Its been a week since my last blog entry and prob one of the best weeks of the trip so far, now in Namibia which is probably my favourite country so far.

I went on a scenic flight over the Okavango delta in Western Botswana which was something else. Having just spent 3 days in the delta with fairly little evidence of animals apart from the odd dropping or two, to see the sheer number of elephants and hippos from the air was incredible, literally thousands. My friend has a photo and in it we counted 70 elephants just in the shot!! To see the size of hippos out of the water as well was quite scary considering the few days before we were just a few metres away from them.

The next day we travelled to near the border with Namibia to a place called the Tsolido hills where there were rock paintings from thousands of years ago of ancient animals and the local wildlife.

A few long drive days followed where we travelled across the northern part of Namibia parallel to the border with Angola, stopping at a few towns along the way and drinking round the camp fire in the evenings.

We then arrived at an awesome national park called Etosha. Given the time of year and the conditions it was expected that the wildlife would be rather sparse and hard to spot but i must have seen over 100 giraffes in the few game drives we did as well as 2 packs of enormous lions and lionesses, a black Rhino, Hyenas, wilderbeast and gazelles. Funnily enough my favourite animal was probably the Mongooses (or Mongeese or Mongi!!) that ran in front of us, such strange looking creatures. At night i sat in the pouring rain at a watering hole for around an hour and didn't see a single animal only to discover on my way back to return the empty glasses to the bar, 3 Honey badgers ransacking the rubbish bins where we had earlier discarded the bones from the game meat we had eaten for dinner that evening. They are sort of a cross between a badger and a seal and skunk, the guidebook saying they are one of only 4 animals that a lion won't eat because when they attack they slash at the genitals to mame there attackers, so you can imagine we were keeping our distance and our privates covered!!

After Etosha we went to a private cheetah park run by 3 Namibian brothers and there family. They had a set of 3 domesticated chettahs that we were allowed to pet and stroke and have a bit of a laugh with, before going on to a reserve in there back garden to see 20 less tame cats being fed donkey meat, which they seemed to enjoy. It started raining and being in the middle of now where there wasn't much to do except drink in the bar so that was that evenings entertainment sorted. The 3 brothers were quite butch guys who liked a laugh and showing off to everyone with party tricks, but i managed to beat them at pool and even managed to pull off one of there party tricks that was more about flexibility than brute strength. There was a 5.30 am start the next day so a few of us decided we might as well pull an all nighter so we managed to stagger to breakfast the next morning beer in hand to get ready to depart with out spending the night in a wet tent.

After a bit of fun and games on the truck and a bit of a sleep to recover, the scenery drammatically changed in to desert land and suddenly the bushes and greenery disappeared into barren sand like no where else i have been before, kinda like what you expect Mars to look like.

We stopped at a place called Spitzkoppe, which is described as the Matterhorn of Africa. This small mountain rising up in the middle of nowhere, very rocky and beautiful. Me, My tent buddy Jono and a lad called Matt went for a climb initially meant to be to the top but soon relising we wouldn't get all the way up. Proper scrambling up these enormous rocks with sheer ledges below, kinda scary but fun at the same time. Jono being the youngest of the 3 of us was running a head a bit and at one point we hear the words " S***, S*** what do i do its rearing up at me, do i run or stay still." Well i get round the corner to find out that a 2 metre Cobra had been starring at him and rearing up hissing a couple of feet away, which was a good picture, but made us a bit more sceptical of the crevices and holes in the rocks from that point on.

Got up early the next morning to watch the sunrise, but rather than watching the actual sun come up it was incredible to watch the sunlight change the colours of the rocks from red to orange to yellow and a thousand shades in between before going on another short climb a different way up the mountain.

Later that day we drove to Swakopmund on the coast again through beatiful barren desert landscapes. Spent 2 days in town now just chilling in a town that is really german for some reason, a bit more affluent than any where we have been so far on this trip and white people actually outnumber the black people which is the first time on this trip. Me and a lad called big Al did a walk this morning out of town to the sand dunes which again was a call walk for amazing scenery.

I written quite a lot now and if you've made it this far your probably bored so i'll stop writing now!

Hope all is well back home, enjoy what ever you are doing and give me updates so i can see what everyone is up to

Tommy