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Hi everyone
First update in a while as we having been on our tour, and this is the first time we've got to a net cafe, what with being on the Dark Continent.
So much to say, but I won't bore you too much I hope. We are on an overland truck trip, with 5 other passengers & 3 crew and we have travelled up from Cape Town to our current location on the west coast of Namibia, right on the Atlantic coast, here in the delightfully named Swakopmund, which is almost a totally German town! Very weird, but my A Level German has come in handy, trying to decipher menus, thus avoiding ordering the Ostrich Burger by mistake.
The people on our trip are great - plenty of characters. First is Carla, Portuguese but as Cockney as Peggy Mitchell and twice as loud, great fun. Vanessa is your typical Aussie, blond & chilled. And v pretty. Then there's the Salisbury couple, Nicola & Keith ("We've climbed Kilimanjaro, we have"), who are early 30's and then there's Diane from Arizona. What can you say about this woman?? She's a throwback to 60's woodstock type era, flowing grey hair, wears 3 skirts at once and must be 186 years old. But I love her, she laughs at all my jokes, even if she hasn't a clue what a Chav is! We're going to visit her in Tuscon (yeh right!!) where she lives with her bloke and no tv......
The crew are cool, Brummie Claire is the tour leader, Steve from Accrington (who are they? Exactly!) is the co-driver and Elton is the cook. Well, he's a mega chef to be honest. He's from Zimbabwe, looks like a cross between Ade Akinbyi & Floella Benjamin and is an absolute legend. One side of our monster truck folds out into a fully operational kitchen and he can cook anything. We've eaten so well, but we need to, we've been burning it off almost as fast as we can eat it! We hiked (Hiked?? In Norwich it's just called 'walking') the Cape of Good Hope, which is the most southwesterly point of the whole African continent. It was amazing, you see wild Baboons, Rock Dassies (like a guinea pig with a cheeky face. Really!) & all manner of pelicans and birdy type things.
Camping has been a novel experience. So far all campsites we've been to have had hot showers and flush toilets, so the only real harship has been sleeping on the ground. That's nothing to the fear that surges through me every morning though. When you pack the tents away, you all have to check for scorpions as they like to sleep under the tents!!!! So far, no scorpions, but I'm sure you'll hear me scream in England if I am lucky (!) enough to find one.
We have travelled to some mental places, often driving 300km a day through desert & savannah. It all looks spectacular, orange dust, red sand dunes, and then out of the blue, a couple of zebra & ostrich grazing by the side of a road. We've seen jackals, wild horses & springboks, a kind of bigger bambi thing. Very cute though. We stopped at Fish River canyon, like a mini Grand Canyon, funnily enough, hiked the river bed for a few hours and then freaked out when we realised how far into the wilderness we were and that no-one would hear us scream etc etc! We climbed Dune 45 in the Namib Desert at 5.30am and sat & watched the sun come up. Climbing a dune is well knackering, 2 steps up, one step back kind of palaver. My calves will be made of steel if we carry on like this, hurrah.
We toured the desert with a bushman, Franz (we christened him Franz Ferdinand and soon our whole truck was humming along to 'Take Me out' much to the guide's amusement). That was superb, it wasn't all sand, but lots of Oasis type plains, where all sorts of grim spiders and crunchy looking black beetles lurk below the sand. Nice. Excellent tour though.
And now we are in a hotel in Swakopmund for one more night. This is the adrenaline capital of Namibia and I am proud to say.............I DID A 10,000FT SKY DIVE YESTERDAY!!!!! SOBER! Ju wisely stayed on the ground and took pics. Me & Carla went up in the shoddiest little plane ever, I swear it had blue tack holding the window in, cruised over the ocean & Walvis bay (where Brangelina are, allegedly), then, opened the hatch, strapped to a large German man each of course & flopped out the door. WAHEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH F******************* HELLLLL etc etc. Pretty amazing and not nearly as scary as it maybe should have been. We were hungover though. We've drank stacks of Hansa beer each night here, and plenty the night before the skydive. I want to do it again, maybe in NZ. Then in the afternoon, I went for a sunset horse trek with Nicola ('I've climbed Kili, I have' ) which couldn't have been a more differing experience from hurtling towards the ground at 220kph! Both were awesome. Today the whole group of us are Quad Biking through the sand, so hopefully even more adrenaline will be in the air this afternoon @ 3. I'm not sure if Namibia is ont he same time as England or if we're 1 hr ahead? Anyway, I'll think of you all at work as I spray sand in the air from the back of my Quad!
One more thing, me & Ju were dared to eat something grotty last night. And of course we rose to the challenge. We each munched on a Mpone Worm. Looked like a dead man's toe, I swear. Not that I've seen a dead man's toe, but you get my drift. It tasted like chewy eggy wangy crunchy peanuty cacky chicken. Blurgh!!! But we were heroes. or stupid. Either way, we washed it all down with more Hansa.
Tomorrow we leave Swakopmund, I'm sure we wont see Brangelina's baby (what did they call it?) and hit the road. Then we start going on game drives, where we should see the Big 5 hopefully. Cheetah park tomorrow, to see some of Jack's distant relatives although I'm sure Jack is scarier, for thos of you that know him!
Hope all is well in rainy Blighty, we manage to keep track of the footy a little through BBC world, so we're not too cut off. Hope Vic Falls has coverage of England v Paraguay.......Keep emailing us, like I said before, it's nice to hear from you all, even if it's just a few lines to say Hi.
Take care of yourselves, and each other
Kel & Ju xx
PS if you want to see any pics of us, we have put them in a kodak web gallery as they seem to be coming out oo blurry on here at the mo. Namibia doesn't have broadband either, so would be too slow to upload. If anyone's bothered about seeing the pics, email us. x
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Sue Gibbs
non-member comment
Kodak Pics
Hi Kelly and Ju We would love to see some of your pics. Any chance that you can send them ? Regards Sue