Our next stop was on the farm Otjihaenamaparero to see 219 million years old dinosaur footprints. There were very well visible, over 20m long tracks, deeply imprinted into the sandstone, surprisingly impressive. The landscape was wonderful with
Next day we took our time, topped up our stock in Outjo, and carried on to Etosha Safari camp 10km south of Anderson Gate. That evening we started our first attempt of cooking a meal on the open fire and it worked! To our surprise nothing was burnt. We got very excited to enter the highlight of Namibia, Etosha Park. And it did not disappoint us. Already at the first waterhole we stopped for a long time, amazed that the animals did not run away as usual. They are so used to cars here. There were zebras and springbok and fresh elephant shit. The view of the pan itself was just unbearable, so wide and endless, you could see the animals kilometres away. It was still muddy in places. We drove around all day and it never became boring. I took lots of photos of beautifully patterned zebras, secretary bird and the cute little ground squirrels. We returned to our camp and next day we set off to cross half of Etosha and camp in the middle, at a place called Halali (regards from the German hunters). We added elephants, rhino, impala, kudu and oryx to our list and laughed at drinking giraffes. The camp had its own floodlit waterhole were we watched a herd of about 20 elephant at night, 2 black rhinos with a calf drinking, and a spotted hyena. On our last day in Etosha, early in the morning, with the sun blending me through a dusty windscreen and the bushes throwing striped shadows on the road, I slowed down as I saw an animal on the road. I was busy working out which big antelope that would be when I realized that it was a lion! In fact, there were two. We watched them slowly disappearing into the bush, marking them on the way. Wow, what a start of the day! We drove through an area of interesting landscape with hills, smaller pans and palm trees. There were even large areas with water and pelicans. Again, we saw a lot, but we had stopped counting except for the 3 lions and 4 black rhinos. Not long before sunset we left the park and took camp nearby. We were looking forward to a day of rest, walking around a bit, without driving. This is the big disadvantage of Etosha that you are not allowed (for good reasons) to leave the car. Even the toilets are fenced in.
