Drive she said

6:30 am always seems to come really early. My hips ache, my nose is cold and I don't want to get up but we have to hit the road by 7:30 so I have no choice. We are driving 600 km today to make our next camp. Cereal, tea and some sort of banana flavour instant oats that look like pudding for breakfast (I decided not to try this). After loading up we were off almost on time.

Team Leopard has the day off today.

We saw baboons, 3 types of antelope (no horns, curly horns, straight horns), zebras, ostrich. We stopped for a bathroom break in the middle of a long stretch of highway - boys in front, girls in back. There weren't even any bushes - Africa doesn't really have what you might think of as a rest stop.

Driving and driving, hot and dry, tall yellow grass that grows in small patches but when you look across the horizon it fills in and looks like a solid field of tall soft grass that reaches all the way to the mountains. More antelope and ostrich - we make lots of stops for photos.

Lunch was at the side of the road near a huge tree that was almost overtaken with a huge nest built by Social Weaver birds. The nests can also house love birds and pygmy falcons.

We stopped in Bethanie to buy biltong which is dried meat like jerky. I bought some made with Oryx. A bit chewy and spicy but pretty good all in all.

Our next stop is Sesriem Canyon. Sesreim means 6 ox leather thongs which indicated how long a drop it was to lower a bucket into the canyon to draw out water. Its not very deep and we hiked to the bottom to look around. It's very dry right now and, like hiking in the Indian Himalayas, its all river rock cemented in sediment. I saw a Shiva rock but it was stuck and it was really too big for me to lug all over Africa.


We headed back to camp and set up the tents. I hit the showers. It was only a dribble but the water was hot so it was one of my best showers so far! We've hit the dry dusty desert and it was nice to wash away the day. Tomorrow's wake up is the insane hour of 4:30 am!! We have to get up early to race to Dune 45 to climb to the top in time to see the sun rise.

I could hear the jackals again in the distance. You can't leave anything outside your tent at night or they will steal it (Tony says they think they can eat it). Some people went to the bar for a drink but there's no way I'm staying up if I have to get up that early so I go to bed at 9pm. I've now started to put a Nalgene filled with hot water in the bottom of my sleeping bag to help keep me warm at night.