Out of Bots

From the Delta we were back to Sitatugna for the night and then next morning we were off to travel through lower Botswana to cross the border into Namibia. We stopped on the way just out of a town called Ghanzi to meet with some of the Kalahari bushmen. There are very few real bushmen still in existence and in summary of their beliefs and actions, they: move from place to place every few days living entirely from the land, take from the land only what they can eat at any one time, which is mostly berries and other wild fruits and foods, kill and eat meat around once a week but can eat an entire animal (buffalo etc) in one sitting, traditionally have big sticky out bums which is where they store their fat from all of that meat but are otherwise very skinny, and finally, talk in clicks. After spending some time with the bushmen, we continued on our way to the border and stopped that night on the outskirts of the Kalahari desert to free camp. The rest stop we pulled up at was in the middle of nowhere and covered in a number of large dirt holes which despite our efforts we could not identify as belonging to any animal that we were familiar with. So, after checking out the holes and the animal manure directly outside each hole, we wisely decided to leave the 'Roswell zone' and headed further into the desert to find a less freaky campsite. Free camping has to be the most fun thing that we have done in terms of camping - there was nothing but desert and bushes, a massive number of stars with the sky lit up with the milky way and that silence that comes with being nowhere near other people. We cooked up steak (the first time for us since Canada!) and potato bake and had a few quiets around the fire (even if there is no bar, there is always an eskie full of beer!). 6am saw us crossing the border into Namibia where they have recently had a polio scare and required us all to take polio drops in order to enter the country even though we are all vaccinated. They then drew on our thumbnail with a marker pen as evidence that we had taken the drops. The marker has now gone so go figure how they will be able to tell now. Customs at the Namibian border had a computer and a scanner for our passports which is the first time in Africa, and indicative of exactly how advanced Namibia is to the rest of the countries we have travelled in Africa. After crossing into Namibia - land of the desert - we camped up for the evening in Grootfontein at the largest metorite in the world, weighing a massive 60 tonnes. The evenings are freezing cold still and we are having to wrap up super warm.