Namibia - Spitzkoppe

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Spitzkoppe

Monday 8th February

On the Monday afternoon we head out of Swakopmund and head north towards our next major destination, Etosha Game Reserve. Quite a few people are looking the worse for wear as we have a number of adventure sports injuries and bad stomachs. Spitzkoppe is a suitable stopping point along the way.

Spitzkoppe

Spitzkoppe is one of three mountains rising out of the dry gravel plains as we head north from Swakopmund. It provides a spectacular camping spot as we sit on a rock, admiring the views and watching an approaching rainstorm.
There are supposed to be some rock paintings nearby but we don’t find any.

Flap My Bitch Up

This is the first place that we have had to “bush camp”. The overland trucks are equipped to that we can camp in the middle of nowhere should we need to. We’ve been quite lucky so far in that we’ve stayed in campsites with excellent facilities - at Spitzkoppe all we have are two “long-drop” toilets. But even these have western-style toilets attached; one of which is set at 45 degrees to the ground which makes the geometry of no. 1s and no. 2s interesting!
The truck carries all the food and water we need together with the tents, cooking equipment and enough spares. As part of our holiday we all share certain tasks such as cleaning, filling up the water, food preparation etc. Again, we are quite fortunate on this truck in that one of the crew is a cook so our “tasks” only usually take a few minutes.
One of the major worries of such a trip is that when we have a large group of people in close contact with each other and sharing food, that “stomach bugs” will easily be passed around the group {IAt the time of writing this we have seven people with the shits} and we have to try to keep everything and everyone as clean and sanitised as possible.
A regular feature of such trips is that the plates, cups cooking utensils etc are dried by “flapping” rather than using tea-towels. On a trip like this people will quickly assume identities according to the tasks they do - “tent bitch”, “flapping bitch” etc.

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