Stinking seals and Lion King Land
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2009
1
11
32
Trip End
Ongoing
Spitzkoppe, Erongo, Namibia
Saturday, November 14, 2009
We drove up the beginning Skeleton Coast road which even at the edge here has no life and no people its pretty remote, but the road here is good and we were driving up to the Cape Cross Seal colony.
In 1486 Portuguese Diego Cáo landed here and erected a stone cross in honour of John II of Portugal. It is quite a desolate place unless you are a seal but there were 100's of them and they seemed pretty happy. It's the beginning of the breading season and they were piled on top of each other fighting for space or if they'd got a coveted rock sticking out their chests and basking in the sun. the pups yelp like dogs and the enormous males roar like lions and make this odd throaty cough to show off.
We drove north to a spot called Spitzkoppe which is large red granite outcrops sticking out of Savannah its like being in the Lion King! There is even a rock that a could be pride rock if you squint a bit...Unfortunately there aren't strolling herds of zebra's and gnu's or Lions, giraffes or elephants like in the circle of life. As the local farmers have problems with them and so that they didn't continue killing them most that were left have been darted and moved North to Etosha by the government.
We are staying in whats optimistically called a "community campsite", we are camping rough below the rocks - there are drop toilets with pretty big tanks underneath them that don't smell too bad as there is a bit of a breeze and even shower cubicles but these are however lacking the all important shower or running water as there isn't any...which is normal for a wild camp but we are here for two nights so I imagine we were all pretty stinky by the time we left, wet wipes can only do so much!
We had a traditional dinner of Ugali, chapatis (different from the Indian variety) stew, and cabbage which was really good but the ugali is incredibly filling its pretty much flour and water made into a paste the cooked down to something more like dough, more appealing than it sounds and great with stew - almost like a dumpling i guess...
We'd brought some marshmallows to toast on the campfire, they have some crazy flavours here so we'd brought some traditional pink and white and also a packet of Liche and kiwi flavoured ones all in the spirit of trying new things - big mistake they were horrid!
As there aren't many animals in the area it was safe for us to sleep outside which we did on top of one of the rocks both nights - though on the first night we didn't get much sleep due to being freaked out but the ENORMOUS white spider we saw at the camp fire it was bigger than my palm and had mean looking pincers at the front! EEK!
There are also San bushman paintings in the area, which we went to see, lots of them were drawn when the guys were in a trance and were half human half animal.
Phew! thats a bit of a long one,
Lizzie
xx
