Namibian wildlife

Whilst the West side of our trip centred around our interactions with people, the East side will have a larger focus on wildlife.

Namibia had much to offer us in terms of its wildlife with our visit to the Cape Fur Seal colony at Cape Cross, the Cheetah Park, and Etosha Game Reserve.

You could smell the Cape Cross seals from a kilometre away and the smell got more pungent the closer we came. With numbers fluctuating between 80,000 and 100,000, it’s not hard to see why there was hardly an inch of free space on the beach. Seals covered the large expanse of sand and were also frolicking in the water.

Most of them were just soaking up the sun,

some with their heads comically upside-down

but all would quickly snap out of it and strongly defend the small bit of beach they occupied, if any other tried to take its spot.

On the way to Etosha, we stopped in at a Cheetah Park where the cheetahs had been domesticated after they were caught as pests (eating livestock) on a farm. Three of the cheetahs lived in the house (harmoniously with a dog)

and the others roamed freely in a large fenced off area behind the house.

Clearly they were comfortable in their surroundings as one of them took a brief nap on a tractor.

All of us took turns in patting the cheetah making it purr loudly,

and some of the men in our group were licked by one. They weren’t at all interested in licking any of the women for whatever reason, much to our dismay. Animals generally seem to take a liking to Shaun so it’s not surprising that one cheetah started playing with him and accidentally scratched his leg, drawing blood in the process. Another was licking Ron’s arm, opting for the part where he had a fresh wound. And yet another was licking Tom’s ear and shoulder.

Perhaps in response to this, the owners brought out some fresh meat for them to eat instead!

We also watched the feeding of the cheetahs in the fenced off area. They followed us as we drove through the area, and were drooling and making excited cat-like calls as they eagerly awaited ‘catching’ their hunk of meat for the day.

Last photo courtesy of Dom

But perhaps our most incredible experience with Namibian wildlife was in Etosha. We were only there for one day but amongst other things we saw a watering hole with a mix of zebra, ostrich, springbok and oryx (gemsbok),

banded mongoose that have a burrow in the middle of the road!,

black-backed jackal,

a tawny eagle,

a zebra with a large chunk missing from its behind,

a tower of giraffe with two of the young ones necking

and the very bare Etosha pan where we set up a series of perspective shots.

At night, we walked up to the Moringa watering hole by our campsite and were excited to have come across a black rhino drinking, lit up sporadically by the automated flood lights.

All you could hear was whispering and the intermittent clicks of camera shutters. After a while, another black rhino appeared and the two of them grunted in a kind of aggressive acknowledgment of the other’s presence.

After the second rhino had a drink, it approached the first and they began to fight, locking horns with each other.

Every now and then they appeared to tire of the fight and would both sit down opposite each other, rest, and then resume their fight again in a few minutes. The funniest part for me was when they both farted in sync with each other and their tails flipped up and down with the large volume of air that rushed out! And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, a third black rhino appeared on the scene and got into a fight with one of the other two!

After breaking for dinner, the rhinos had moved on, but instead we came across a huge herd of elephant.

You could hear the slurping and dripping of water as the elephants brought their trunks up to their mouths and drunk their fill. A few of the guys on our truck stayed up all night on animal watch at the watering hole but no other animals came and to be fair it would have been hard to beat three black rhinos fighting!