Southern Zimbabwe, Botswana and Northern Namibia are flat and typically straight roads leading to the horizon. The sides of the roads are bush and every bend has a sign to say that there is a bend. A slight rise in the road is met with great exitement if you are not reading.
Namibia is mostly desert so I looked for the signs of the change in the vegetation. Palm trees and more arid plant started to appear - the desert is near.
Things here are not quite the same - made apparent when we stopped off to go shopping. Spotting a couple of locals to have a chat with was a real eye opener, "what is your name": Answer - something click something click other type of click followed by a click! His name consisted of four clicks but it was almost impossible to reproduce.
The typical looking spar supermarket looked like any other in Africa - again things where not the same. Two Himba tribe people where doing their shopping - so what is the big deal - have a look at them in google. They pretty much looked the same, topless with the red paste in their hair and on their bodies. We saw the Himba a couple of times in Namibia but in rural areas not in the supermarket!
We were heading to Etosha National Park and the promise of the best camp yet. On the way we visited the pan to see nothing except the curvature of the earth (it is like a salt pan).We were all told to on best behaviour at the camp and to be quiet in the early hours (lots of aging tourists there). It was that night that one of our group had a big argument with someone and everyone else got pretty drunk and noisy. Luckily a water hole and possibility of seeing wildlife kept us away from the bar. We saw nothing at the watering hole, there was more wildlife around the tent, some Jackals were up to mischief. That night they decided to nick one of my shoes and kept me awake as they tried to get food out of the bins.
The watering holes the next day were packed with zebra and wilderbeasts. Occasionaly the zebras got spooked, giving me great pictures of water and zebras flying around. Saw a big monitor lizard and it was happy for me to get really close. Some ground squirrels, bird nests 8ft across kept me ocupied with the camera (taken 1800 pictures up to now).