Day 14

We made our way through Etosha to get from the Okaukuejo campsite in the south, to the Namutoni campsite in the east, passing the huge salt pan of almost 5000 km2 that gives Etosha its name (Great White Place), signs further on in the park explained the competing scientific theories of where the water that made the lake was coming from and where the water has gone to now.
At first it seemed a bit easy to me to take 5,000 km2 of useless land and its surroundings and turn it into a national park, so that you can brag about the high percentage of your country being a NP, but I have to admit that with a total size of over 22,000 km2, they had not been stingy when it comes to adding the ‘surrounding land’ to the NP. And truth be told, they were not making intensive use of the remaining non-NP land in Namibia either, allowing nature to run its course freely, almost everywhere, expect perhaps in their mines, but we did not really get to see those.
We got to again see a large number of animals, including multiple black rhinos. I always thought they were endangered, which apparently was true according to a ranger that I asked about this, ‘except here’. Although white rhinos have been reintroduced successfully, the black ones apparently still dominate and were the only rhino’s we’ve seen on this trip.
We reached our campsite around lunchtime, so we had lunch and made camp in the mid-day heat and then had a few hours before we would continue the afternoon game drive. I was too lazy to change into my bathing suite for only a few hours, but did make my way to the pool side with a book and some sudokus. However while I was there, I gradually began to realize that I preferred to spend more time relaxing near the pool, over more hours in a very hot truck, so I decided to skip the afternoon game drive, as did many others.
At some point the Belgian girls started to encourage me to jump into the pool fully clothed. I said I would do it for 2 beers and after more cheers jumped in, but to my great disappointment I never got those beers. First they were pointing to each other when it came to who was going to actually get me the beers and then the story changed to nobody explicitly agreeing when I named my price. Nobody had disagreed either, nor had the encouragements stopped. Given the price for beer there, good sportsmanship would have only costed them a few cents each, but apparently there is no honor anymore in the youth of today.
After dinner a few of us played a game that resembles charades, Willem and I were in a team together and found out that evening that our friendship has not evolved to a point where we should enter competitive games together if we still want to make it to that 20-year anniversary in two years.