We woke up with the morning sun just starting to stream into our “tent”. It was 7 am and time to get up and get breakfast before we head off on our safari to look for desert elephants. These wonderful creatures are unique in that they have adapted to the desert, not requiring the same amount of water, using sand to cool themselves and keep off the flies, and their feet have adapted to climb hills and mountains… very unique, and hard to find this time of year!

We set off in a triple tiered safari 4×4 with 3 rows for the passengers. Tall vehicles, made the hour + drive even bumpier, until we turned off the road and started taking field tracks, and then completed off roading! My goodness, the areas our driver/guide took us were remarkable from fields of raspy grass that hid rocks, to dried out river beds filled with sand to climbing hills of rock and a bit of grass..our driver was going to make sure we got an elephant sighting! After about 2.5 hours and some directions from a local farmer, we spotted our first herd of about 5.

Not wanting to stay with the one sighting, David had heard that the heard was much larger this am and had split up… Off we went in search of the rest. Sure enough, 20 minutes later ( and dear defying driving) we found the second herd. We tried to view them from the river bottom, but our guide was not satisfied, so he found a spot for the jeep to climb out of the bed and up an impossible looking hill. Sure enough, he found us another great spot for viewing.

By this time we needed to head back to the lodge. The trip was only supposed to be 4 hours, but we arrived back in 5.5 hours…but it was worth it.!

We had lovely lunch provided by the lodge and then decided to throw caution to the wind and visit the world Heritage site at Twyfelfontein ( a word meaning doubtful spring in German was the homestead the family levine. They lasted 12 years here as farmers, had 3 kids, but the water source got drier and drier until it barely sustained a few birds.

But I digress… the real attraction to this world heritage site is the quantity of pictographs discovered here. They are between 2,000 and 8,000 years old and were originally carved by the Bushmen. They depicted a variety of things from hunting grounds, watering holes and mythical creatures called upon to grant good hunting. We also saw giraffes, which are not commonly to this area and are thought to bring rain very lucky animals that were never hunted because of their special powers.

Well, an hour plus hiking through rocks at 36C was enough for us. Time to get back to base camp, have a little sit up our our deck and chat about our day and eat ready for our”sundowners drinks” at the sunset lookout.

It’s been another glorious and eventful day. Tomorrow we travel again to the southern edge of Etosha National Park. We will have 3 nights here split between 2 lodges… so much wildlife yet to see! My biggest hope is to see the flamingos that travel there from Walvis Bay during the summer season… fingers crossed!

Until tomorrow, wishing you a lovely rest of your day!