Blogs from Namibia, Africa - page 107

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 ... read more

I take back all the negative comments I have made about quad bikes. We had such fun last night on the dunes. There were just the three of us in the group, we were lad by a very gentle guide. The instruction to not think of the steering as like a bike was difficult to adopt at first, so I likened it in my mind to pushing a supermarket trolley that wasn't steering true. The revving was similar to my 2CV - pied au planchet if you wan tto get up the hills!! We started by gently following the guide up and down gentle slopes, concentration was the important word at this point. As we progressd he took us up steeper slopes which was not too traumatic, then we started going down the steep sides of ... read more

Well, today is my last day in Windhoek and we are officially done with training! Yay! It was very helpful but very exhausting! Yesterday was a good day...we had a speaker in the morning on "teaching with rubbish" which was cool because I now know how to play checkers and bingo with cardboards and bottle caps! Then we broke up in groups and my group went to an HIV/AIDS clinic and got to see the process of a drop-in client. Very interesting! Tomorrow we are all going our separate ways throughout Namibia and this is where the real challenge begins... I met with our field director today and she gave me more info. about my school and principal. She said the prinicipal is very energetic and very excited to have a World Teach volunteer teacher at ... read more

An astonishingly early start today with breakfast at 5:30am. We're camping and it doesn't get light until 5:45am so it's a pretty stupid time to have breakfast but there you go, we're not in charge. We drove firstly to an amazing little town, well collection of buildings, called Solitaire. Despite only having one shop, the place is famous for its apple crumble. And quite right too - it was the most delicious apple crumble ever tasted. On a chalkboard they display the world news because people around here don't have much contact with the outside world. We're clearly not missing much whilst we're in the Namibian desert because the current summary of world events is 'D Beckham to play in the US. Temperature 42C'. At lunchtime we arrived in Swakopmund, Namibia's holiday destination. It's a small ... read more