grass insect

There are some funny animals around here. On my last walk I found this insect in the middle of the path laying eggs or something. When it sits on the grass you really cannot make it out.

Brandberg

Last weekend I spent in the Brandberg area. My friends already left on Thursday which was a public holiday, but unfortunately I had to work on Friday. This only left me with 3 free days and the task to find them in one of the gorges of a mountain massive with a diameter of 50km. I have never been there before and there are no road signs at the many tracks. However, my friends gave me a good description of the area and some printouts from google earth. I also bought topographic maps with a scale 1:50000. So I packed my car on Friday and left Windhoek with the first daylight on Saturday morning at 6 am. It took me 5h to Uis, the town nearest to the Brandberg. I thought this was not too bad, but then it only started. The road on the remaining 80km was incredibly bad, ripples all over. On top of this a yellow warning light in my car went on which made me nervous. So I drove very slowly, watching the mountain carefully and trying to identify described features. This was surprisingly easy and even the tracks that turned off from the "main" road were in the right place. Thus, 3h later I found my friends without difficulty. They were as glad to see me as I was, already imagining me camping on my own in the wild. They had cleared a path into a dry riverbed, a very romantic setting. We went for an evening walk and then sat around the fire, braaing and chatting. The others slept in their roof-top tents on their cars, but I just spread my sleeping bed on a mat on the floor, enjoying the free view to the stars. I was not disturbed by anything in the night, only noticed some bats hunting above my head. And it was ABSOLUTELY quiet, no sound at all at times, not even snoring neighbours ;-) What I had not considered was the mist rolling in from the coast only 60km away. So my sleeping bag was wet outside, but never mind, I was not cold. Next morning we set off to a trip up the mountain. This turned out to be harder than it looked because of huge bolders we had to climb over. It is amazing that we still always found a possible way. There were interesting plants all around: Welwitschias in the plain, reed in the now mainly dry creeks and somthing like a little stone garden further up. The view from the top was rewarding. The way down trained the muscles in the arms as well as the legs because we had to let ourselves down the bolders and jump from one to another. I still feel the muscle pain today, two days later. The whole tour took 7 hours. It followed another relaxing evening at the fire. Next morning we set off straight on the way back in order not to get into a Namibian traffic jam.