Last night we stayed with Dean and Lizelle at their AirBnB in Tsumeb. Dean is a welder at the local copper smelter (Tsumeb is a copper town) and was working 6am to 6pm everyday during the plant shutdown. He looked knackered. Lizelle, however, didn’t seem to do much at all, except to tell the maid what needed to be done, and looked very well.
As we had a reasonable journey ahead of us today we had planned to leave early but Glenn was tired as he stayed up to watch the France v Germany footie match and Yvonne needs no reason to stay in bed. We also enjoyed watching downloads of grandson Riley opening his birthday presents for his 3rd birthday today along with getting very happy messages from Scottie for being successful in getting a new job. Anyway we were not out as early as planned and set off for the Hoba meteorite close to the next town, Grootfontein.
The meteorite is the largest on earth - most vapourise on impact. A 50 ton block of Iron and Nickel, it was found when a local farmer hit it with his plough and dug around to see what it was. Since then the area has been landscaped by the National Heritage Council, which has built a sort of amphitheatre around the meteorite to show it off. It all sounds a bit naff but actually it works. Although it is just a large rust coloured block that looks like rock it is amazing to look at knowing that it was once hurtling around space. The edges are riddled with saw marks where small pieces have been removed for examination by various international bodies and it was once purchased by an American institution for display in the USA but they couldn’t move it!
From Grootfontein we headed towards the Caprivi strip, a narrow strip of northern Namibia that hems in Botswana to the south and provided the German colonists with access to Zambia and Zimbabwe with Angola to the north. This is a very different side of Namibia where the, seemingly endless, straight road is lined with small, presumably family owned, stockades comprising an outer fence of sticks or thatch surrounding a few thatched huts with either stick and mud or thatched walls. Archetypal Africa. Although the people looked very poor we passed several schools all emitting children dressed in smart school uniforms and walking alongside the road to their homes. Also on the roadside were people carrying water containers of every shape and size either to or from the regularly spaced communal water tanks. So, people with no mains water, electricity nor sanitation and this in the same country with vast diamond, gold and uranium mines. Occasionally we stopped to take a photograph but if we were spotted children would run to us with outstretched arms calling “present, present”.
After a few hundred km of this we found the sign for Shumvara Camp, where we stayed overnight. We were greeted by Ann who showed us to our site, which comprised a large tent with beds, a fire pit, an open sided hut with fridge, cooker, kettle and sink and another open air hut with a loo and shower, all walled in by a thatched fence, rustic, yet homely. The camp is set high on the bank of the Okavango river, which flows into Botswana’s famous inland delta before evaporating, and afforded views over a vast wetland plain towards Angola - a lush green landscape like nothing we’ve seen so far in Africa yet very African.
A long chat with Ann revealed that we’d missed the last boat trip, husband Mark was already on the river with some other guests. She also told us that Mark had worked as a game warden in Kruger and Etosha and they had moved away from South Africa to build and run the camp here: a lifestyle choice rather than a money making venture - like many other Africans we’ve met. It appears Mark is a very well known and respected Wildlife Guide and in the bar over a whiskey or two he revealed he had been bitten, twice, by the deadly Black Mamba snake and had suffered severe injuries from an elephant attack. Their reception area was filled wall to wall with antlers and skulls and the floor area filled with dogs, cats, chickens and the goat even resided inside.
 |
| We sit atop 50 tins of iron and nickel meteorite |
 |
| The bared metal sparkling in the sun |
 |
| One of the many family stockades |
 |
| Piles of thatching grass |
 |
| "Present please" |
 |
| Overlooking the Okavango river towards the Angolan plain |
 |
| Our camp |
No comments:
Post a Comment