Etosha National Park

Hello Everyone!

Our last few days of the trip from Thursday to Saturday were spent at Etosha National Park, which is an animal reservation north of Windhoek by about 3 to 6 hours, depending on how fast you drive.  Etosha was created before independence, but there were San people living in the area before hand.  When speaking to people on the trip we learned that there is a court case now because the San people want their land back. 

Within the park, there are three main camps that you can stay at and a few roads to drive around on.  Anyone is able to enter the park and go on a game drive, where you drive along the road and along the watering holes to see animals.  According to our guides, Passat and Nespect, who have taken a number of trips in the park, we were a very lucky group.  We got to see about every animal, except maybe a cheetah, which is very rare. 

It was very surreal and unbelievable that we were in this park, where there were herds of hundreds of Zebra and we were so easily seeing a pride of lions and hundreds of ginnea fowels.  Even more surreal was our camp site.  We camped in a park where about 300 feet walk from our camp site you could walk to a man made watering hole that was open to the park, and around the watering hole was benches, where we could sit in silence and watch animals as they would come to the watering hole.  We spent a lot of time here watching for animals to come to see what would come and what would happen.  It was amazing how time just seemed to pass so easily sitting there.  We saw so many animals right there including elephants, rhinos, giraffe, zebras, kudu, ginnea fowel, oryx, and many more.  We got to see the animals interact and what not aswell.  My favorite was one night we saw about twenty elephants at once at the watering hole.

Another favorite part of the trip was cooking on the braai.  We had really good meat and vegetables and it was great to spend this last bit of our trip together.

Thanks for reading, Angela