mishaps

I could not believe the number of broken things on this tour. It started with the fridge in the car: it worked for the first 200km, then said “beep” once more and then it went dead. No light, no tone, no refrigeration. So we had from then on a very bulky and inefficient cool box which restricted us in our food shopping. However, we managed surprisingly well without it. The next thing was the borrowed gas cooker. Our attempt to cook tea on it required a windstill place and a lot of patience. The flame was tiny, not enough gas was coming out. We checked the valve and the outlets, but could not find anything wrong. So, this meant cooking on an open fire whenever we wanted anything hot. OK, I could put up with this. Then, on a camp site in Etosha, we had a screw in one tyre and it lost a lot of pressure. We decided to change the tyre in camp rather than somewhere on the Etosha roads with hungry lions around. We had problems getting the nuts off and asked for help at the local petrol station. The man there helped us with some tools and we thought the problem was sorted. It was not so. When trying to use the hydraulic jack it only moved a few centimetres and then stopped. It turned out that the oil had been leaking out. So we also borrowed a jack, finally changed the tyre and got the hole fixed. At our stop in the next town I bought more useful tools for the nuts, a new jack and also showed the gas cooker to the man in the garage. He tried it out and it worked! He said he had not done anything, it just worked. Hm. Well. What I had not expected was that we needed tha jack and the tools the next day as we had another flat tyre in another camp. We also got that tyre fixed in the nearest town. To finish this unpleasant story, later one tyre was torn by a stone and the last one ripped totally off on a normal gravel road. We ended up driving 150km along the coast without a spare. In Swakopmund I ordered new ones. And I remember my brother asking me in the beginning why the hell I have 2 spares! I think 4 flat tyres within 2 weeks is quite a record and in the end we were very quick in changing it.

Etosha once more

This time I went on tour with my brother and his kids. The Landrover was fully loaded with borrowed camping gear and food for 2 weeks and off we went. We took our time to enjoy everything in leisure and to avoid too long drives in a day. Our first stop was the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a place where they care for injured and orphaned cheetahs. If a cheetah does not learn to hunt from its mother, it will not be able to survive in the wild, so it has to be kept in a reservate and fed. We were introduced to the concept of the place and saw the feeding of a group of the cheetahs. There is even a clinic and laboratory to care for injured animals and to do some research on them. The museum nearby was also very interesting. They do a morning exercise with the cheetahs, where there is a piece of fur pulled over the field for them to hunt, similar to a greyhound race. Unfortunately, we missed that.
The next highlight was Etosha. Although I had been there before it was still a great experience. Already in camp the night before we entered the park we heard the lions growling. We had 3 days to spend in the park and saw everything one could wish for: a herd of 20 elephants crossing the road just in front of us, 4 lionesses with 7 cubs relaxing at a waterhole, oryx fighting, giraffes with their offspring and a pair almost twisting their necks around each other … The funniest thing I saw was a large group of zebra mongoose whirling through each other at the road side and the strangest thing was a single black rhino pestering a group of elephants at the waterhole – and the rhino won! Usually this is the other way round. After those 3 days in the car we took a day off and relaxed in a camp outside the park, just walking around a bit and using the pool.