Day 197 - From all to nothing

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After the relative luxury of 3 nights in a hostel we were back to earth with a bang: camping with no facilities, including water. Our first stop was the Cape Cross Seal Colony. Thousands of seals, a lot of them babies and some of them being seagull/jackal-eaten carcasses. The smell was just unbelievable. According to a plaque, Cape Cross was discovered by a Portugese who erected a cross where he landed. The cross fell to pieces and the remains are now in Berlin, but 100 years ago a replica was put up. Subsequently to this, about 10 years ago a rather pedantic historian concluded that the replica had been put up 10m away from the correct location. So now there are 2 identical replica monuments 10m apart. We stopped off in a town to buy food and try to use the internet (without success as it turned out). Tobias, a slightly nutty Dutchman on our trip noticed a sign above the door to the bank saying 'No Robberies'. Most normal people would probably just think of something funny to say, but not him. According to those inside the bank at the time, Tobias burst through the door and shouted 'this is not a robbery' before running back out again. Slightly weird behavior that on another day could have got him shot.

We were staying next to Spitzkoppe, Namibia's second highest mountain and quite a sight since it just looks like a huge rock lying in the desert. We had a guided walk to a rock art site and various other Bushman-related things. The guide was a local schoolboy who knew a lot more about English Premiership football than about local history. The sky was amazingly clear and we spent some time trying to match up what Gemma's astronomy book said with what we could see. At one point we thought we could see a meteorite heading for earth and another Australian with us, Andrew, shouted 'to the cave' (we were sleeping in a cave tonight) very much like Batman and Robin. The start of a theme perhaps? Sleeping in the cave was excellent, although surprisingly warm from a fire. We said it was the 197th day of our year away, which prompted a question from Karen, yet another Aussie, asking how many days our year away was going to last. When Gemma answered 365 days Karen regretted having asked that question.

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