NAMIBIA: ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK, DAY 2, OKAUKEUJO CAMP TO HALILI CAMP

After a good night's sleep in our Etosha National Park cabin, we got in a line of cars at the gate that were waiting to leave the lodge area and start driving around the national park. Visitors are not allowed outside the lodge fences at night unless they are in a national park vehicle. Our plan was to leave as early as possible, drive around for an hour or two, and then come back for breakfast and to check out before resuming our safari drive.

The gate opened at 7:15 AM, just in time for us to watch a beautiful African sunrise:

Dawn is a great time to see wildlife. Our first sighting was a pair of greater kestrels:

. . . then a gemsbok (also known as an oryx) with impossibly long horns:

. . . then a lone jackal, out looking for some breakfast:

But the best sighting of the morning happened right here. Can you tell what animal is snoozing in the tall grass?

Ah, he decided to wake up! That's a pretty bad case of bed head:

I'm including a lot of pictures because this is the ONLY place we saw lions on the entire trip:

It is such a rush to see a lion in the wild.

Look at that powerful rear haunch in the photo below. He looks like he could spring forward at any second. He was actually pretty relaxed, watching a few lonely springbok as if they were a TV show, and we watched him in much the same way:

Quite an incredible mane. I would like to have buried my hands into its depths. Well, maybe not.

We returned to this spot later in the morning to find TWO male lions. It looks like this one is playing "Who Will Blink First?" with some birds at a small watering hole, but he was really just taking a long, languorous drink from a big puddle right in front of him:

Then the lion we had seen earlier came walking over:

Such a charge to see TWO male lions!

The drinking lion just kept drinking. Maybe he had run too long and eaten too many springboks the previous night.

Darn exciting!

Watering holes are a great place to see all kinds of animals, especially in the morning, but we were really surprised when we went back to our lodge to get some breakfast to find that the Okaukuejo waterhole was more crowded than a speakeasy during Prohibition. There had been almost nothing there when Bob had gone down to check it out at 5:00 AM (while I slept).

There was a dazzle of zebras:

I love how they got in formation--perfectly lined up, kind of like a weird form of water ballet . . .

. . . or perhaps like the offensive line protecting the quarterback, except there are too many players on the field in the pond:

I love this photo with the reflection of of the vertical zebra stripes competing with the horizontal ripples in the water:

A male kudu . . .

. . . with his harem:

A male black-faced impala with HIS harem:

We went to a viewing stand on the far end that we hadn't noticed the night before and climbed up onto it, noting the sign that warned "Climb at your own risk." When we turned to leave, what I am calling "Bob's Miracle" happened.  He stepped forward without looking down, thinking he was going down a short step, but he went off the front of the stand, a four-foot drop into a narrow walkway with a stone wall on the far side.

I yelled, "BOB!  BOB!" and ran down the five stairs and around to the front, certain he had broken some bones or hit his head. I was already thinking about where the nearest hospital might be--hours from where we were, no doubt--and how I would get him there. Would we need an ambulance? WERE there ambulances in Namibia, and did we trust the Namibian medical system?

Bob's head was an inch or less from the stone wall and was the first thing I checked. (He said he saw the wall on the way down and was able to hold his head up so as not to hit it.) Gingerly, he checked his appendages and very slowly got up, asking me if he had torn his clothes. (He hadn't.) Nothing, miraculously, seemed to be broken. He had scraped the palm of his hand and one arm and his ankle, and as the day progressed, his right knee felt more and more sore and tender, but compared to what could have happened, it was a miracle.

We used items from the first aid kid I had packed to clean him up. Scoffing at my suggestion that we should take a break, get some ice, etc., Bob got behind the wheel and we forged onward. A little fall would not stop the mighty wildlife photographer. 

We spent the rest of the day driving around, visiting various water holes. We saw a grazing giraffe:

Wait, make that TWO grazing giraffes:

Or FOUR!

This is what they are poking their noses into. I don't know why they weren't a bleeding mess:

"I can't believe my eyes either!"

We moved on to another watering hole where two gemsboks were standing sentinel:

This picture reminds  me of Dr. Doolittle's two-headed Push-Me-Pull-You:

There are so many animals at these few waterholes. It's surprising the water doesn't disappear.

Zebras, elephants, giraffes--that's what everyone expects to see in Africa, but the birds are equally spectacular.  I love the greater kestrels:

They make me thing of these hawkwing mushrooms we foraged in Colorado some years back:

One of our favorite birds that we remembered from East Africa is the secretary bird. They are quite large and strut around on very long legs. They remind me of a snooty British earl in tails leaning a bit forward as he walks with his hands behind his back:

However, that headdress borders on the ridiculous:

But my favorite African bird, by far, is the lilac-breasted roller, a bird so brilliantly colored that it looks as if it has flown off the page of a color-loving child's coloring book:

As the sun rose to the middle of the sky, we eventually came to a waterhole that appeared to be unoccupied:

It seemed like a good opportunity to get some snacks out of the back of the car (and clearly I had to walk a few steps away to capture this photo):

Unfortunately, just as we were returning to the safety of the car interior, a vehicle being driven by a professional safari driver approached. He had witnessed our transgression and gave us a real dressing down, telling us that if a ranger saw us out of our vehicle, we would get thrown out of the park. "Stay in your car!" he repeated several times. Sheepishly, we obeyed.

For a while we didn't see any more animals because we were driving past an enormous 75-mile-long dry lake bed called "The Pan." Thousands of years ago the rivers that fed the lake changed course and the lake dried up. These days after the rare rain storm, this whole area gets covered by a thin layer of water, creating an ephemeral "ghost lake."

The soil is very salty, and where there is a natural spring, the animals use the rocks as a salt lick:

At the far edge of the Pan, we began to see some wildlife again, but individuals, not groups:

Black and white seems to be quite popular in Etosha:

Many of the animals appear to be almost tame, but that's deceptive. They really are wild animals:

Another kori bustard, the largest flying bird native to Africa:

Just one elephant:

Next to the lions, the most exciting sighting of the day was one enormous (but lonely) rhino standing in the middle of a large grassy area, no trees for miles in any direction. He was completely still, as if he were thinking, "Maybe if I pretend I am not here, no one will notice that I've been deserted by all my friends."

A solitary giraffe:

A single baby elephant . . . 

. . . but where there is a baby, Mama is not far away

While we were watching her cross the road to join junior . . . 

. . . I saw two more in the rearview mirror crossing the road right behind us, and then we started seeing them everywhere, probably 25 to 30 elephants milling around us. It was our best elephant experience to date.

Surrounded by elephants--we felt like we were in the middle of a National Geographic photo shoot:

They just kept coming, elephant after elephant:

Lots of mamas and babies:

We finally arrived at the Halali National Park camp, where we would spend our second night before heading out of the park in the morning. Halali is the German word for the traditional ending of a hunt--in this case, the end of game hunting in Namibia and the rise of eco-tourism.