Reaching Sibioli National Park

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Well we made it to Sibioli National Park, the fact that only 12 foreigners have visited the park this year should give you an indication of quite how hard it is to get to.



We left Logangali reasonably early, knowing that it would be “tough” going but decided to stop at the Desert museum just out of town for a cultural top-up. Whilst it was interesting and show a lot of local culture, it was reasonably speaking a few tables or ornaments including what looked like a walking stick which was used to throw at dik-diks (small antelope) and kill them. So all this time it isn’t a walking stick, it’s a dik-dik stick.

The road to the national park took us through a combination of different terrains including:

1. Sand that went rather deep and we got stuck at least twice

2. Lava rocks which scraped the underside of the truck at least 500 times

3. Thorn bushes where the road was so narrow it was scraping the paint off the side

4. “Unexpected loss of road” where a river had washed away the road leaving a car sized hole to fall in, which we did several time

All in all the underside of the truck took a good beating and the front bumper had more than a few dents in it by the time we reached the gate to the national park and little did we know that we hadn’t yet experienced bad roads.

At the gate to the National Park a lovely chapped looked rather shocked to see us and after filling in an unnecessary level of paperwork we were allowed in. We were the 30^th visitors this year and the 12^th foreigners. On entry we headed to Crocodile corner on the water front, on arrival and not seeing any crocodiles we stopped and made lunch, shortly after which we saw at least 10 crocodiles in close vicinity to where we ate.

We then drove on to the much famed “cradle of mankind” where the earliest human fossil was found. On the way we saw a petrified forest of wood which was surprisingly impressive and a number of different gazelles, but no predators.

The road got worse, then even worse and then whatever is worse than even worse. The poor hilux was doing well and we were going down roads we don’t think had been driven this year. Eventually we made it to Kooba Mora to camp, but in fact it should be called “bug central”.

On arrival we had to remove part of the back end of the truck which had scraped on so many rocks it was broken. We also learned what “a lot” of bugs look like. On the plus side there was a shower at the place we stopped, on the down side you had to share it with 1 million insects from small to alarmingly large.

When we finally got into the roof tent that night, the sunset outside was obscured through the mosquito nets by the sheer volume of bugs trying to get in. In addition in the middle of the night we were woken to the sound of a rather unhappy Hippo in the vicinity but unfortunately never did see it, but we most definitely heard it!

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