day 2: etosha national park (namibia)

Jennifer and I began our day at the Halali watering hole which is located in shrubland dominated by mopane trees. There was not much to be seen at the watering hole, so we quickly moved on to taking down camp and driving towards the Etosha Pan to step into a world beyond.

The crackled and salty surface of the pan stretched to the horizon where heat waves separated the surface of land from sky. We dug with our fingers into the hardened surface of the pan to find moist clay below which we shaped into a dice and baked under the windshield over the next ten days.

From the pan, we drove to a few different watering holes, seeing many giraffe up close. The giraffe were larger than life and seemed most closely related to diplodachus from The Land Before Time movie rather than any animal we know.

Other interesting sightings included black-faced impala and kudu moving under the mopane trees to keep cool while eating fresh green grass that was shooting up after a recent summer rain.

The day ended with a beautiful sunset that we watched from a fort tower in the Namutoni rest camp. After dark, we watched a few hyenas (or hy-henas, as Bill Petoskey says) walk around the watering hole under a full moon. Our awesome new binoculars were able to give us a sort of low-light night vision that made viewing possible.

Halali watering hole around 7 am.

View over the park from a hill near Halali rest camp.

I threw a rock down this hole and immediately heard a bunch of bats begin flying around and squeaking at me. They were not happy, but luckily they stayed inside.

A beautiful plains wildebeest.

Our first sighting of a white rhino!  White rhinos are larger than black rhinos and have an extra fold of skin under their arms.  They are very big animals.

Turn and face.  These guys want to make sure you know that they know that you are there.

Rhino rears.

Yes, this was our third rhino spotting of the day.  Sorry we can't hand over binoculars, but if you zoom way in you can see a large brown-gray lump in the middle of the picture.  It is resting in the shade of the tree.

The bakkie (Afrikaans for pickup) and the sky.

We finally figured out the 10 second timer.

Finding clay under the cracked surface.

A young kudu.  Notice the vertical white stripes on the side of the body.

Hello!

We hung out with this guy for a while. All pictures taken out the car window.

An ephemeral summer flower.

We caught this giraffe leaning over to drink.  They have to spread out their front legs to reach the ground.

Jennifer was quite close to this aptly-named black faced impala.

You can really see how tall these guys are in the next two pictures--this one was an average adult height--we saw two others that were a fair amount taller, but we couldn't get this close!

This is a totally different giraffe, but she was munching close to the road and we caught her with her tongue out--its a purple tongue!

Giraffe and a small herd of springbok.

Sunset as viewed from the top of the tower, an odd landmark in the middle of this national park. It was built as a fort by German colonists sometime in the 19th century, and was refurbished and turned into the rest camp facilities sometime in the 1980s.

Full moon rising.

It was hot, even as the sun went down!