Sunday afternoon in Namibia

In other news, the rainy season is still going strong here in Namibia. This means it is sunny and fine during the morning, and thunderstorms roll into town in the late afternoon or early evening most days. Windhoek is now completely green and flowers are blooming all over town, as are the surrounding hills. It is beautiful here. However up north it is a national disaster with the flooding, and they are worrying that some of the damns are getting too full and might overflow or have to be discharged.

On Sunday, we went on a day trip to a game lodge called Auas Game Lodge, which is a common activity for people in Windhoek who have the resources (like the other families at the international school). The lodge we went to is 23 K south on a paved road, and 23 K east on a bumpy gravel/dirt road that included numerous small stream crossings, with mangy baboons and herds of cattle on the road. You drive for about a half hour without seeing a house or a person, then, in the middle of nowhere, is this lovely lodge with a pool. We splurged for a fancy lunch under the lapa (thatched roof), about $40 for all 5 of us with coffee & dessert, and then went on a hike. This lodge has a large pen, about the size of a US football field, with two rehabilitated leopards in it. We only saw the male leopard, but it was beautiful – just hanging out in a tree. They also had a crocodile. A lot of the trail was washed out from the rains, so we had to hike through “quicksand” for a while, which the kids loved. There were wildflowers all over this walk, and many pretty birds. We also saw lots of porcupine burrows, but didn’t see any porcupines. There were also wildebeest and springbok hanging around, which we have seen so much now that I almost forgot to mention them. We left just in time from this resort. We made it back to the paved road just as it started raining. If we were still on the dirt road, we would certainly have been stuck. Just during our drive home, it rained about a centimeter, and also hailed. Our clothes that we had left on the line were soaked, but by the time we made it home the rain had stopped.