5am start again! There is a big issue here about “seeing things at sunrise” which is good once you get there but it is pretty rough when you have to get up. We were driven by very chatty German/Namibian woman from the Namib Sky Balloon Safari company to the launch site which was about an hour away. When we arrived there were three huge hot air balloons inflating slowly. Each balloon takes 12 people and all three of them were full. We were in a balloon with a couple of quiet families but the other 24 places in the other two balloons were filled by some very loud Italians (of which more later).
The ballooning is good. It’s not all “silently gliding through the sky” since there’s a huge gas burner about 2 feet above your head which roars every two minutes and in some way it’s much more scary than being in a plane. There’s something about the open basket and the relative immobility that makes it a lot like standing at the edge of a big cliff. However, that being said, it was an outstanding experience which is impossible to describe. So here are some pictures. We took hundreds to try and capture how magical it all was. The big advantage of being up with two other balloons is that you’ve got something to take a picture of…
Enough of the balloon photos. We got an extra long ride in the balloon because they couldn’t find a good place to land but when we finally got close to the ground, Willem the pilot landed the balloon right on the back of the truck. Pretty impressive. We then had the slightly surreal experience of sitting down to breakfast in the middle of the velt with 24 amazingly loud (and happy) Italians. August is the “Italians in Namibia” season and many of the tour guides speak Italian because it’s so popular. They certainly enjoyed their balloon trips and there was a lot of wild gestures and…well…italiany things going on. We breakfasted on Willem’s special croissants, bread, Ostrich pate and home made smoked Zebra. It was wonderful.
We had a trip in the most rattly old jeep in Africa to get back to the lodge. I honestly could have jogged at about the same speed. When we got back, Trish and I decided we needed some exercise to work off the breakfast and went for a 3 mile walk out to the Conical Hill. It is the conical thing you can see in the right hand side of this picture. It doesn’t look far but it is and it doesn’t look high but it is when you get there. It’s a long hot walk at noon when the sun is overhead and Trish was doubting my wisdom in even attempting it. It’s a very obvious landmark in the area and it is formed by a tiny cap of incredibly hard black limestone about 4m thick and about the size of a tennis court. This cap of rock has slowed the erosion of the softer rocks underneath which gives it the conical shape. Once the cap of limestone disappears, the whole thing will erode away pretty quickly. We saw a very rare Red Rock Rabbit on the way up the slope. They’re so rare that naturalists don’t even know how long they live and the thing just jumped out of a hole in the ground in front of us. It wasWe didn’t linger long on the top since it was so hot that the band around my hat was melting.
In the afternoon, Trish and Hannah went out on another drive and Isabelle and I decided to go quad biking again. This time we were a lot faster and the guide took us up into the dunes. It was amazingly and awesomely cool…err maybe I’m turning into a teenager. The quad bikes can go just about anywhere although Ronney the guide was very careful to make sure that we only went on the sandy parts of the dunes and never went across vegetation since the vegetation is the only thing that holds the dunes together. We had a very pleasant sundowner as well. Since Isabelle is flouting so many laws by riding a quad bike under 16, I thought I could probably risk a gin and tonic and still ride the bike.
This is our last night in Sossusvlei mountain lodge and actually the last night of our trip. Tomorrow we fly from here to Windhoek in another tiny plane and then from Windhoek to Johannesburg and then Johannesburg home. 24 hours after leaving here, we should be getting into Cambridge. Travel is a wonderful thing.
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