Back in Namibia!

After two overnight flights in a row (Boston to London, then to Johannesburg) we meet Berv, our guide for our Southern Africa tour in 2022. He happened to be in the airport at the same time so we contacted him and arranged to meet him for the few minutes our paths crossed. We like Berv a lot and it was a special treat to see him in person again 3 years (almost to the day) later.

After a last 2 hour local flight, we landed in Namibia where we stood in line for over an hour to get through immigration. Borders are bad enough, serving only to separate people from The Other Who Must Be Feared, but Namibia recently implemented visas for everyone and they did not have the kinks worked out of the new system. The immigration officers had to manually enter much of our online information into the old system taking an enormous amount of time to process a medium size planeload. 

Once we got through, we meet our driver for the 20 minute drive to Voigtland, a 120-year-old farm that has been converted to a very nice 5 room B&B. After a short nap, we sat down to a delicious dinner which included an oryx carpaccio appetizer followed by eland steak accompanied by potatoes and a very nice vegetable medley. 

This morning we woke up and joined Gustav the giraffe for breakfast on the deck. Like many Namibia farms, Voigtland covers many square miles and has many wild animals like oryx and eland. Some of the giraffes have been tamed by feeding, so all the guests (a bunch of Germans and us) took turns feeding Gustav. 

Our guide Abel, who was our guide here in 2022, showed up at 9 for the 5 hour drive to Etosha National Park. Abel was such an excellent guide last time and has such a nice personality that we requested him for this trip. The ride was long but fun as we got caught up on the past three years and very quickly he got back into teasing Maria for the quirks that you all know about. After checking into our room, we took our first game drive, which, because of the late hour was only going to be about 45 minutes.  Within 5 minutes we found a young lion. We sat and watched him until it was time to leave. 

Back at the lodge they have a water hole near our room where we saw our first wild rhinos! We have seen rhinos in sanctuaries but this was the first time we had seen wild, free-roaming rhinoceroses.

It’s really hot here, over 100°F and so dry that Maria had a bloody nose for the first since I’ve known her.

Dinner and bed now, early start tomorrow!