To get to Etosha Pan on the route that we chose, you have to pass through Outijo. This place is remarkable for its German pastries. A local Afrikaans family make the most sublime pastries. Pastries and cattle country….it is an obvious connection!

The Pan dominates this National Park. Not like a mountain dominates a landscape and draws your eye, but just by being there. Its sheer size forces you to acknowledge that it is there, even if you can't see it. But wherever you are, you feel it. Weird by true.

The Pan is as big as Belgium and it is covered in a foot of water! I have never seen pelicans happily floating on its surface; nor a heron making a kill. Hell, I was even sure that there were fish here! The Pan is baked stiff for most of the year!

The rest camp names are evocative of times of old. Okaukuejo with its central tower, Halali with its two hills and Namutonibased in the old German Fort from ages ago. But best of all is the floodlit watering holes at each camp….and the swimming pools! Lunch and a swim in 35 degree heat. Magic! Any vantage point is beset with people when the sun goes down. Here the sun sets and rises with remarkable clarity! A beer in hand helps too!

With rest camp gates closed, and the sounds of the bush floating through the fence, the floodlit watering hole is the nightly focus. All eyes follow whatever comes down to drink. Here is the real life version of those National Geographic documentaries……the skittish thirsty giraffe, the ever hopeful prowling jackals and hopefully a lion or two. An elephant never goes amiss either. But we struck the jackpot gold of 5 black rhinos in two family groups. Awesome! Spectacular…..but a pity that the tripod was in the white bomber and I was not moving for hell or high water!

Early mornings were spent looking for those noisy lions….have they no consideration for our sleep. The camps' wandering jackals had long since lost their novelty and their behaviour was nothing short of ordacious! We left Etosha having seen two males and a female make their way alongside the Pan, looking for all the world like the regal cats they are. Less fortunate was the leopard caught out on the plain by a herd of wildebeest. When you are a proverbial fish out of water, the numbers will always win out here! Even the a pair of jackals got in the act. No doubt proud of the fact that they had seen a LEOPARD off!