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Namibia is an intriguing country, a land of deserts, diamonds, and dinosaur tracks, strikingly reminiscent of the American Southwest. We spent 11 days in the country (almost four longer than we had planned due to the car trouble saga) and in that short time experienced only a handful of the nation’s natural attractions.

Above all, Namibia is a land of superlatives, home of the biggest, the deepest, the longest, and the oldest. Outside Grootfontein, we visited the world’s largest meterorite. From there, we traveled on to the small town of Tsumeb, which is the naturally occurring home of 184 minerals, 10 of which are found nowhere else on the planet. We marveled at Etosha, a vast plain where prehistoric waters once ran, walked in 170 million year old dinosaur tracks outside Omaruru, and gathered rocks at the Spitzkoppe, a 1,728 meter sandstone monolith also known as the Matterhorn of Africa. We descended to the shore and took in the world’s largest seal colony (perhaps the foulest smelling experience of our lives) at Cape Cross on the southern end of the notorious Skeleton Coast. The coast is usually foggy and foreboding, the result of the cold Atlantic sea air colliding with its warm desert counterpart, but our day with the seals proved bright and beautiful. It was on the way back to Swakopmund from the stinkfest that our van, Uncle Vito, gave up the ghost. Fortunately he carried us as far as our lodge before collapsing for good.

Dax and I frolicked in the sand dunes outside Swakopmund, but they were mere molehills compared to the biggest and oldest of the planet’s sand dunes which we visited at Sossuvlei. We ascended Dune 45 to watch the sunrise (some of us faster than others) and enjoyed the 4×4 capabilities of our replacement car as we slid through the sands outside the Big Daddy dune which stands over 300 meters high. We returned to the port town of Walvis Bay, birthplace of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, where Uncle Vito languished in the parking lot of the repair shop waiting for parts to arrive from South Africa. Like its neighbor to the north, Swakopmund, Walvis Bay is a small oasis in the midst of a bleak, windswept desert seascape.

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Finding a long term rental car is a challenge. Anne started working on a rental car for Southern Africa weeks before we arrived. When we had internet, she would check prices at all the big shops and search for a smaller shop that might give us a deal. All were very expensive and it started to look hopeless. We debated going Indian style - putting all 6 of us and our luggage in a VW Golf or a Smart Car, but in an effort to stay sane and legal, we decided to go with something with 6 seats. This kept the price high, but we got lucky and finally found a smaller rental car company which cost significantly less than the big boys. They delivered the car a couple of days late, which was fine as we were lazily recovering from India in Pretoria.

When our van of choice finally arrived, everyone piled in and off we went on a test drive. The children took to the car and started calling it Uncle Vito as it the model name was Mercedes Vito. Uncle Vito came to us a little damaged. The previous renters had abused him and broken a seat and the passenger side sliding door. Even with his bumps and bruises, the kids latched on. I couldn’t quite get over some of the car’s shortcomings and made statements like, “Vito, the shame of Mercedes.” Uncle Vito probably heard me talking and decided to turn on us. Our unassuming mini-van was to become the cause of much hardship for both us and the wildlife of Namibia.

I am still probably too harsh on Vito. He made it the first 4000 kilometers of our Southern Africa drive without incident. His thirst for oil was a little worrisome, but he pushed us through all the dangerous places (South African townships, Botswana’s wild bush, Zambia, and the Caprivi Strip). But when we left Etosha, Uncle Vito started struggling. His internal computer put a governor on us and would not go over 3000 RPM’s. This slowed us down considerably and we puttered to the closest Mercedes repair shop, which took us well off our chosen path. We spent a day wandering outside the repair shop while they tried to resolve the problem. After about 3-4 hours they threw up their hands and sent us on our way. They told us, we needed to go to a bigger repair shop which would have the latest computer diagnostics. They told us and Vito’s owner that he would be safe to drive and sent us on our way 400-500 kilometers away from the next repair shop.

Driving at our reduced speed, we were able to see more of the countryside as fully functional cars zoomed past us. Uncle Vito’s slow pace had an added drawback. We haven’t quite figured it out yet, but his slow rate of progress and low level engine noise turned him into a stealthy critter hunter. We have been keeping track of the number of animals we’ve inadvertently killed on the trip. (We would be bad Jains.) The number had not been significant considering the sheer number of miles we (and our drivers) have driven: a parrot in Australia, a chicken in Cambodia, a cat in India, and a big lizard in Botswana. But in 6-8 hours of slow driving through Namibia, we went on a mad killing spree. It started with a few single birds. Anne would scream, I would groan, and we would move on. Then we got a double kill. Two little birds were playing on the side of the road and together flew right up into the windshield. Thump, Thump. Next we almost took out a family of warthogs. One especially bright boar waited for us to approach and darted right in front of us just as we passed. I swerved a little and the frightened pig skidded to a stop right at our tire and spun around in retreat. Dax claims he has never seen an animal’s eyes look that big. Soon after the pigs came a sparrow and a sparrow hawk who unfortunately was chasing it. We only heard one thud, so we might have missed the sparrow. A couple more birds followed and before the night was over we hit a bat. (Who hits a bat?) By the end of the day we had killed a double digit number of winged wildlife, the last one being stuck in our grill when pulled into our camp site.

The next day was much less eventful as we drove through the desert. Our killing spree came to a temporary halt but Uncle Vito was not done with us yet. The following day we took an easy drive of about 100 kilometers up the coast to see some seals. On the return trip about 20 miles outside our destination Uncle Vito went from bad to worse. He started to heat up and refused to go over 30 kilometers an hour. Never pushing his temperature gauge into the red zone, we limped him along until he finally rolled to an exhausted halt outside the gate of our backpackers’ lodge. Later that night a tow truck came and took Uncle Vito away. The repair shop did an analysis and told us it would be two days before they could fix him. Since our rental car company could find no other replacement car from Capetown to Windhoek, we decided to make the best of the situation and wait. The morning it was due to be repaired, we called the shop and found out it would be at least two more days since it was a national holiday and the part they thought would be arriving from the capital four hours away actually had to come from Johannesburg. By this point, we told our rental car company they absolutely had to find us another vehicle. We were understanding, as they are a small company and were 2000 kilometers away. They again spent all day looking and still came up with nothing. Anne and I decided to go look ourselves. We couldn’t find another mini van but we did find a king cab pickup and a 15 seat microbus. The rental car company agreed to rent us the truck so we could go to Sossusvlei while Vito’s repairs were completed. It was a 500 kilometer drive there one day and another 500 kilometer drive back the next.

Of course, when we returned from our cramped drive, (6 of us do not really fit in a 5 seat king cab) Uncle Vito was sitting in the lot with his front bumper off, draining liquid, with no hope of a speedy recovery. Distraught we called the rental car company again and told them we could wait no longer. We had already lost 3-5 days and needed the 15 seat microbus to take us to Capetown. They agreed and the next morning we were on our way in a Toyota Quantum. Now this car I liked. The kids have not come up with a good name for the Quantum and I could care less. It made the 2000 kilometer drive at top speed without causing us any trouble…at least while I was driving. The ghost of Uncle Vito popped up and spooked two hapless guinea fowl into the Quantum’s speeding bumper while Anne was driving. Her scream is still echoing through the canyons of Namibia.

Editor’s Note: Tom’s selective memory erased the fact from his brain that he actually killed one bird with the Quantum before I decapitated the guinea fowl. — Anne

Technorati Tags: birds, mercedes vito, Namibia, roadkill, vito

We’ve been keeping a big secret for the past week or so, but it’s finally time to spill the beans. Earlier today we filmed a segment for The Oprah Winfrey Show at the base of Table Mountain in Capetown. Oprah’s people first contacted us in January but didn’t find a show that was the perfect match for us until now. They arranged for Oprah to interview us via satellite from Capetown’s most spectacular natural setting on March 28th. We had a driver, a producer, a make-up artist, and a film crew, and in general felt like celebrities for a day…all for a 10-minute segment! The tentative plan is for the show to air on April 2, a quick five day turnaround from taping to airing. We won’t be able to see the show until Tom’s parents bring a copy to Turkey with them in mid-April, so be sure to record/watch and tell us how we did. (No comments on weight loss or gain, please!) Feel free to tell anyone and everyone you know.

Technorati Tags: Family travel, Oprah Winfrey, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Table Mountain

While being stuck in Swakopmund due to Uncle Vito’s heart problems, my mom and I decided to try out the local sport of sand-boarding. It was on my list of things to do in Africa from the beginning so I was quite excited to finally get a chance to do it. There were two options, lie down boarding, which resembled what we had done a couple months back in Vietnam but much faster and crazier, and stand up boarding, basically snowboarding on sand. My mom chose the first and I chose the latter. We were picked up early in the morning by a bus full of instructors. After a quick stop to pick up some German tourists, we drove a little farther into the sand dunes and stopped at a base point. Here the instructors explained to us what we’d be doing and suited us up with boots and bindings. Everyone made sure the equipment fit and then we were separated into three groups: lie down boarders, experienced stand up boarders, and novice stand up boarders.

After being separated we started off up the dune. It was quite the hike. On the way the instructors explained that since the dunes were public property, they couldn’t build a lift. Since they didn’t want to deface the dune, they don’t take quad bikes up, so every day they and their clients make the long steep walk up the dunes. After an exhausting hike we reached the top and followed our various instructors to different parts of the dunes. My instructor, a surfer from So-Cal, gave me and the one other German who hadn’t snowboarded the basics on sandboarding. After a little while he said it was time to take a run on the dune. Having never done anything like this before, and not knowing what it would be like, I was a little nervous so I opted to go after the German. He went and made it look relatively easy. I tried to follow up and found it was much harder than I had anticipated. It was nothing like surfing or skating. I could hardly make it a couple meters without falling. I was distraught when I reached the bottom of the dune but intent on doing better my second run.

While I was climbing back up the dune for my next run I had a nice talk with the German tourist. When we reached the summit, I found that the next run down I would be trying my hand at lie down boarding. I watched a few people go before me and it looked like a good deal of fun. I positioned myself on the board and was pushed off by the instructor. I started blazing down the dune at 55 kilometers an hour. I once again had to climb the dune and by now was totally exhausted. I reached the top, and despite being tired, quickly strapped on my board for the second run. This time I took the dune straight on and barreled down it. I was doing quite well until it came time to stop. I had forgotten how and so I attempted to do it the only way I could think of. Kicking the tail of my board out. This didn’t end well as I pulled an “ostrich” and had my head stuck in the sand. I was excited about my run though and made my way up to the summit again. Once again I was strapped up for another run, but one of the instructors wanted me to do a tandem lie down board with my mom. The tandem was more like sitting up and was very slow. I objected but in the end was forced into it. My mom asked me how it was so far and I told her “Great, except for this!” She agreed and said the tame sit down run wasn’t worth the effort of hiking back up.

The rest of the day I did a few more runs, getting a little better every time. I did one more lie down board run going 67 kilometers an hour, incredibly fast, down the biggest dune, which the Namibians call Dizzy. For my last run I decided to attempt going off the kicker (jump). I was nervous. I lined myself up and launched off. It was very exhilarating for the second or so I was in the air. When I came back down I managed to right myself but soon I was toppling over again. When everyone was at the bottom of the dune, it was the instructor’s turn. The first one down did a simple 180, while the second busted a huge front flip off the small kicker. Everyone was surprised and cheered him on. We made our way back to the cars and had some drinks and sandwiches. Everyone was parched and guzzled down multiple sodas. We all talked for a while over our meal. My mom met an American who had home-schooled her children while they lived on a fishing island in Alaska, and I talked to some Italians who were interested in my online schooling. Soon we said our goodbyes and headed back to our hostel. This experience has me hooked on sandboarding and currently I’m trying to find a place to sandboard in Capetown. Now to find a place to sandboard in Georgia…

Technorati Tags: Family travel, Namibia, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, sand dunes, Sandboarding, Swakopmund

¶ Namibia was a big surprise for me. I’ve always loved collecting rocks (along with coins) and I didn’t know before we came here that Namibia has more different rocks and minerals than almost any other country in the world. We spent a day rock hunting around the Spitzkoppe mountain and visited the Kristall Galery in Swakopmund, a showroom and store all to rocks and gems. My dad told me that when he was little, he and his grandpa liked to collect rocks in the mountains of Utah and then take them home and tumble and polish them. ¡ I can’t wait to get home and do the same with my Spitzkoppe rocks!

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After our intimate encounter with wildlife on the Caprivi Strip, we weren’t sure how we felt about camping our way through the rest of Namibia. Cautiously optimistic, we exited Angola and made the one-day drive to the jewel of the country’s animal venues–Etosha National Park–where we planned on a two-night tented stay. We had heard that many of Namibia’s campsites are plagued by hyenas and baboons and were not eager to encounter either one late at night. Frankly, we didn’t know whether we’d even be able to camp since all the guidebooks and South Africa’s auto club (the equivalent of AAA) insisted we had to prebook in Windhoek, the nation’s capital. Once again proving the authorities wrong, we drove up, paid the required fees, and popped our tents in the reassuringly fenced and convivial Okaukuejo Rest Camp. We ran into some lovely South African women who had also been at our campground in Nata, Botswana. We hadn’t met them and it had been dark when we arrived, but they recognized us by the sounds of our voices. Apparently there aren’t many American families with small, loud children traveling the Southern African campground circuit at the moment and we were easy to identify.

Confident we could fight off the occasional pesky jackal, we were ready to rest easy…but first there were animals to find. We’d already found elephants, rhinos, giraffes, zebras, buffalo, warthogs, hippos, kudu, impala, wildebeeste, and a slew of other animals on our previous self-styled safaris, but the big cats had eluded us. Tom was eager to track down a lion or two so we set off into the vast Etosha pan. We were barely a kilometer outside the camp gates when we found what Tom figured would soon be a front row seat to to a feline feeding frenzy–a dead zebra. The great beast laid bent and broken on the ground beside a tree. Something had snapped its neck, a leopard perhaps? As we drove up, three or four jackals were just beginning to take the first few bites out of the coarse hide. We knew the jackals couldn’t be responsible for the kill, but when no bigger animal appeared, we began to wonder what really had happened. The best we could surmise was the big, dumb beast had been looking the other way and run headlong into the tree.

We left the zebra behind vowing to return and quickly discovered more zebra, giraffe, and wildebeeste. Much to the kids’ delight (Dax excluded), our new big discovery was birds…oodles of them. Using the handy spotting guide the park provided, they identified many varieties of exotic avians including the famed secretary bird, familiar to old people like their parents from the Disney classic Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The sun began to set and we had to get to back to the camp before they closed the gate. We circled back by the zebra but still no cats had materialized.

Like an excited little kid, Tom woke early the next morning and beat everyone else in the park to the zebra. 15 minutes later he was back shouting, “Hurry! Out of the tents. The lions are at the zebra.” We jumped into Uncle Vito and raced back to the carcass. During the night, most of the animal had been devoured. When Tom arrived, a pack of jackals had been feasting, but within a few minutes a hyena chased them away. The hyena was almost immediately replaced by three lions, two female and one male, who asserted their food chain superiority. The male lounged lazily in the distance while the lionesses tore the carcass with their frighteningly powerful jaws.

We lingered for a good 30 minutes and were joined by many of the tour groups who had shared our campground. Of all the high-priced guides and expert park rangers, it had been Tom who located the lions first. Who says you can’t safari successfully on your own?

We returned to the camp, struck our gear, and hit the road. We had 145 kilometers to travel to reach our next campsite at the western end of the park. We saw a few more of the same old animals and a bevy of interesting birds before arriving at the midpoint of the park–Halali Restcamp. Here we cooled in the swimming pool and feasted on our own buffet of ground kudu and pork chops. In stark contrast to predominantly vegetarian Indians, Africans believe a meal is not a meal unless there is at least one healthy serving of meat.

We found a few more rhinos along the way to Okaukuejo but after the lions and our rhino spotting in Hluhuwe-Imfolozi, nothing seemed that impressive. Our second night in Etosha reinforced how unusual our tactics for exploring Southern Africa are. We were surrounded by tour groups in their monstrous overland vehicles with nary an independent traveler in sight. While the participants on these tours seemed a jovial lot, we were glad to be on our own this time around, looking out our own windows, deciding which route we wanted to travel, and eating our own food. We agree we’d prefer the safety of one of these trucks if trekking through the racier central African countries, but given the relative safety of this region, making our way on our steam is liberating.

Our tents proved waterproof that night as the rains came, though our trash cans were not jackal proof. Having had our fill of animals, we headed off in the direction of the infamous Skeleton Coast, one of the first destinations Kieran and Asher picked out of our travel books at home. The only problem was Uncle Vito refused to accelerate beyond 3,000 rpm and we were stuck going 100 km/hr. Could we have been too smug in our independence? Ahhh, but that’s a story for a future post.

Technorati Tags: Etosha National Park, Family travel, Namibia, Camping, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Safari, Southern Africa

Angola is a country ravaged by war. Since its independence from Portugal in 1975 there have been bloody struggles for power. Up until a few years ago the bombs were still going off as Communist rebels tried to stake a claim in Namibia. It was on the State Department’s red list (very dangerous countries, currently on the red list are such places as Iraq, Iran and Colombia), and is still on its yellow list today. As we learned from an Angol-Namib man at our lodge in Rundu, voodoo cults are common, killings occur daily, and unexploded bombs litter are everywhere. Most people with money left Angola long ago due to the many dangers they faced in everyday life. Sound like your ideal vacation spot? No? Well, my parents doing as any good parents would have done decided, “Hey, why not?” (Note that they will also be taking us to Colombia, one of the only three countries on the Red List). Now if they would have stopped there this would have been fine, but then they took it one step further. Being the cheapskates that they are, my parents decided to save the visa money and enter the country ILLEGALLY. Enter a third world, war torn nation ILLEGALLY. Enter the yellow list country ILLEGALLY. Why? So we can say we’ve been there!

Just kidding. Well not about the war torn nation part (or for that matter the cheapskate part…), but for travelers in northern Namibia, it is common to illegally cross the border into Angola, which is just a stone’s throw across the river, just to say you have. And so no grandparents get concerned, no, we did not go headlong into an Angolan war-zone; we simply took a stroll in the countryside. Our journey to Angola began when we stopped at the campsite where we had an eerie incident the night before (read my mom’s post). We looked across the river and asked someone if that was Angola or Namibia on the other side. They told us it was Angola, and that if we wanted, we could make a quick stop there illegally on a birdwatching boat ride.

My parents were excited while the rest of us had mixed feelings…about the birdwatching that is…boring. But it was settled. The next morning they woke us up and before we knew it, we were getting out of the small rickety boat and jumping into Angola. Hans, the boat driver, gave us a sign that read “Illegal in Angola” and told us to go take some pictures.

When we had finished documenting our criminal activity, we got back in the boat and made our way back to the campsite. Upon hitting the Namibian shore, we breathed a sigh of relief; we had made it out of Angola safely. But safe from what? We didn’t know since all we saw were a few cows. Now let’s just hope the Angolan government doesn’t read our blog…

Technorati Tags: Angola, Animals, Illegal, Okavango river

This may be a big shock, but the camp sites in Africa have no internet access. I just wanted to let you know that we will be very slow to answer emails and comments sent over the last week or two. I got on for a half an hour today to get a couple of posts up and clear the 1000+ spam comments. We will be in Cape Town soon and will be back online then. Don’t let our absence stop you from sending us stuff. We love all the comments.