After two days at Tsumkwe, we tore ourselves away and drove six hours west and south toward Etosha National Park. The next three nights we spent in a bungalow at the edge of the park, going into the park each day. The first couple of days, we went with our guides William (who is Oshiwambo) and Imelda (who is Damara). We were fortunate enough to see the park's most celebrated inhabitants, the lions and elephants, engaged in their daily lives. For the elephants, that meant a lot of browsing, along with a fair bit of siphoning water through their trunks, tossing soil over their shoulders, and occasionally using a giant termite mound as a scratching post. For the lions, daytime life meant mostly sleeping, with the occasional regal look around--that and a quick copulation of a kingly 25 seconds duration late one afternoon. But the park was wonderful for so many other species--the great numbers of zebras, springboks, impalas, wildebeests, warthogs, kudus, steenboks, duikers, and, our personal favorites, the tiny, tiny dik-diks and the tree-high, gracefully ungainly giraffes. There were also jackals, vultures, turtles, an African wildcat, giant millipedes, and so many birds--the lilac-breasted roller, the kori bustard, the woolly stork, the secretary bird--wonderful species with wonderful names. And that's not even mentioning the beauty of the eerie flat landscape of thorn trees and termite mounds with its shimmering, temporary lakes and long horizons. On the last day, we drove ourselves through the park, adding ostriches, storks, and a private audience with a young bull elephant to our list, before we finally had to go.
2 comments:
what are dik-diks?
They are Africa's smallest antelope.
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