South America and South Africa

After Zambia we went to the Etosha Nationalpark in the North of Namibia crossing the Caprivi Strip even further North and squeezed between Botswana in the South, Zamiba in the East and Northeast and Angola in the North. It is bordered by the Okavango, Chobe, Kwando and Zambezi River contrary to the rest of Namibia fertile and lush. The scenery was very much alike to Zambia and also the villages were made of little round thatch covered huts like in Zambia and Botswana.

Regarding the Etosha NP I reckon that we were clearly there at the wrong time of the year. The rainy season had already started so that the game does not use the waterholes close to the camps but stays deeper in the park with its more than 20,000 sqkm. The Etosha Park is dominated by a salt pan desert which is about 130 km long and as wide as 50 km in some places. Other than anything I have read before we could not see huge herds of game populating the park. Given what we had seen just a few days ago in Chobe NP I was somewhat disappointed from seeing “just” bigger groups of zebras and ostriches. My personal highlights were the two chameleons crossing the road in front of our car. It was amazing to see how slowly they moved needing for one step of one leg maybe 30 seconds.

After Etosha NP we went to Swakopmund, which is a city with about 40,000 inhabitants located at the coast approximately 170 miles west of the Namibian capital Windhoek. It was founded by the Germans at the end of the 19th century and its colonial heritage is still visible in its architecture, the restaurants, bakeries and “Konditoreien” and also audible as a bigger part of the population still speaks German and this with only a slight accent if any at all. For me it was awkward speaking German to the locals albeit being more than 7,000 miles away from home. And since I am now away for more than four months it was really great to eat some real German food (Marinierte Heringe mit Pellkartoffeln – Pickled herring with oven-potatoe for those who are interested). Swakopmund is located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Namib Desert and could potentially have wonderful beaches. As the cold Benguela Current coming from the Antarctis flows by swimming without a wetsuit is more or less impossible as the water rarely gets warmer than 15 degrees centigrade which is a shame given the perfectly fine sand they have here.