It’s only been 1 day since my last post, but there’s semi-fast Internet everywhere around town so I thought I’d give another update. Swakopmund is a very bizarre town. It is super touristy and also very German. Everyone in town speaks German and all of the stores and houses look fake (like I’m on a movie set or something). It is very un-African like, and it also happens to be the town that Brad Pitt and Angelina came to to have their baby (so prices have increased alot since it has been in the press so much).

Yesterday, Clare and I wandered around town and checked everything out. There wasn’t much to see. People only come here to do adreneline activities. We ate dinner at the Atlantic Bistro with Avril and Alec (Avril’s brother who joined us in Vic Falls). It’s really nice to have a break from the group and do what you want to do when you want to do it.

This morning, most of our group went sandboarding in the dunes near town. It was awesome! The company we went with was very professional and they give you actual snowboards (with slightly different bottoms) and snowboard boots. It’s a lot like snowboarding, but when you fall it doesn’t hurt. (Thanks to the nice soft sand.) I really loved it, and was able to remember most of my snowboarding skills. (I still fell down a ton, but that was part of the fun.) The worst bit was actually walking up the dune. It was a moving dune, so the sand blows around a lot and is very soft. Try walking up a soft mountain of sand in huge snowboarding boots, it’s a real challenge. I made it up and down about 6 or 7 times, but I was exhausted by the end. We were all coated in sand and made a huge mess in the hostel’s bathroom. But it was great fun!

(Don’t worry Mom, I’m not going to do paragliding. The guy running it isn’t licensed to do tandem flights, and I’m not to keen to go flying off of a dune by myself. So I had to give it a pass.)

The cheetah sanctuary was very cool. It was started because a lot of farmers in the area had been shotting cheetahs, so a family decided to save them. They have about 30+ cheetahs there and 3 of them are domesticated and live in their front yard. (It was a bit freaky walking up the house with cheetahs running around.) We started our tour of the place by going to the house and hanging out with the 3 cheetahs there. We got to pet them and get pretty close to them. Then we watched the guy feed them pieces of a donkey, which was a bit disgusting. (The family had 3 little dogs that sat watching the cheetahs eat. 1 of them was very brave or stupid and decided to bark at the cats and try to steal their food. Luckily, he only annoyed the cheetahs and he didn’t become the dessert!)

After our visit with the domestic cheetahs it was time to see the “wild” cats. (The guy has them fenced in on his farm, so they of course aren’t really wild.) We drove around the area in the back of the a pickup truck. Luckily, we had brought more donkey meat with us, so we didn’t become dinner. It was a pretty cool expereince!

We had some nice kebabs for dinner, then most people headed to the bar. I decided to stay at the campsite and get to bed early. At one point I was there all by myself. (Our tent was about 3 feet away from the fence of the cheetah territory, so it was a bit freaky.) I decide to walk up to the showers, and was shining my flashlight around to see when I noticed that a cheetah was sitting right in the corner of the fenced in area, about 15 feet away from me. All of a sudden something ran towards me, right from the same area that the cheetah had been sitting in. Of course I screamed bloody murder and started to run away. That’s when the mysterious animal started barking. It turned out that my “cheetah attacker” was actually a tiny dog. It seems the dog wanted to play a Halloween trick on me. (It took about an hour before my heart rate returned to normal.)

The next day we were all set to bush camp in the Namibian desert. (Bush camping is just stopping the truck in some remote spot and just setting up the tents. No bathrooms etc.) We stopped in a really beautiful place and got the tents and tarp set up. (It looked like it was going to rain.) That’s when our bad luck caught up to us. The driver side window of the truck just shattered for no aparent reason. Then the truck got stuck in the deep sand of the desert. The last straw was the crazy bees. (We were camped in a place that hasn’t had a drop of rain for over 8 months, so the bees were obsessed with the water tanks.) There must have been at least 200+ bees trying to find a way to get to our water. We set out some honey and sweet things to lurer them away from the truck, but they only wanted the water. (One of the girls on my trip is allergic to them, so she was really freaking out.)

After about 2 hours of trying to get rid of the bees, Matt and Katherine (our leaders) decided that we would have to leave and sleep somewhere else. So we packed up all of our stuff (again, 2 times in 1 day! Augh!). We were super lucky though and ended up staying at a really nice place, in a little duplex type thing. We had 2 kitchens 4 bathrooms and 6 bedrooms for the 12 of us. Talk about luxury! I was on cooking duty and we decide to be alittle too ambitious, since we had ovens. Nicola, Ruth, and me ended up cooking for 3 ½ hours and basically made enough food to feed an army.

Today, we went to Cape Cross Seal Colony and saw a bunch of seals in the wild. It was pretty cool, but extremely smelly. Now we are in Swakomund and we will be staying here for 3 nights. (I’ll be doing some sandboarding and paragliding. Paragliding is basically jumping off of a big sanddune with a parachute on your back and then floating around of the thermals. I’m really pumped!)

See you all (in MN) in 2 weeks.

Happy Halloween! I’m now in my 9^th African country, Namibia. So far everything seems very nice here. It has a really low population density, so when we drive we hardly ever see people or even villages. It is quite a Westernized country, and Germans were the ones who settled here. So everything is run very orderly and exactly (completely different from the rest of Africa). The first night in Namibia, we stayed in a little municipal park. I literally felt like I was back in Minnesota at a little neighborhood park (like Countryside our something). It was a perfect lawn, with sprinklers, swings, slides, and a little bathroom building that looked so American. We were all in culture shock! Our first big site was Etosha National Park. We stayed in 2 different campsites that were both converted German military forts. Their best feature was the floodlit watering hole, where you could sit and watch the animals all night. (We ended up seeing some black rhino, genet, zebras, jackals etc.) It was very peaceful and serene sitting there and relaxing with the animals.

Etosha is a very dry park with big saltpans in the middle of it, so most of the animals sit at the watering holes. We did a bunch of game drives and saw some great things. We had to black rhinos walk right in front of our truck. Then later on that drive we saw a huge herd of elephants with their babies splashing around at a water hole. The next day we saw a big pack of 9 lions. Then within an hour 3 cheetahs came up right by the truck. It was great! (But sadly this was our last game drive of the trip.)

The final night there it seemed like it was going to rain, so we got to eat dinner in the fancy restraunt. It was a buffet, so I got to try another kind of game meat: Gembuck (sp?). (Gembuck is a big antelope thing with super long pointy horns. They are very beautiful, so I felt kind of bad eating it. But it was quite yummy!)

Tonight we are staying at a cheetah sanctuary, so I get to pet and walk with the cheetahs. (Yeah!) Then tomorrow we set off for the desert.