Namibia without Globi

30.12.15 – 29.1.16

Getting used to the southern Africa

Arrival

The immigration was really easy apart from the fact that the Immigration Officer wasn’t able to calculate. 3 months starting end of December are finished by end of February??? Gabi has been interviewed for hours while Peter nearly fell asleep.
The most important thing for surviving is of course communication. Hence the first thing we needed was a local SIM card. You can get them everywhere and we found a small shop around the corner. Unfortunately they not only admired our cellphones and did the upload thingi, but they had to do some special preparation for internet in the back of the shop. Since then Peter’s contact details are disappeared, if anything else is missing we don’t know.
As Globi will be late for at least 20 days, we are now stucked in Windhoek, immobile. We had planned to switch from immobile to mobile! So we had to find a car rental. Quite difficult as it seemed all cars were rented out. But lucky we found one – and even a 4×4.

Etosha pan

We are travelling in the so called rainy season. But the thunderstorm we experienced in Namutoni – in the eastern part of the nature park – was definitely beating even the Zurich “Seenachtsfest”. This park was pampering us a lot. We did see so many animals and often just a step away – a once in a lifetime experience.

As there obviously are a lot of animals, we did try the local game food. During our safaris we could judge already which pieces are more yummie than others, a very different way to observe wild animals. Though we never ate lions, their roar impressed us. This sound you can hear over many many miles.

The park is managed by the government. That’s possibly the reason why the shops in the beautiful camps are always empty. One would need to order in advance and to make sure delivery is on time. But often that’s just not possible because the keyboard of the computer is too hot or any other reason you might think of. That was exactly our story with the petrol in Okaukueyo. Every day new petrol should arrive the other day. We are guessing that until today nobody has ordered the petrol 😉 So we drove back 80km to get some petrol in another camp.

In Dolomite the driver – you cannot take your own car up the hill – let us wait for 1.5 hours in the sun before he gave us a lift. He preferred some other nicer guests. So sad, we thought we are nice guys as well.

Himbas

Close to the boarder of Angola we were allowed to visit a Himba village. Not only the way they dress is unusual for us, but even more their very special hair styling: they crop the hair of the children completely. Only from 5 years onwards the hair can grow. The girls wear 2 plaits to the front, the boys one to the back. When the men get married, they open their plait and twist their hair to a little knob which is then covered by a piece of textile. The women grease their hair with a paste – reddish color – and add some cow or goat hair to it, so that they get quite rich and fluffy tassels and the end.
The paste is made from a special stone they get from Angola. The stone powder is mixed with butter and is used as a body lotion for the entire body. They are not allowed to wash them with water anymore after that. Though the young girls sneak away sometimes for a bath in the river. Sex is allowed before getting married – after marriage as well – if you can still switch partners we couldn’t find out. Kids produced before marriage belong to the family of the mother, after marriage to the new family. So clear rules for the belongings.
Having sex is really traitorously, as the red colour of the girls rub off on the men’s skin. That’s why the young men need to take a bath afterwards, so that the neighbours cannot see the marks.

Police control

Around the national parks there are a lot of street controls. At these check points the wheels get purified as well as the shoes to avoid the spread of the foot and mouth desease. One of these officers remarked that one of the car lights wasn’t working. When he started to bullish around we asked for his identification card. That motivated him even more and the fine was getting higher and higher. We explained – by the way the truth – that the lamp did work in the morning, but that due to the heavy gravel roads the bulb might have loosen a bit.

The fine calculated up to NAD 750, same like you would pay for two designer shorts. Peter did take a picture of the guy – to have something in our hands. That indeed speeded up the procedure. The officer was really furious, it’s not allowed to take pictures from officers. At least we got a deal now: we deleted the picture and therefore we didn’t have to pay the fine immediately.

RoRo