Nambia Day 12

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When we got back from dinner last night we went over to the waterhole to see what was about and we were treated to seeing seven black rhino drinking. We thought that was lucky enough when suddenly I spotted a huge owl swoop silently in and land on the tree behind us. What a fantastic evening.

Today was another day on safari self-driving around this vast park and we have been exploring the middle section. Once you are off the main highway and go out to the waterholes the roads get fairly rough so we were again thankful we had the 4x4.

At our first stop this morning we saw a large pride of lions wandering across to have a drink, before settling themselves down for a rest. We also saw vultures in the area: probably hoping for the leftovers of a kill.

Our route took us past the pan, which is a vast mainly empty area that used to be a lake. It is not a salt pan, but soft clay, which occasionally floods. There is a route where you drive part of the way into the pan and this is one of the few places where you can actually get out of your car, which we did today. The area is so vast that you can actually see the curvature of the earth on the horizon.

Much of the region we were visiting was higher ground, much of which is lightly wooded and this made it quite interesting and meant we saw some slightly different antelope including kudu, which are really beautiful. Despite being on what was obviously elephant super-highway (dung and stripped trees), we did not see any in that part, but thought we might have glimpsed some black rhino in the distance.

Later we came across several groups of elephants, one of which numbered fifteen including several young. They were spread across both sides of the road and one elephant seemed to be taking a dislike to our car so we made a sharp exit.

Meg has been ticking off the birds again today as there is a fantastic variety of birds here and some of them are very hard to identify as you only see some of them flying. Favourites were the brightly coloured purple rollers, lilac-breasted rollers and the gorgeous violet-eared waxbill.

Off to the Erongo mountains tomorrow via the Africat Foundation which works to conserve cheetahs and leopards, we have heard that they now take day visitors so we are hopeful we will be able to see some of their work.

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