There's a meercat in my shower & thats a lady man
Trip Start
Sep 10, 2008
1
3
71
Trip End
Sep 03, 2009
Brandberg,
Namibia
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Well, at least, if you ate part of them or got a bit into an open wound, or inhaled the smoke if they were burning etc, then you drop dead in 5 seconds flat. After casually walking past these plants in the past, I think we all made mental notes to give them a wide berth from now on! The bushmen use the poison the plant produces to tip their arrows when hunting. About the only thing that can eat them (that I remeber anyway) is rhinos, who love the stuff. Which is also apparently why humans don't eat rhinos. hmm.
Next, was the bushman carvings depicting various animals and their footprints. The carvings are dotted around a boulder field on the side of a mountain. Heading back through the gift shop I contemplated buying one of the scary voodoo doll things, that are actually suposed to be Himba dolls, but decided against it. After a visit to the most horrible toilets I've ever been to, we went to the car park. Only, our bus wasn't there.
Taking time out on our walk to the paintings
Our guide and assistant weren't anywhere to be seen. Slightly puzzled we all huddled under the only shade we could find and pondered more and more bizarre explainations of where they could have got to and what we should do now. After about half an hour of waiting, we spotted our bus speedily bumping down the road. Apparently we'd had two flats, and as we'd used a spare tyre the other day, we only had one more spare, so they had to go and get it fixed. We eventually made it to our lunch spot, unfortunately, the flys had made it there before us.
After an eventful day, we moved on to the next campsite, that came complete with a pet springbok. As we put the tents up on the site that apparently desert elephants wonder through on a regular basis, a baby meercat appeared and started running round the site. Before we knew it, he'd jumped into one of our tents. Chaos ruled for the next few minutes as he ran in and out of every single tent, suprising more than a few people. Eventually he disappeared into the surrounding bushes. A couple of us decided to take showers (which have chains you hook across the entrance instead of doors). I turned around and staring right back at me was the meercat. After a while, he must have got bored and wondered out. I then heard screaming coming from the block next to me. "Meercat?" I asked... "Yes" was the answer amongst the get out shouts!
We found out that the meercat was in fact one of three baby's owned as pets by the lodge. After that he became the main nights entertainment, following anyone who walked through the bin, being picked up, stroked and thrown out of various tents. Eventually our Paulus (our camp assistant) made a little burrow for him and locked him in it, after the meercat kept jumping into the fire to warm himself. After tea a lot of the staff who worked at the lodge came to sing and dance some traditional african music for us which was a fantastic end to the day.
We started a new day with going to see the famous White Lady painting. In fact the painting is actually of a man (I'll leave it up to your imaginations as to how they worked that out), although he is painted in white. It was a good 40 minute walk to the painting through the stunning scenery surronding the Brandburg mountain. We headed for lunch on the skeleton coast. I had thought it was called the skeleton coast because of the number of shipwrecks along it, however, it seems to be for a second, more sinister reason. The whole beach was covered in bones, including complete skulls, and spines and pretty much everything in between. They were apparently from the seal colony up the coast that we went to visit.
We all got very giddy on arrival into Swakopmund. The thought of sleeping in beds and not having to put the tents up and down was too much to take. I have never been so happy about the thought of sleeping in a bed in my life.
