Monday, November 06, 2006

Tour de Etosha, Oct. 27 -30, 2006





























































































































































































Friday, it’s the departure day. After the week’s delay, I was happy to finally get going. However, I did feel concerned of the fact that it’s the end of the dry season and beginning of the raining season, when animals quickly leave the waterholes and become difficult to spot. But I knew this was the last chance for me, since I am leaving early April next year, which will still be the raining season. I had to take a chance.

I went with an organized tour through the Chameleon. Arriving at Chameleon early in the morning, I saw some familiar faces, the staff all seemed quite happy to see me – it almost made me feel like a bit ‘home’, although it charged me a 15% fine for my cancellation of last week’s trip, which I hated a lot. Oh well, our group was composed of nine members, including the tour guide and his assistant. Quite conincidentally, this group had a high concentration of British connection. Two couples, one old couple and a young couple, are from England. There is another girl from Finland originally, but is currently living in England. And there is also a guy who is actually from Canada, but has close relatives in England. It seems like only me doesn’t have a close connection. Well, I stopped over in London for 10 hours – it’s a good start, I guess.

Sometimes only when you live in a different place from home, or while you travel, you start to see how many people are doing things you wouldn’t think of as a regular person, who is living a life being lived by everybody around you. For example, in our group, the young British couple have been travelling around the world since last July and plan to return in December this year – seventeen months’ on the way, wow, what a life style. As they said, they didn’t think walking down the street in Bangkok was exotic anymore; in stead, sleeping in on their own bed in the Sunday morning with coffee and newspapers waiting seemed more like that. Similarly, the Canadian guy was in his second month for his planned travel around the world for nine months. That kind of reminded me of the 10-year old Canadian boy whom I met at the Chameleon’s. (By the way, he talks like a 30-year old.) He doesn’t go to regular schools. He has been travelling with his parents ever since he was little and he learns while he travels.

Coming back to our topic, we are going to talk about the Etosha National Park. The word ‘etosha’ means the Great White Place or Place of Emptiness, describing the vast salt pan, which shimmers with mirages in the dry times. The pan is the bottom of a large, shallow inland lake which dried up. It seems that long-term climatic changes were responsible for the pan as we know it today. Evaporation at a rate of approximately 3,000 mm per year caused the lake to disappear quickly. In the process the sandy clay floor became brackish. Once the lake was completely dry, the brittle, brackish soil was more easily eroded by the wind, so that the plan became gradually deeper. During the raining season, water flows in the pan from rivers in the far north. However, the pan seldom fills up completely.

The first Europeans in Etosha were traders and explorers John Andersson and Francis Galton, who arrived by wagon at Namutoni in 1851. But Etosha didn’t attract the interest of tourists or conservationists until after the turn of the 20th century, when the governor of German South-West Africa, Dr F von Lindequist, became concerned over diminishing animal numbers and founded a 99,526-sq-km reserve. In subsequent years, the park boundaries were altered several times, and by 1970 Etosha had been pared down to its present 23,175 sq km. This vast park protects 114 mammal species, 340 bird species, 16 reptiles, amphibians, one fish species and countless insects.

There are three main camp sites in the park and we stayed at one of them for each night: Okaukuejo, Halali and Namutoni. At each camp, there is a waterhole where animals like to congregate. In addition to watching waterholes at the camps, we spent most of our time for game drive in the park in the morning and later afternoon, when animals tend to come our searching for water and food. It was an interesting phenomenon, but we spotted

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