Weekend at Etosha National Park

Last weekend was one of the most amazing of my life! Etosha means ‘Great White Place’ and you can find it easily on ‘Google Maps’ – it is to the south and slightly east of Oshakati. The huge white expanse which you can see is the Etosha pan (110 km wide), which used to be a huge lake but which now, for most of the year, is dry.

It is surrounded by a variety of habitats ranging from woodland to open grassland in which are watering holes where animals come to drink especially in the early morning and late afternoon.



The second scary moment of my stay in Namibia happened soon after we entered the park. We turned a corner to see a very agitated black rhinoceros charging down the road towards us. He veered to the left then turned to face us.Luckily he decided not to take out his bad temper on us!

We then visited our first waterhole and, on the way, spent time taking photos of a vulture in a tree. I happened to turn around and saw between 30 and 40 vultures on the ground behind us all trying to eat a dead zebra.
We watched them for a while then proceeded to the water hole where we saw zebra and giraffe drinking.




As we returned I noticed something else by the zebra – a leopard! It must have killed the zebra not long before we'd arrived and was trying to entice its two young to eat whilst also trying to keep the vultures away from it! I was so excited! You may need to copy the photo and look at it full size to see the leopard which was very well camouflaged, especially when it lay under the dead tree yu can see in the background.







We returned to the same water hole the following morning and all that was left of the zebra were some ribs. There were also some very full and sleepy vultures and a couple of jackal – all they managed to find and make off with was the tail!

For the rest of the weekend we just sat at other water holes and watched processions of animals come, drink and then melt back into the bush: zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, kudu, water hogs, impala, springbok, oryx, mongooses and eland. They all posted sentinels to keep watch in each direction so that the others could concentrate on the water and not worry about predators. They were very wary of a couple of hyena who mooched around a bit until they were seen off by a bunch of wildebeest.

On our last day we found a waterhole with 6 elephant drinking, washing and covering themselves with mud – an awesome sight!







The only animals which we really wanted to see but didn’t were lions. We plan to go again at Easter and seeing them will be our goal.

We saw many wonderful birds too including ostrich, flamingoes, cranes, hornbills, hawks and this beautiful shaft tailed widah- look at its long tail.


Here are some giraffe for Rennie to count. How many legs do 1, 2, 3 and 4 have? Maybe next time I will be able to find groups of 8, 9 and 10.



































































A zebra crossing.