Desert Wonderers

Purros – Hoanib

We were heading back to the Hoanib, after two nights in Purros in the lovely campsite by the river.

The campsite also has mongooses (mongeese?) which we caught scurrying away when we returned yesterday. Chips said they also get visited by a brown hyena – not so great! Hyenas have been known to enter ground tents, and grab someone’s head and drag them out

Before we left Purros we went to the school to give a donation to the headmaster, as he returned from Sesfontein today. I think perhaps he was expecting a bit more, as he looked rather disappointed when we handed over the cash. They had been given a large financial donation by a West African church. Perhaps he thought we were representatives of some other institution. 

Spending an afternoon at the Purros campsite had allowed us time to sort through the food we had bought. In particular, the soya minces. We are vegetarians and use soya mince at home. I knew it was widely available in Namibia, even the local village shops sold it We bought lots of packets in Windhoek. Sadly, soya mince was bought by the locals for financial reasons, not dietary choice. Namibia is very much a carnivorous country, but real meat is relatively expensive. 

What I hadn’t realised when I bought the packets of bolognese flavoured soya mince, beef flavoured soya mince and stew mixes, was that everything had added sugar! We sorted out all the packets of flavoured soya, together with some other food we hadn’t liked, and brought it to the school. We would have to rely on the canned pulses we had bought,for our protein. 

We handed our box of unwanted food to the school teacher we had spoken to yesterday. She said that the boarders were only given enough maize meal from the government for one meal a day. The school tried to get the parents to give money for another meal, but the parents couldn’t always afford it. This seemed appalling to us. How could children study if they were hungry? The school teacher looked really excited at all the food we had rejected! I also gave her the remaining toys for the nursery.

One of the pastor’s (from yesterday) friends approached us and asked us where we were going. When we told him, he said we couldn’t go back that way because it was flooded. We knew this wasn’t right and told him we had come up that way a couple of days ago. I suspect he just wanted a trip to Sesfontein.

People had told us we would have trouble getting to Hoanib because of flooding. They told us we wouldn’t be able to get to Purros for the same reason. People told us where elephants were, or weren’t, that the babies were born in May, others said last month; that the matriarch was 50 years old and others said 40 years. We began to realise people just wanted to give us information, I’m sure to help, but it was so often wrong!

We went back a slightly different route, trying to find where we had camped in 2020. I think we did find it, but it looked so different. In fact, everything looked different from our previous trip. How strange that our image of a place one year, can be so different in another.

In 2020 we thought we were by ourselves when we had camped, but in the morning a truck pitched up with rhino rangers. They stopped to talk and offered to take us to see the rhino. We declined because we didn’t want to rush to pack everything up. Thinking about our rejection of their offer now, seems terrible. It would have been an amazing experience to find a rhino with the rangers. The trouble is, we think rhino are really boring, no matter how rare and protected they are.

When we arrived back in the Hoanib it seemed a bit like coming home. We found some oryx and a couple of giraffes in a mating dance, winding their necks around each other. It was majestic.

The evening was spent tucked into the side of the valley in the Mudorib. It gave us a bit more protection from the wind, rather than being on the ridge slightly above the Mudorib as before, although the view wasn’t as great. 

I love wild camping, but it has its negatives. I love the isolation, just the two of us. I love showering in the open air next to our camper. However, the downsides is we have to go to bed when it gets dark, and it gets dark early. We do not feel safe outside the camper when it is dark. The wild animals that we love to see during the day, are not so great to meet when we are in the open on a dark night. Predators are not always deterred by a campfire, and that’s not taking into account the smaller nasties like snakes, scorpions and various spiders.

This photo not only shows the essential of wild camping – the camp fire; but it also show one of Nigel’s motion detectors having been set off (above the fire on the right). It was probably set off by ash from the fire although next morning we would discover what else had set them off in the night!