Souvenir Chronicles: NAMIBIA: FROM ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK'S HALALI LODGE BACK TO THE WINDHOEK AIRPORT

As I mentioned in my last post, after a long day of driving more or less east across the length of Etosha National Park, we finally arrived at Halali Lodge. As at our previous lodge, we had a private cabin that was spacious and nicely appointed.

We even had a little patio in the back:

There was an African grey hornbill strutting around by the check-in area, a welcome committee of one:

We went first to check out the Halali waterhold. It had a very nice viewing area, but the only animals we could see were kudu:

I love the reflections that are best caught in the morning or evening light:

Dinner in the lodge included pieces of thinly sliced kudu cooked to order. It was delicious, although I felt a little bad eating the animal I'd so enjoyed photographing just a bit earlier.

After dinner we went on a night safari drive, something Bob had set up in advance. One other couple from Bern, Switzerland, was in the open vehicle with us, which had room for nine passengers.

Overall, the drive was a major dud. First, we didn't see much, and second, it was very cold. I put on my down jacket and a rain coat over that, and the driver gave us blankets, but the wall-less vehicle with its raised seats was freezing. Third, the drive lasted THREE HOURS. We mostly saw animals we had already seen, but they were sleeping and difficult to spot. NOT worth it.

We got up early so that we could get a good start on a L-O-N-G drive back to Windhoek, and we left the lodge with the intention of moseying past a waterhole on the way out.

We are used to zebras crossing the road in front of us, and we've had elephants do it on this trip, but having a giraffe cross the road in front of us was a first:

Why did the giraffe cross the road? Apparently he had the munchies:

The zebras could easily walk between the giraffe's legs and under his belly--not that they would, but they could:

Giraffes may be the oddest of all the African animals:

Just a bit of camouflage going on here:

A two-headed giraffe. We have not seen one of these before. Cool.

We noticed a couple of elephants:

We saw our first hyenas of the trip (but not our last):

There were more homely wildebeest:

This one needs a new stylist:

At the waterhole, there was a whole "confusion" of wildebeest, bookended by two giraffes:

. . . and accompanied by an unusually skittish impala herd:

Another giraffe joined the "tower," making this group look like a VIP and two vigilant body guards:

Once we left the park, the Tom-Tom GPS the car rental company had provided for us told us we had 5.5 hours of driving between us and the Windhoek airport. Speaking of the GPS, it was so hard to figure out that we ended up mostly using the old-school map they had also given us. (Namibia was the one country where our cell phone company, Verizon, could not provide coverage for us.)

The scenery along this stretch of Namibian highway doesn't change much--tall grass on either side of the two-lane road with shrubby bushes beyond that. Open fields are dotted with tall termite mounds that resemble leaning tombstones in an unkempt cemetery.

Every few kilometers there is a sign for a rest stop, and a kilometer beyond that is a simple picnic table and benches under one or two shade trees.

The speed limit is 120 km/hr, or about 75 mph, and Bob regularly exceeded that, much to my dismay. The road was pretty good and traffic was light.

We picked up typical road trip snacks at gas stations along the way, looking for new flavors. we found ghost pepper corn puffs, chutney-flavoured potato chips, Mexican chili-flavoured potato chips, and gemsbok biltong (jerky), among other things.

Everyone we encountered seemed to speak some level of English, although at times we struggled mightily to understand their accents. And yet they seemed to understand ours without any problem. Exposure, I guess. Also, there is a lot of American pop music on the radio, interspersed with a DJ speaking a language that sounds a little like German or Dutch. I think it was Afrikaans.

As we drew near to the city, we began to see what looked like campgrounds. There were spots where people were selling bundles of wood and bags of coal.

And then, suddenly, we were in the city.

We followed the signs and our map and our Tom-Tom GPS:

. . . and before long we found ourselves at Hosea Kutako International Airport, which claims to serve 800,000 passengers annually. That seems like a lot until I compare it to LAX, which serves 85 million annually.