Day 5 - Mudumu National Park, Caprivi Region, North - East Namibia

It was a fairly early start to the day this morning; the sunrise was so spectacular, very red and bright. The monkeys were up with the sunrise making a nuisance of themselves before we even had a chance to get out of the tents; they upset the whole Tupperware of coffee and grabbed a packet of biscuits that Ernest had left on the table. Kim and Ernest spent at least half an hour chasing them and shooting them with Kim's kettie. It is quite amusing to watch two grown men running around after the little beggars and they just jump up out of reach and look down their noses at them shouting and waving their arms around... That is until one of them got hit with the marble from the kettie.

We had to leave by the latest 10 and after our lazy day yesterday it was quite difficult to get everyone motivated to move. The showers were so good; lots of hot water and clean ablution block so unlike what the rest of Africa is going to be.

Anyway as usual we set off late but we didn't have far to go, (we thought,) so there was no hurry. We bid our farewell to Jack and off we went heading for the boarder and into Namibia. Of course I was already fretting about the bloody meat control post but if I had thought logically why would they take the meat when we were about to leave the country, they only take it when you are entering.... Still fear is never logical is it?

The border post was a breeze, straight through but there was a foot and mouth control point where we had to get out of the car and stand on the poison mat again. This time Ronel was really on the ball and had her shoes ON and had put her feet on the mat and back into the car like a rabbit. She was determined not to get the blond bimbo award of the day.

We had our first stop at Papa falls which was just 20 kilometers into Namibia. Ernest and I remember stopping there with all our kids thirty years ago. Then it was just a picnic spot but now it is the site of a fairly posh lodge built and run by the locals. The falls were exactly how I remember them and I have old pictures of the kids and ourselves swimming down the "falls"- really just a little rapid.

We had the option of paying an entry fee of $40 per person or having lunch there so we opted for lunch... Big mistake as after an hour of waiting our order had still not appeared out of the kitchen. We eventually left the falls at about 2 o'clock still not too worried as according to Ernest it wasn't too far. We travelled alongside the wide Okavango for a while and saw some things that looked like Hippos. I radioed Kim's car to tell Andria that there were hippos as she had never see a hippo in the wild, and this resulted in our next blond bimbo award of the day. As I said  "Andria ” over the radio she sweetly said  “yes Gaye"  but she was sitting at the back of Kim's car and nowhere near the radio. Kim and Steve were laughing so much that they couldn't even talk to us and tell us what had happened. The last laugh was on me really though as the hippos turned out to be a couple of rocks in the middle of the river.

So we then set our noses for Mudumu and found to our dismay that it was already three o'clock and we still had about 140 kilometers to go. My GPS is just not functioning and I discovered that Marcel back at the office only downloaded the Maps for Africa for Mozambique which isn't much use to us where we are going. Ernest keeps saying that I am the blond bimbo as I don't know where I am going but I now have someone else to blame....Marcel you are the blond bimbo of the week!

We eventually arrived at the reserve at 4.30, rushed into the Park headquarters to pay and get allocated a campsite. It took us quite a while to just find anyone to pay and we were told we had camp site number two. She gave us a map and off we went. We entered what we thought was the reserve and promptly hit heavy sand and the truck went down deep into the sand. All I saw was Ernest saying " shit shit shit " and hitting all the buttons on the dashboard trying to find low range four wheel drive plus the diff locks, he found the right buttons and out we popped but I hadn't got on the radio quick enough to warn the others that we were in heavy sand and to put their cars into low range and Kim being right behind us went straight down to the axil in sand. To be fair he has never had any four x four experience so it was not surprising he got stuck. We managed to drive on a bit and stopped on hard ground to wait while the others dug Kim out of the sand.

This stop turned out to be a huge surprise where we saw an amazing sighting of about two hundred elephants. We also saw two herds of roan antelope, stacks of impala, zebra, and warthogs. Well after driving around for at least an hour and a half and getting very lost, we realized we had better find a nice place to camp for the night and to hell with finding our “campsite". There isn't a sign in the whole reserve and not having the correct program on our GPS we knew we weren't going to find the correct place before the sun went down. 

Ken found a beautiful site right on the river overlooking about 10 hippos all snorting and watching our antics with great curiosity. We knew we couldn't make a fire as we didn't want to attract any attention to our little illegal camp so we had to use the gas cookers to cook for the night. I had taken out the meat for a braai dinner and so now that we couldn't make a fire we had to compromise and improvise and we just had to make do with braaing on the gas skottel. To be honest we weren't sorry that we didn't find the camp site as we were in the most spectacular place, nice and level and totally away from any sign of civilization. It was just us, the hippos and the stars.

We took out a very special bottle of wine to celebrate our first night in the wild African bush. Fritz was very innovative as we haven't got a decanter for the wine so he decanted it into the kettle. It worked fantastically well and we had another evening to remember.

We offered for Fritz, Ronel, Steve and Andrea to sleep on top of the truck as we thought the hippos might come visiting and being on the ground might be a little scary but they were quite determined to sleep on the ground. The thought crossed my mind that the hippos might come visiting!

Signing off!