Ride Round The World

(Imagine a photo of 2 big rhino and a baby rhino at a waterhole. Uploading photos out here takes hours and usually fails right at the end)

Today was only meant to be a staging day, with an easy cruise up to within striking distance of Etosha National Park and a simple hotel room to recharge myself and all my gadgets.

Turns out to be a rather nice lodge with a deck overlooking a waterhole. A dip in the pool, a beer, some drone flying with the owners teenage son who is drone mad and shows off his skills, then dinner of roast eland on the deck watching the rhinos, giraffes, and oryx, and that’s a pretty decent way to achieve position for Etosha.

Tomorrow, into the park for 3 nights, where I hope to:

1) not get stuck in sand

2) see some elephants, lions, and so on.

But first, in my room there’s a complimentary mini bottle of Amarula that requires investigation.

Finally! A photo.

Wow. It’s dark! It’s really fu#@!ng dark, and so quickly.

I make sausages wrapped in bacon, and little sweet red peppers stuffed with cheese and also wrapped in bacon, because, hey: bacon, on the camp fire.

I scoff them very quickly with a glass of red, sense of ease reducing as quickly as the light.

I haven’t experienced such total darkness and isolation since Siberia. In Siberia, though there was technically the possibility of bears, it was more likely id meet Vladimir Putin, but out here… well. God knows.

It’s scary in a cheesy horror movie giving you the creeps even though you know its not real kind of way, not in an actual threat kind of way, but it’s still hard to ignore the shiver down your spine when you’re out in the bush like this completely on your own.

The fire burns bright but fast because the wood is so dry, and so as it fades I retreat up the ladder to my roof tent.

The sides of the tent slope up towards the peak, so with the door unzipped then if I lie on my back my head is almost out on the open with an uninterrupted view straight up to the stars.

And my God, what stars!

The tent feels like home, like sanctuary, and so the psychological chills vanish to be replaced by awe at these surroundings.

It’s so completely dark with no artificial light around for tens of miles that the sky is thick with stars. The milky way looks like a painting and I can easily see the fast moving pinpricks of light that are satellites in orbit.

I’ll probably be watching this mesmerising, beautiful sky until I fall asleep. Complete tranquillity. Just a few distant animal sounds. 

Good night from Namibia!