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Published: March 21st 2015
The River Bank Party
In the town of Rundu, on the border with AngolaClick to watch my film if you would prefer to watch than read
I wasn’t expecting much when I crossed the border into Namibia my impressions of the place were built around the Namib Desert, the only thing I knew about the country so I imagined it being desolate and dry. We (me and my mate Rich) entered from Botswana at the end of 2014 during a 3 month tour of Southern Africa. After driving through the thin strip of land known as the Caprivi Strip we chose to spend a night in Rundu so we could go to a New Years Eve party on a beach of the River Cubango. It was a great night and a great experience dancing with the locals while looking across the river (and therefore border) into Angola. We got to see some warm up acts and a guy called Gazza, one of the most commercially successful and best selling recording artists in Namibia, according to Wikipedia. Right at the end of the night I was unexpectedly grabbed and pulled on stage to dance with Gazza himself, I think his staff wanted his fans to see him
The River Bank Party
Our campsite on New Years Eve hanging with some European looking white guys.
To bring in the New Year we drove to Etosha National park to look for lions, stopping en-route at a crater lake with a Japanese sounding name, Otjikoto. Namibia’s flagship National park was simply awesome, a park with the ‘Big Five’, a huge salt flat and loads of watering holes so you can just sit and watch animals interacting with each other. We ended up camping right in the centre of the park 500m from a watering hole, which successfully enticed a host of elephants, rhinos and giraffe, to name just a few. It wasn’t until the day after that we found a couple of lionesses thanks to the help of the visitor’s sightings book. We sat and watched them for an hour, mostly just sat under a tree to hide them from the sun but they did walk a few hundred metres to go drink some water and to eye up the herds of hooved animals that were grazing nearby –
&feature=youtu.be">you can see our attempts to better David Attenborough in the film.
We followed our safari with 4 days in the Skeleton Coast area, a really arid part of the globe with some spectacular scenery and some fascinating sites to
The River Bank Party
There was lots of drumming and dancing visit. In one day we visited the Organ Pipes - some funny shaped rocks, Burnt Mountain - a blacked out hillside, Twyfelfontein – an area with some rock carvings and the Petrified Forest – some 219 million year old fossilised trees. We had to drive between 600 – 700 kms on dirt track roads so progress was slow. We stopped a night in Sesfontein, a town in the middle of nowhere where we went to a bar to ask the locals about the clicking noise they make when they talk –
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Precious
Thank you for sharing one of your best cornflake sharing stories. You are living life to the fullest and squeezing every opportunity out of it that you can. It sounds like you had impressions of Namibia which have come true but you also found some things that surprised you a bit. Happy travels. Eager to read more.