Etosha National Park
The next day we had to wake up at 5.30, yes again, this later became sort of a tradition – wake up at 6 latest, pack and go. If you are late, you miss breakfast and eat directly for lunch or eat whatever snacks you have. Luckily, we stopped often at small towns at the supermarket and would stock up on some snacks and readings. At some point, I found a great magazine called “What if, the book of alternative history”. I loved it not so much for the what-would’ve-happened part, but mostly for the actual facts part because I got to learn a lot of things by reading it, or refresh my memory on things I already knew.
We went to Etosha National Park, where we had an awesome 2 days of wildlife experiences. Driving around the park during the day and enjoying the Okaukuejo waterhole animals at night. There is a Livestream on Youtube that is always on, of the Okaukuejo water hole, check it out! It’s SUPER COOL! On our first night, we were freezing, but while the guys were preparing the dinner, we got to go and see the sunset over the waterhole and let me tell you – it was STUNNING. And what was the best part – all the animals that started coming at dawn.. During the day we saw four elephants there and numerous zebras (Kennedy even exclaimed “Only four?” which I didn’t really get back then exactly why he was so surprised, but wait and I’ll tell you why as you may already guess..).
By daylight, we got to not only observe beautiful elephants taking a dip in the water and birds swimming and flying around and zebras, but we also got to try and figure out whether something we saw running around was a coyote or a dog because a dog being there didn’t make much sense, but it definitely looked like a German Shepherd and it really was. We later learned that these are the dogs that rangers use when they are driving around the park to protect the animals from poachers. Quite nice I’d say.
After sunset, giraffes started coming towards us from the far distance and we had a lot of fun observing how 4-5 long stick-looking figures grew bigger and bigger and it was super fun to see them crouch in order to reach the water and they had to crouch in a few steps like crouch a little bit, see if they reach the water – if they didn’t, repeat the process until they do haha :D, a coyote also roamed around and scared some of the birds, it hunts them so they were, naturally, running away from it. There was also a young giraffe and a herd of zebras came along too. At some point, it became pitch dark and even colder and Fill was done waiting and headed back to the camp. I, however, wanted to stay a bit more even though I didn’t spray my legs for mosquitos and I was also freezing, but despite the temperatures mosquitos were present..
Anyway, I waited not more than 10 min after he left and suddenly I see an elephant coming, after that another one and another one until they were 4, one of which was a baby. The area around the lake is basically sand and then a small fence pointed towards the animals, then some grass, and then the not-very-tall stone wall which essentially separated people from wildlife. People were sitting on benches in a semi-circle around the whole lake basically and were chatting and watching. But as soon as the first elephants were spotted, everything went so quiet, you could hear the dead silence, under the artificial yellow light we could only see out part of the lake, the distant part of the lake was very faintly lit and we could see both sides of the lake and that’s about it. So when the first elephants arrived I didn’t think much of it, BUT soon after, not more than 5-10 min later there was a flood of ALMOST FOURTY (yep, 40!)
elephants by my count. Both big and small. Babies of different sizes and they all came to drink. One of the adults tried reaching out to the grass between us and the fence and reached out with the trunk right in front of me. She was literally half a meter away from my face.. okay, maybe 1m, but SO CLOSE, I was so excited, I wanted to scream 😀
But did my best NOT to do it and just to film. I frantically also called Fill on the phone and messenger but he didn’t pick up and there was no way I’d leave with this spectacle before my eyes. At some point, my excitement cooled down a bit and I just observed without taking photos or anything, just to absorb this moment into my memory and I picture it right now, as I write this. Unforgettable experience. After maybe 20 min or half an hour, the elephants left and I wanted to wait a bit more for the rhinos to show up as Kennedy said around 21:30 they show up usually but i was so freezing that I had to leave and try my luck the next day.
The nights, however, were REALLY cold, we were freezing, I thought I wouldn’t need my sweater at all, but ended up putting on two of them in the end, and never, not even one day, did I go with shorts, even though during the day it was very hot, in the morning, when we’d normally leave, it was still freaking freezing and I rode in the car fully clothed with two layers of thick clothes and a t-shirt and a blanket on top and was still freezing and it wasn’t until 10-11 AM when we started opening the window and finally letting some warm air in and removing some of our layers of clothes. But our “suffering” was rewarded with the sightings of giraffes, oryxes, BLACK RHINO with its baby and several more rhinos and ostriches, zebras and numerous different species of antelopes and many, many birds! After a while it became quite a normal sighting so instead of doing more zoomed-in photos of the animals I started photographing the animals “in their habitat” kind of photos – trying to capture more of the background, the hills and mountains, the colours of the locations with the animals inside, like the desert or a single tree in the vast nothingness and show how tiny the large giraffes or ostriches were in the foreground of the vastness of the deserts. We even saw a honey badger! This is probably the most vicious and brave animal on Earth, attacks anything from hyenas, to lions, eats snakes and scorpions and pretty much whatever it can get its paws on. Super interesting and I didn’t know all this until we saw it and I heard the excitement of Shelley and Peter.
