Etosha National Park
NAMIBIA
Wildlife's Highlight Reel
By LYNDI
Friday, April 22, 2011
Sometimes while Aaron and I are traveling through Africa, we have to remind ourselves it’s like a baseball game. First of all, baseball games – to the uninitiated – can be long and rather dull. And when we’re on our third “long-drive day” in a row, viewing endless brush shrubs and desert landscapes, waking up at 5am and packing up camp just to arrive at our next camp as light is fading in the sky and then do it all over again – it’s kind of like it’s the seventh inning stretch and the score is 0-0. You start to ask yourself, “Man, I paid good money for this?”. But then you arrive to a place like Etosha National Park in Namibia, and out of the blue it’s an inside the park homerun – something completely unexpected – except this time it’s a gamepark and a rhino’s running the bases.
It’s a stretch, I know. Thanks for hanging in there. But the point is sound, if the analogy’s a bit weak.
When Aaron and I were in the Maasai Mara National Park up in Kenya, we were ready for up-close and personal animal encounters, but we barely knew anything about Etosha and were blown away by the many lively animals that abounded in the park. Also impressive were the facilities in Etosha – although coming from bush camping for 3 nights (2 in the Okavango Delta and one on the side of the road just before the Namibian border), an outhouse would have filled our little hearts with joy.
We pulled into our first campsite in the national park around 5pm, first stopping at a watering hole where we could see several giraffes awkwardly spreading the front legs wide to get a good long sip, and were thrilled with the hot showers, grassy camp areas, and drinking water out of the taps! Each campsite in Etosha also has a watering hole floodlit at night so you can grab a drink and wait and watch to see what comes in to get a drink. Nothing terribly exciting approached the watering hole the first night – just a lot of gazelles, impalas and wildebeests, but the peace and quiet (after the noisy French group left) was perfect. The new driver we picked up in Livingstone – a Zimbabwean named Rino – is a certified wildlife guide and gave us all a basic lesson on constellations and star-gazing on the endless canopy of night sky.
We were all up early the next morning – a 5:30am departure – to go on a morning game drive when the animals are most active, and what a show the wildlife put on for us. The highlights would be a lion hunting a zebra (the zebra got away) and a cheetah stalking an oryx (the oryx also made an escape) and a black rhino up-close and personal.
Our driver, Rino, knew that the animal, rhino, is a very curious creature – is that confusing? So we all stood absolutely silently gazing out the window as the rhino approached slowly but surely. Before he took off, he must have been about 15 ft away from our truck, close enough to get a really good look. What strange creatures – they have these odd tusks coming out of all places on their head, and little round ears just sitting on top of his skull – kind of a Mickey-Mouse-meets-triceratops. In addition to those three displays, we were also treated to a wildlife smorgasbord of oryx, kudu, jackal, warthog, giraffe, impala, and gazelle.
It was another long drive day, but we arrived at our next campsite on the other end of the park around 5pm. Due to some small pools of water near the campsite, we were absolutely overrun by mosquitoes until the sun set completely, and then just only really annoyed by them for the remainder of the night. But if I thought mosquitoes were bad, I was about to learn an important lesson about what’s really bad.
Dinner that night was a beef stew, so after preparing a side salad and rice, our fellow passenger Caroline was on stew-duty and stirred and stirred the boiling, steaming pot until ready. As cook crew normally eats first, I grabbed a bowl and dished a nice serving of beef stew. We all sat down to eat, lit by the low glow of our headlamps, and I noticed what looked like some carrot strands poking up through the stew. I pulled on it a little, and what came out was not the rooty strings of a carrot… but an entire praying mantis!!! The nasty bugger certainly met his death by flying into the stew – Caroline either not noticing or exacting revenge on one of us – and got stewed right in there with the peas and onions. He was very dead, but his buggy little eyes still glared up at me as I extracted his entire body from my dinner. Needless to say, it was just salad and rice for me that night.
Early game drives mean early bed times, so we crawled into our tents around 9pm or so. We have to be a little more careful to put everything away in national parks due to jackals and hyenas trooping through, but when we awoke, we found that a jackal had taken off with another passengers’ shoes. And while Nicole walked barefoot through the campsite in search of her shoes (at least the jackal had good taste – they were some Columbia river sandals – the rest of us just had cheapy flip-flops) we packed up camp in the dark to take off for another game drive.
Except this morning, something was waiting for us on the bus. As tends to happen on tours, we all had no clue what day or date it was, so when we opened the truck door and saw little white powder footprints climbing the stairs, we were a bit puzzled. But when we got up to our seats we saw little tiny Easter baskets filled with chocolate eggs! The footprints were a bit confusing, I’m sure Tanya was attempting a bunny print, though it was definitely dog-looking. So it was fitting that an Easter Jackal had visited the night before and left us chocolate… and stolen Nicole’s shoes.
Another early game drive this morning was less exciting than the day before, but it would have been hard to beat the previous day’s drive. So we left Etosha with our expectations wildly exceeded, our Easter Jackal presents gobbled up, and the praying mantis population just one short.
