Namibian Series pt. 2—Windhoek and Etosha

With still quite a long drive up to Etosha we decided to stop and spend a night in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. This is the city that my friend Dan lived in as a kid, so he called up one of his old schoolmates who gave us a hostel recommendation and met us for drinks.

As we drove up towards the city it began to rain. It was still warm out so the storm was pretty amazing! This whole area is very lush and green (probably helps that it’s the rainy season), and the dark sky lit up the purple mountains creating the most beautiful scenery.

It was really great to meet Dan’s old friend Samuel and his friend and we spent a good part of the night sitting outside under a covered porch listening to the rain, watching the lightening, and drinking Savannahs (cider).

The next morning after another grocery stop we headed up for Etosha. About 5 or 6 hours later we entered the gates of Etosha and pretty soon after we saw our first giraffe! We set up camp at the first campground area, and headed down to the watering hole to wait for the animals to come. Summer time is the rainy season for Etosha, which meant that everything was beautiful and green, but also meant that a ton of animals weren’t gathering at the main watering holes (they could get water elsewhere, and there was a better chance a bunch of people weren’t watching them at those ones). We did see a ton of zebras and springbok at this watering hole though.

It was incredible to be able to just sit at a bench and watch the animals come up to get a drink. Pretty soon we realized that the dark storm we could see far away was now coming our direction. Heavy raindrops soon turned into torrential downpour and we hurried to the car where we decided to wait it out inside. Our tents were already set up and as we sat in the car looking out to a flash flood, we couldn’t help but fear for the state of our tents and the possibility of us having no dry place to sleep. Finally the rain stopped and we were able to get out and trudge through ankle deep water to try and salvage our gear. Luckily the inside of our tents weren’t completely soaked.

For the next 3 days we drove around looking for game and every night we stayed at another campground area along the Etosha Salt Pan. In the afternoons we would be dying of heat and covered in sweat (I’m not joking when I say we didn’t stop sweating for nine days), find our new camp site buy a pack of savannah’s and hit the pool. We then would proceed to talk about how shitty it would be to be one of those animals out there trapped in the heat.

During our 4 days in Etosha we saw:

-Giraffe

-Zebra

-Ostrich

-Kudu

-Springbok

-Oryx

-Wildebeest

-Elephant (even a baby one with no control over its trunk!)

-Hyena

-Lion

-Rhino

-Flamingo

-Warthog

-black mamba

-giant millipede

-giant lizard/ (what looked like a baby komodo dragon)

Dan and Liz are huge bird watchers so we all got pretty into it while we were in Namibia and spent a good part of our trip looking out and identifying awesome birds. We saw some seriously cool looking birds!

I was so happy that we got to see everything that we wanted to see! It was incredible to get to see these animals in the wild (pretty much) and doing what they would naturally be doing!

**side note: I taught everyone about our Schalk family tradition of saying “bye___. We love you____. We’ll miss you ____” whenever you leave some place. So as we drove out of the gates of Etosha you will be happy to hear that we gave it the traditional farewell of “bye etosha. We love you etosha. We’ll miss you etosha.” We also did this for the next few places we stayed from here on out. Thank you Dad for being completely weird (or maybe dumb is a better word) and in turn making me weird too.