Namibia day 11 - Onguma

I finally managed to post yesterday’s blip this morning when I momentarily got WiFi. 

This morning I was awake by 6.20 am and I went down to the waterhole to see if there were any animals. I was still in my pj’s but it was dark so it didn’t matter! There were no animals at all, which is due to the recent rains, and highly unusual as animals are always seen at this water hole, and the reason why we booked a night at this camp. I went back to bed and decided to finish reading my book. Next thing I heard a loud noise coming from the waterhole, it sounded like elephants. I rushed out there again and saw three blobs in the water making an awful noise. It turned out to be three hyenas, two seemed to be fighting with the third one. I quickly went to wake Tommy up so he could also watch this behaviour. The two hyenas eventually left the water hole and trotted off right in front of where we were standing, looking us directly in the eye. It was rather thrilling! The poor third one slunk off, probably a young male who was being ousted from the pack. 

We had breakfast and left by 8am heading eastwards through Etosha, stopping as we saw animals. I much prefer guided safaris in open vehicles but Toni is extremely knowledgeable and self drive safaris seem to be the norm here in Etosha. We saw impala, zebra, wildebeest, lions, giraffe and many birds - lanner falcon, greater kestrel, and many more. 

We stopped for lunch at Namutoni - another camp in the national park, before exiting the park and going to our lodge Onguma. Onguma is a private lodge and has its own wildlife reserve. It is beautiful with only eight tented rooms placed around a water hole. Our tented room is lovely and even had a special air cooling system over the bed if you don’t want to sleep with air conditioning on. 

We had tea and then went on a sunset game drive. We told the ranger that we were interested in birds and we saw so many including some rare ones that had Tommy very excited, like a shikra (a type of goshawk). We saw many white backed vultures as the largest population of them is in Namibia. We saw wildebeest, warthogs, lots of impala and then we saw a pride of lions as the sun was setting. We sat watching the lions while we had our sundowner drinks from inside the open sided vehicle while the lions lay about 3m away. This was taken of one of those lions while we enjoyed the sunset drinks.

We finally got back to the lodge at 7.30. They have no set times for meals here so you can eat when it suits you, so we went directly to dinner which was delicious, eland steak! 

I was expecting good WiFi here but they had a huge storm recently  which has knocked the router out and there is no WiFi. It will apparently get fixed in the next day or so. I have finally managed to upload this by going into the guest loo behind the reception desk where they have a temporary wifi hub for reception!