Well week 1 of the trip is over, and it’s been an amazing week at that. I’m definitely very lucky with my group – we’re all pretty close after such a short time and have had some real days and nights to remember!

We started off going north from Cape Town, spending out first night in a beautiful camp site/barn attached to a house owned by a lovely English couple who hosted a wine tasting from the Winelands of this area – Birdlands if you can find it. We sampled 6 wines – 2 whites, 2 reds, one rose, one pink champagne – before the whole event degenerated into something of an afternoon drinking session with the wine left over (there was a lot of it), the vineyard reps (who were worse than we were) and Eddie our tour leader – who showed his true colours, which seem to point towards a great trip! Up early the next morning, with surprisingly clear heads, and it was up towards the Namibian border and a stunning campsite on the banks of Orange River. It was so beautiful, swimming at sunset and having a rather bizarre game of water-polo-rugby with another truck (we won by a huge margin – thanks to the Aussies I think), complimented by another big night at the best bar in the world – also overlooking the river. The following day we had a leisurely morning and then continued up into Namibia.

Since then we’ve visited Fish River Canyon, the world’s 2nd biggest (after Grand Canyon), where we walked around part of the rim and saw our first poisonous snake (tiny, but still pretty nasty!) before enjoying sundowners – mostly consisting of Birdlands wine! We’ve spent a bit of time in the Namib Desert, which is incredible – huge red sand dunes, sparse acacia trees, oryx, springbok, baboons in campsites, ostriches and jackals. We climbed up Dune 45 for a spectacular sunset and also fit in a few slightly more adrenalin-filled activities – sky diving over the desert (I’m TOTALLY hooked!) and quad biking in the dune fields, both absolutely awesome – no other word for it.

Swakopmund has been a bit of civilization for us, plus a few parties here and there for birthdays (and just because) – it’s also where we’ve done the sky diving and quad biking. Other than that, it’s just been pretty nice to sit in beachfront cafes, go swimming in the sea a lot and sleep in comfy beds – a quick catch-up before heading back out into the bush!

Yesterday night was our first taste of proper bush camping (i.e. no loos or showers or anything like that) in a place called Spitzkoppe, which is famed for its huge rock formations and rock paintings that are up to 6,000 years old – pretty impressive. It’s a truly magical place – you could sit up on the rocks and stare out across the plains forever, I certainly spent a bloody long time up there from mid-afternoon to well after sundown just watching the changing colours of land and sky. There was also a huge thunderstorm that night, which was amazing – the lightning lit up the rocks yellow so that the trees were silhouetted against them, we were all snuggled up on the truck having supper before worrying about the dash to our tents (luckily it stopped raining by then) and it felt a little Jurassic Park! This morning I woke to watch sunrise through the window of my tent (contact-lens-less – I recommend it for trippy viewing!), the sky changing colour through pinks, yellows and greens and into the pure blue characteristic of Africa skies; and changing the colours of and shadows on the rocks as the sun rose. That afternoon, evening, and morning will stay with me for a long time.

We’re back in Swakop at the moment, an impromptu return due to truck probs, but I’ve developed into such a Zen master that a tiny thing like that simply can’t bother me! We leave here early tomorrow morning to carry on crossing Namibia, so the next place for an installment will be Botswana in a week or so.