African elephant encounters

The morning had been filled with wildlife – Etosha National Park was certainly living up to its reputation. We’d seen herds of zebra, hordes of springbok, countless oryx/gemsbok, wildebeest, and some of the less common antelope – steenbok, impala, hartebeest, dik-dik. We saw a male kudu with two full twists to its horns send mud flying into the air, probably trying to reduce its insect issues at a small pothole. The birds had also raised our admiration: iridescent blue and violet rollers, stately bustards, a pale chanting goshawk with unbelievably orange legs and beak. Nevertheless, my dad commented, “I’m ready to see an elephant.”

So, when some of the dark shapes that we spotted across a broad grassy/dusty plain looked like they had ears and trunks, we all got pretty excited. Looking at the map, we could guess that our paths might intersect.

Indeed, a few km down the road, after a deliberate right turn, we saw a large elephant ahead of us on the road. (Okay, “large” is an adjective that doesn’t really need to be associated with elephant – it sort of goes without saying.) Alan said, “I’ll just shut off the Kombi here and we’ll watch it.” Well, an elephant has a slow walking cadence, but it covers a lot of distance fast. In just a short time, we could begin picking out the details – missing most of both tusks, a hole in the top of the left ear, slightly incontinent dribbling pee as it walked. The zebras in the foreground hustled out of the way. And still the elephant strided towards us down the road. Every so often, it snuffled its trunk on the ground, picking up dust and blowing it onto its sides or underneath, bothered by bugs. Apparently it wasn’t aware of Namibian traffic laws, as it was on our side of the road. The footsteps of an elephant crunch sonorously on gravel, measured and inexorable. About 20 feet in front of us, it stopped. We had long since started to get a little nervous. My mom rolled up the window on the passenger side. The elephant waved its ears a little, but perhaps not as much as I had been led to believe signaled threat. Then it shifted its position to pass us on our right – no one moved except to close the windows on that side as well. It stopped even with Alan in the driver’s seat, its eye level above the roof rack. Some time recently I had paged through the mammal field guide and exclaimed about the weight of a large bull. Alan had done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that it was 17 times more massive than the Kombi! I remembered that now. I also began wondering how I could best protect Katie, who was unusually quiet in my lap, in the event of a roll-over: no one had their seatbelts on. I had the impression of an enormous curtain of deep grey wrinkles right outside the window. It wound its trunk around and fanned its ears. Then it continued on. Whew! We let out a collective sigh of relief and giggled a little. But the adrenalin rush wasn’t over yet: I looked around behind to find that the elephant had turned and stopped, facing the Kombi directly behind us. Again, we waited, barely daring to breathe. Was it looking at us with irritation or perplexity? Had we posed a challenge, parked in its way, or was it simply trying to figure out the dimensions of this large new rock? It reached out its trunk and touched the back of the vehicle, then turned and walked away.

When we checked later, we found dried dust mixed with nose snot, in a 6-inch line on the back window.

Other notable events of the day: 4 other dusty elephants, taking a well-worn path through the savannah; 2 lions by the road, including a young male who climbed out of the culvert to pee right in front of us; jackals in camp, waiting for something to happen at the waterholes, in yipping choruses of high wails all around; lightning to the north the night we stayed at Numatomi, and more unseasonable rain; surprising diversity of vegetation types, from grassland to thick thorn to almost aspen-like copses of small trees; Etosha pan simply full of water, appearing as vast as the ocean in a 180 degree arc from some viewpoints.

Our 2nd elephant encounter occurred when a tuskless male (but not the one near our Kombi – different distinguishing marks!) visited the Okaukuejo waterhole one evening when we were there. He spent a lot of time fanning himself with his ears and standing with his bottom facing the crowd!

Our 3rd elephant encounter was en route from Palmwag to Brandberg: Desert elephants!!! 8 on one side of the road, uprooting bushes and making low rumbling sounds; 4 on the other side, who eventually ran down a gully and across, trumpeting at the other group. There were elephants of all sizes- but, of course, all very large!

Concrete

Namibia has a distinctive building style. Nearly all the buildings are made of concrete blocks, often with a layer of cement on the outside and tile on the inside. Much of the construction we’ve witnessed makes it clear that there’s no fear of earthquakes: the blocks are not built up around rebar, but occasionally have a bit of wire mesh, sort of like a strip of fencing, placed horizontally between successive layers. When the lab building was constructed in April adjacent to the existing hatchery at the Salt Company, the new walls were attached by nailing a strip of aluminum to the old wall, then bending it to lie in the new mortar.
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….

Mother and Father in Namibia

Mother’s Day to Father’s Day: JR’s parents spent these holidays on day-long journeys from Bloomington, Indiana, USA to Windhoek, Namibia and back. Maybe that’s why this itinerary was still relatively cheap when they decided to take this opportunity to visit Africa for the first time. In between, 12-15 May in Windhoek; 15-24 May at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 25 May-3 June on a northward loop that included Etosha National Park; 3-6 June at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 7-8 June at Gobabeb desert research center for their Open Day; 8-12 June on a loop south that included Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib-Rand Nature Reserve; 13-14 June back in Windhoek. They celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary in the middle of the Namib Desert, the oldest desert on earth, and the driest area of sub-Saharan Africa! Just a year or 2 shy of 70, Albert and Kathy nevertheless embraced African-style camping. For more than a month, they slept in a tent (okay, it was a pretty big tent [3x3 m, plenty of standing room], with cots and pads)! They packed and moved effortlessly from one campground to another, some more rustic than others: at one extreme, the pit toilet at the Salt Company was a half-mile away; at the other extreme, some of the camping sites had individual power and light, flush toilets and warm showers, and special rooms for doing dishes. Although we promised them laundry access at least once a week, in fact we never made it to a Laundromat, and they ended up washing most clothes by hand. And they didn’t bring any extra baggage – just one carry-on apiece, plus one small checked bag that mostly included books and clothes for Katie and some biology textbooks. They were wonderful traveling companions, and we will be forever grateful for this strong connection that they’ve forged through discovery with their granddaughter, and for this opportunity for us to explore parts of Namibia that we would otherwise have been too busy to visit.

Funniest things they said on the trip: Mom, en route from Windhoek to the salt ponds on the coast: “Is that a real giraffe?” Yes, indeed, 4 of them – the first of many that we watched over the next month. They really do look other-worldly, with their long necks sticking up above the bushy vegetation of this arid land. Probably, you’ve all seen pictures of giraffes spreading their front legs to be able to stretch down to drink water, but did you know that they hop their feet back together when they’re done? Dad, while on the dirt road circumference around Namibia’s tallest mountain, Brandberg: “Could you stop a minute? I think I just saw a Welwitschia.” In fact, along that stretch of desert road, there were hundreds of these curious plants, with their two leaves that grow perpetually from a low woody trunk, sporting small male or larger female cones. Apparently Namibia has NO native gymnosperms – is this weird, or what! Especially coming from the Pacific Northwest, which is chock-a-block full of conifers! – and Welwitschia is the closest it gets!

The trip was also book-ended by two critical meetings at the Polytechnic of Namibia. It is with a great deal of relief that we report that JR’s “baby”- the new Agriculture and Aquaculture programs- passed at the school-level on May 9 and passed at the university-level on June 13! Woo-hoo! Well, the curriculum development aspects of the Fulbright year are not entirely complete, as JR will now coordinate the development of a new BSc in Applied Biology across several schools, and AT continues to advise on the development of the Namibian Business Innovation Center.