here, as their way of ridding themselves of parasites. It really doesn't bear thinking about! Apparently, both the livestock they own and some of their ceremonies around the central 'holy fire' - one of which is this bathing ceremony - are pivotal to the Himba belief in ancestor worship. As a village, they seem to have little in the way of material goods, and their tiny mud-built schoolroom was more basic than anything we'd seen on previous travels - and yet, this particular tribal village, near Kamanjab, apparently has visits from tour groups on a pretty regular basis, and we were assured by our guide that the tour companies do pay for this privilege. Makes you wonder .....

Okay, tomorrow we head off to the capital, Windhoek, for one last night in Namibia, before crossing the border into Botswana on Monday, where we'll visit the Chobe National Park as well as the Okavanga Delta.