Made with the incredibly high quality video available on my portable digital camera.

The big things made out of sand are the dunes.

"Come And Get It"

Vultures feasting on fresh zebra kill in Etosha National Park, Namibia - nearby lion tracks showed evidence of a struggle within the last 12 hours

"Look Closely"

Giraffe at Etosha National Park, Namibia

Namibia is beautiful; stark and desolate in the desert and desert highlands, and slow, laid-back, and lumbering along in it’s cities, which (sorry Namibians) feel like South Africa in the 80s - completely with older buildings, a lot more dust, and some interesting taste in hairstyles and clothes of the both the white and black population.

A country of Namibia’s size (about half the size of Alaska, larger than Texas, and four times the size of UK) with only 1.8M people always feels empty in a certain way. 

I have spent two weeks here, and with half of that nursing a sprained ankle (nope, still can’t run but can walk with barely noticeable limp), I have a major case of cabin-fever and want to get back on the road.

One thing that has struck me as interesting about Namibia and different than South Africa is the begging - here everyone has been taught the same line - "I am hungry, need to buy bread for my family, so hungry, give me five dollar," which I suspect is a legacy of the contrast between the poverty, the relative level of development and tourism in Namibia, and the hordes of white people from the West that come to Namibia to do volun-tourism and save the poor Africans - because surely, teaching English for a few weeks so that the kids have dozens of new teachers each year and encouraging permanent "substitute teacher syndrome" and giving money to panhandlers and further discouraging people to work is a great thing for Africa.

Anyways - if all goes well with motorcycle parts being flown in from Johannesburg (UPDATE:  They never arrived, so I had to do a little back-alley electrical work to hot-wire the cooling fan), by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be well ensconsced in the middle of Angola.

"My Good Side"

After my wipeout coming back from Sossosvlei in southern Namibia and some much needed R&R in Windhoek, quite possibly the world’s most boring city (with all apologies to St. Augustine, Florida) , and with connection from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, I got my Angola visa very quickly.

In lieu of segueing east to Swakopmund and the Skeleton Coast before heading to Etosha , in my hobbled state moral support arrived in the form of a passenger who planned a 6-day (soon to be 7-day after a miscommunication about flight times) excursion that would instead do a full loop around Northern and Eastern Namibia beginning and ending in Windhoek.

Here’s the route we took- 1542 kilometers over 5.5 days:

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"Desert Nap Time"

Cat nap at Dune 7 in Swakopmund, Namibia

…If you decide that you’re REALLY hungry and order the Bushman Sosatie plate at Joe’s Beer House in Windhoek, and after eating crocodile, zebra, kudu, ostrich, and chicken, you wonder if you’re going to get food poisoning, you probably will…

Off-road and dual-sport motorcycles are meant to ridden over rough terrain with full loads at medium speeds - when they fall down nothing snaps off; they ride better fully loaded; and they maintain handling capability on all types of traction.

One thing they are not good at is being run at high RPMs for a long period of time - eating oil and gasket warping is all too common.

I of course have ignored all this since getting the bike.

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“Zebra Exodus”

Wild Zebras at Etosha National Park, Namibia