Yesterday I had nothing better to do in the afternoon, so I went on the cheetah feeding. I finally feel like a local. The guide, Kennedy, asked if I wanted to get in the front of the safari truck instead of jumping in the back with the tourists. The tourist seats in the safari truck are about 5 feet off the ground and enclosed up to the railing. I thought this was a great idea until I realized that the cab of the safari truck didn’t have any doors and is about 2 feet off the ground. So the ravenous cheetahs were basically prancing and fighting for food about 3 feet from my pink exposed flesh. Still, the guides seemed to be pretty relaxed about it, and since they feed the cheetah every day, I guessed they knew what they were doing. Cheetahs can be pretty tame. They have to goad ferociousness out of them by throwing the meat in strategic ways to make the cats jump and fight for it.

I had another morning at the school today. It felt good to walk out of the quiet German farmhouse and into the settlement where the locals live There was some African music playing and the smell of food cooking over open fires. It’s funny to see the guides when they are at home. They are really the big, successful men in their community and they strut around with importance and confidence. They all came to visit the school and it was great to see that side of them. When they are at the farmhouse and waiting on tourists and following orders, they seem much more introverted and hunched.

I ate lunch with the wildlife volunteer. She had just given the guides she is training a “surprise test” and was giving me the quiz just to pass the time over a lunch of bread and dried oryx meat. It was multiple choice, but I scored just as well (if not better) than the guides. I guess watching all those nature documentaries has paid off!

I’m trying desperately to get into town to buy a broadband modem so I can get connected to the internet. There is usually a shopping trip on Thursdays, but whether or not they will have space for me is another story. I hope I can go. I’m feeling rather cut off (which is a good and bad thing), but I feel like I need to be connected in case something goes terribly wrong at home. I also want to make sure my family knows I am alright. They do tend to worry when I disappear into the African bush.

Ehland visit

We were visited by a herd of eland overnight. I heard a bunch of hooves stomping around my hut and I woke up to find tracks right outside my door and all over and around the sheds, campground, and right up to the door of the main house. They sure had left their share of eland poo on the lawn next to the pool.

We also have a new dinner guest. A baby python has taken up residence about 10 feet from the dinner table in the lapa. It’s so cute and small at the moment that the guests find it very amusing and take lots of photos. No-

one has yet freaked out. The owner says that in his 50 years in Namibia he has only come across 2 pythons, so it is a pretty strange sight in these parts. The local staff want to kill it or at least capture it and move it away from the house. At the moment it’s only about a meter long, isn’t poisonous and probably doesn’t have the strength to strangle your ankle (let alone do a person any permanent harm). However, they do grow up to 5 meters long, so maybe it makes good sense to move it while it is young. I took a quick powerwalk along the 3km mountain hike after breakfast this morning. The trail goes up and over the Khomas mountains that I see from my bathroom window. I didn’t see any animals (except a wild horse), but I did walk past the three-legged cheetah enclosure. The cheetah was rescued a year ago and then broke its leg while playing with a toy. They amputated the leg, so now it can’t be let back into the wild. It is completely tame and the tourists can take the three-legged cheetah for a walk. I really must do that one morning. The big question is – how fast can a three-legged cheetah run? Faster than a two-legged man? I wonder if someone will eventually find out the hard way. I started teaching at the kindergarten today. I only have 4 students and one toddler who come in to wreak havoc and break things, but doesn’t actually belong in the class. The kids are Patrick, Patricia, Vivian and Denzel. I wonder if he is named after Denzel Washington, or whether Denzel Washington has an old African name. I’ll have to find out. The kids turned up with their stubborn hats on. The first day is all about finding people’s abilities and limits. I tried to find out their abilities. They tried to find out my limits. Besides coloring, I don’t think they have held pencils before. The abcs are totally mysteries to them. I guess that makes it easier. Now I just have to teach them to write one new letter a day for 6 weeks. After a futile hour of trying to get them to copy the letter “a” over and over again, it was finally game time. For the first hour they had pretended they didn’t understand me at all and spoke zero English. Strangely at game time, when they wanted to be understood, they were speaking lots of English words and accurately following instructions in English. They finally settled down over coloring at the end of the day and were having a nice little chat amongst themselves. The local language (which is a derivate of San which is the oldest language in the world) includes several clicking and kissing sounds. It really was a joy to hear them chatting and clicking away around the coloring-in table.

Arriving at the guest house

Flying into Windhoek airport was a strange experience. The runway was out in the middle of the savannah and it was totally deserted. There was literally only one other plane on the tarmac and we taxied right up to the terminal to get to the passport control. We just had to walk about 20 meters over little zebra crossing and through some glass doors. Since this is “German Africa” everything was spotless and well organized

The night I arrived there was an unseasonal thunder storm. Wet season is usually November and December so the locals were a bit mystified as to why it would be raining in September.

The whole drive from the airport I had the usual “first day at school” nerves. What will it be like? Will they like me? Will they be weirdoes? Will I be welcome? What if I make a bad first impression with my jet lag and fetid stench from two days without washing?

I arrived at the guest house around 7:

30pm and was greeted warmly by Leon, the assistant manager. It was already dark as he showed me to my room which turned out to be an annex to the saddlery. I would call it a “stone hut”. The walls inside and out are raw river stones held together with cement. It’s perfectly nice and a little rustic, but has a modern bathroom and lovely hot and cold running water and electric lights. The guest rooms are much posher, but I’m not spending $200/night so I can’t complain. I then went to meet the folks for dinner at the main house. They were thankfully very welcoming and I was introduced to Ali (the wildlife volunteer) and a couple of the staff. The bar/lapa/dining area was beautiful, dimly lit with hurricane lamps with a long table set up for the 16 guests to enjoy a communal dinner. The bar is a gorgeous, organic space using raw wood with a three foot high statue of an elephant (which is a little strange because we don’t have elephants around here). In a desperate attempt to make a good first impression I chatted with the guests and tried to ignore the fact that my ankles were swollen and one stiff breeze and I would have fallen over fast asleep. I wanted to jump in and appear useful straight away, so I helped with the dinner service. Moving around also helped me stay awake. This was my first introduction to the Germanity of Namibia. The guests range from skinny young Germans, to pudgy mid-aged Germans right up to really fat old Germans. For dinner we had spaetzel, red cabbage and roast oryx. The entire table was speaking German except for a couple up my end of from South Africa who were speaking English. The South African made a comment that nearly had me fall off my chair. It wasn’t his fault really. He had a couple of daughters in their early twenties and obviously was a protective parent. I was telling him about my trip to The Gambia and he said “how do you stop your parents from having heart attacks when you go away?” I had to stop myself from saying “well, honestly, I haven’t been very successful in that regard”. I finally staggered back to my stone hut in the saddlery around 10pm and fell fast asleep. I still hadn’t seen anything in the daylight. When I finally saw Namibia by the morning light, I was stunned by the view out of my bathroom window. Over my sink is a large picture window that looks out over the stables and past the river bed and onto the Khomas mountains. It is the only window in my stone hut so I am tempted to set up my office in the bathroom. It’s breathtaking. Maybe I’ll just spend a lot of time brushing my teeth and gazing out the bathroom window. Breakfast on the terrace in the main farmhouse reminded me of a quote from Fawlty Towers. No, the owner wasn’t like Basil Fawlty and the guest house is very well run. But the quote goes something like “well, what do you expect to see out of a Torquie hotel window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? Or wildebeest sweeping majestically . . . . “ As I sat and drank my coffee looking over the dry river bed, a herd of wildebeest came sweeping majestically by. Because of the unseasonal rain, there was some water in the river bed and it attracted the animals. It was a fine greeting to southern Africa. Over breakfast I was chatting to a German tourist and we decided to take a hike together to the Andreas dam There are about 20km of marked hiking trails around the lodge. The dam was set up as a water hole for the game animals. The track ran through a gully near and we came across an eland that appeared to have been unsuccessfully shot. There was what looked to be a bullet wound in its rump. It was slowly dying on the trail. There wasn’t much we could do but leave it there and let the owner of the farm know. In the afternoon I went on my first cheetah feeding. As long as there is space in the safari vehicle and I’m not taking it away from a paying guest, then I’m allowed to do pretty much any activity on the farm. The cheetah feeding is the farm’s major tourist attraction. The owner rescued a couple of “trouble cheetahs” that would otherwise have been shot and put them in a large 10 acre enclosure. Those 2 cheetahs then had 4 cubs which are now fully grown. That day a whole new busload of tourist arrived for the cheetah drive so we had three vehicles and about 30 tourists all with their big lensed cameras and safari binoculars. The cheetahs rely on the meat from the people, so they are always happy to see the safari vehicles and prance around the jeeps with no problem. They would literally come within a foot of the jeeps, jump at thrown meat, have little cheetah cat fights over a prime cut and even let the professional cheetah feeder pat them on the head. The tourists lap it up and it is almost impossible not to get clear, close up and impressive photos of animals that are usually allusive in the wild. It really was quite a spectacle. At 5pm when the sun isn’t so hot, I went on a game drive. For two hours we drive all over the farm and try and spot animals. I wouldn’t say the farm is teaming with wildlife, but we did see two giraffes, a couple of ostriches, eland, oryx, warthogs and lots of little animals. The other volunteer is from England and is teaching the local guides how be do a more professional job as wildlife guides. She is giving them lessons but doesn’t think they are putting much into practice. I’m going to spy for her and go on the game drives and take notes on their progress. She knows that if she is there “assessing their performance” they will put on a show but is doubtful that they are otherwise putting her lessons into action. They really do need to learn a lot about enthusiasm and how to interact with the guests. Of course there are cultural barriers where they don’t want some white person appearing out of nowhere and telling them what to do when they have been doing the same job for years and as long as they don’t get fired, they don’t see a problem. I start teaching at the kindergarten on Monday. I heard from Justina (who works in the kitchen) that the kids are very excited to have a teacher again. The last volunteer teacher left 3 weeks ago and there hasn’t been any school since. Part of my “additional project” is going to be writing a genealogy/ethnography of the local staff. They live in staff housing behind the main guest house. I think they will be a lot more fascinating that the hordes of fat Germans who come through here. I am really looking forward to working on that, but first I have to gain the trust of locals so they will talk to me. At the moment they seem a little stand-offish. I think working at the school with their children will be a good way of slowly gaining their trust. I’m also going to do an HR project with the staff. I’m going to get them to set some long term goals. Do they want to get further training? Do they want to move up to a different job? Do they want to go back to school? How can we make that happen for them? Once again I may find some cultural barriers. Maybe surviving and having a decent life is enough? Maybe they simply don’t share the ambitiousness of Americans? And surely there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe I’ll find that there are some hidden ambitions that I can help with. The owner, Johann, is really quite jolly and personable. I thought he was going to be a big of a curmudgeon, but I guess he just came across that way in e-mails. His family has been here since 1942 and his parents are buried in a beautiful cemetery near the river bed. He obviously wants the best for his employees and all their families who rely on him for their livelihood. He even set up the kindergarten for their children because the nearest school is too far away. It does all seem a little be feudal with the lord in the big stone house on the hill and his peasants in “employee housing” on the flat lands below. However, he has built them nice houses (as good as my stone hut), so I guess he is a benevolent feudal lord.

On the road

The security at the airport confiscated my Swiss army knife! I know, I shouldn’t have had it in my carry on, but I wasn’t thinking. Nowadays they are all obsessed with liquids and shoes. It wasn’t even the knife blade portion of the Swiss army knife they objected to. It was the cork screw blade. What happens now if I have a wine cork emergency and I don’t have my trusty tool? That could be disastrous!

The flight to Johannesburg seemed to go on for-

blinkin’-ever! I’ve now spent the last two nights trying to sleep on planes and I’m feeling a little fetid. I’m now sitting a Jo’burg airport. It’s rather impressive. They have obviously put a lot of work into preparing the airport for the World Cup. They are clearly obsessed - a bit like Sydney with the Olympics. It is in complete contrast with Banjul airport in The Gambia (bless it). They had maybe 3 flights a day and I had to literally wake up the customs agent in order to get through customs into the departure lounge. As he was screening my luggage he tried to convince me to marry him and become his second wife. Since that was the 200th marriage proposal I’d had in The Gambia, I didn’t take it too seriously. I must say, I’m not feeling out of place being white

I'm on my way

After much organizing and planning and plotting, I'm finally on my way. I catch a flight to South Africa tonight and then a connecting flight to Namibia (Windhoek). I leave at sundown Tuesday and should get to the lodge by sundown on Thursday. It makes Africa so much more enticing that it is so far away. But then again, so is Australia.

I'll post again as soon as I get my feet on the ground. I've been in touch with a friend of a friend in Namibia who has actually been to the lodge a couple of years ago. She has good things to say. Now I'll just have to find out for myself.