Dekaro in Southern Africa: Namibia with Pierre and Frank

Hi guys (and especially Testronic friends!) I’m in Namibia with Pierre and Frank. We’re in a strange little town called Swakopmund, German in name and in practice, set between the desert and the sea, where you can try all kinds of extreme sports.
We chose quad biking in the desert, probably because for a couple of months we tested a video game called Pure, where you had to ride quads. It’s incredibly fun, sorry for overusing that term, but it really was fantastic, also because we went through spectacular landscapes. Sometimes, from the dunes, you could even see the sea.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t take many photos because we only stopped a couple of times. Anyway, let’s go in order...

It’s hard to sum up these past few days because they’ve been very intense. I met up in Windhoek on the 17th with two friends I used to work with in Warsaw: Pierre (French) and Frank (German). Since our work team was made up of an Italian, a Frenchman, a German, and a Spaniard, out of professional habit we added a Spaniard, Pablo, to the group.
We rented a 4x4 Nissan with two rooftop tents, and it’s incredibly convenient: total freedom. The tents go up in about three minutes; you just pull them out from one side and they open like an accordion.

The landscape changes a lot, and the roads come in all kinds: some are paved and in excellent condition, others less so. Then there are stretches where you need four-wheel drive, and also some real hardcore off-road sections, like the one that runs along the river marking the border with Angola, where at a certain point we had to give up and turn back.

Another thing that stands out is that the roads are almost always deserted: you can drive for dozens of kilometers without seeing another car. Only in towns do you see more traffic, and maybe bump into one of them! By the way, it wasn’t my fault: even the police agreed with me because the guy I hit didn’t have working headlights. Basically, all of a sudden I found this van completely stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason... I braked and swerved to the right to avoid it, but there wasn’t enough time and baaaam! The van wasn’t damaged at all —or rather, it was already so beaten up that it was impossible to tell if we added anything— but our car took a bit of a hit: the fender got dented and the headlight was pushed in. This happened in Opuwo.

As our first stop, we headed north to Etosha National Park, which, together with Kruger, is the most famous park in southern Africa. We explored it back and forth in our 4x4 for two days. There were an insane number of giraffes, plus a lot of other animals. On the last day, we even spotted two lions.
Then we continued even further north, practically up to the border with Angola, all the way to the Epupa Falls. We slept right next to the river, about thirty meters from the waterfall.
That whole area is inhabited by the Himba, a people who cover their skin with red ochre. The women have distinctive braided hairstyles, which vary depending on whether they are married, eligible, or children, etc. They also traditionally go topless.

Afterwards, we headed south along the Skeleton Coast, a desert region that borders the ocean. We saw a colony of thousands of seals, with a huge number of pups about a month to a month and a half old. They were all very noisy, and the whole area smelled pretty bad. In general, the adults were lounging on the rocks while the pups were swimming and playing in the sea. Now we are in Swakopmund.

The 22-hour bus ride wasn’t too dramatic. The bus was large and spacious, and there were hardly any people on it. The hostess, Janet, somehow took a liking to me and kept coming over to joke around. Then, during the night, she came and sat next to me, showed me a lot of funny videos and photos on her phone, and then we fell asleep. The next morning I was in Windhoek.

Petrol station

Etosha National Park

When I was almost losing hope, we spotted two lions. They were under a tree, far away. Then they got up, and we followed them from the road, and at a certain point they crossed right in front of us!