Africa – 18th Sept 2008 – Day 17

Last night turned out to be a very windy one indeed. By 2pm, the curtains in our tent were flying all over the place. John thought that he saw a lizard running around the room, but this turned out to be his imagination. However, the Zebra were screaming during the night which kept Fiona awake.

At 7am, after breakfast, we went on a walking safari with Cameron, the lodge manager. Otr was a very interesting walk, learning about all the local flora and fauna. Fiona spotted a buzzard in a tree. It turned out to be quite a rare species which even Cameron had not seen before in his 4 years at this Lodge. It turns out that Cameron and his wife Mary are opening a couple of lodges in another part of Namibia next year. They sound very interesting, tourism is certainly booming in Namibia.

Cameron was also telling us that Kate Humble from the BBC had been recently doing some filming.

We arrived back at 10 and chilled out on the patio, watching all the animals coming to and from the water hole which is just 20 foot from the patio. Some days you can see as much here as on a big drive.

After lunch we headed back to our tent to sit out the searing mid day heat. After refreshments, we headed off on our 4pm game drive with Angela and Adrian.

It was something of a frantic drive, word got around that there were a pride of lions in the area with cubs and who had recently made a kill (Oryx). John our guide drove quickly to the sighting, there were already 3 other trucks at the area of the lions. In the ongava reserve, trucks are not allowed off the main tracks, 3 of the trucks were already off tracks so they could get a better look at the lions. However we stayed on the tracks and 5 minutes later the ranger for the park arrived and caught one of the drivers, apparently the resort gets a huge fine and the driver looses his job. Of course it is the punters which put the drivers under this pressure to get so close, not good.

We managed to see the lions and the cubs, three of them, they were very cute. Again all the trucks bunched up together and this resulted in the mother lion being separated from the cubs, the poor cubs were distressed and were calling for mum. They managed to get round the trucks and were reunited. We told our driver we would rather leave the lions in peace which we did.

We drove for some time then came across a Lioness and Lion chilling by the side of the road. It turns out this is the mating season and just as we arrived they got down to the business, then chilled out again. According to John our guide, they mate for 4 days every 15 minutes !!!!.

We got back and had dinner, we sat with Ange and Adrian and had a really nice night. They live near the lake district, so we plan to go up there next year for some walking. They also have a dog a black Labrador who is two and very full of life, not sure this would suit Heather.

Cameron and Wendy our hosts bid us farewell for our journey to Huab lodge the next day.

John had a bit of a funny tummy that day so didn’t eat very much at dinner. We went to bed at about 10:00pm. After about 30 minutes we heard voices coming nearer and nearer to our tent. Then suddenly the door opened and two of the new girls who had ariived that day bounced in thinking it was their tent. We all got a shock but they managed to get to their correct tent which was one up from ours.