Etosha trip reports and accommodation advice

^{Baby elephants at Rietfontein watering hole (October 2020)}

For us, the best thing about visiting Etosha is that each trip is different. It’s like one of those “Choose You Own Adventure” books playing out in real time. It’s fascinating, fun, and thrilling. But different climates and seasons result in different animal behaviors and can impact what you are able to see.

My last blog post was all about tips for making the most of your trip to Etosha. Trip reports and some advice on picking accommodation below!

When: Late December (summer)
Stayed: Gondwana Safari Lodge (because we didn’t know better)
Saw: Some lions snoozing under trees along the road driving to the main drag from Gemsbokvlakte, and lots of zebra/antelope. No elephant or rhino. Went on a Gondwana game drive and saw a lion with a zebra kill.
Over-all impressions: If you stay outside of the park, it’s harder to get in as the gates open (there is a line) and you have to be careful to ensure you leave before the gates close. There was a good amount of rain by this point so the watering holes were less populated. 

^{This dude had the meat sweats}

^{Hazy skies and grass during the rainy season}

When: Mid-July (winter)
Stayed: Okaukuejo
Saw:  At the Okaukuejo watering hole: lots of elephant, rhino, and lions nightly. Driving around: lots of fat and happy zebra/antelope and secretary birds, several hyena at dusk/dawn around Nebrowni, one elephant and two rhino. Monitor lizard on the Salvadora/Sueda loop.
Over-all impressions: After a solid rainy season ending in April/May, the grass is too tall to easily spot snoozing predators or anything else low-lying. Watering holes started to become populated around mid-day.

^{Plain zebra and tall grass in the afternoon sun}

^Springbok!

^{We saw so many secretary birds on this trip}

When: Mid-October (spring)
Stayed: Okaukuejo and Namutoni
Saw: Rhino, elephants, zebra, giraffe, bustards, and antelope galore. Lions in the morning near Nebrowni, a leopard resting in the cave at Ngobib. Spotted hyenas by Nebrowni, Klein Namutoni and Chudop. All the herbivores congregate at watering holes. Snakes and banded mongooses at Namutoni watering hole.
Over-all impressions: Best animal sightings yet. Literally hundreds of elephants at watering holes. Amazing sightings took almost zero effort on our part. Watering hole at Namutoni is nothing special.

^OMG

^{Watering hole buddies}

Animals galore: elephant, giraffe, zebra, and springbok

There is a glut of accommodation around Etosha, and it can be hard to decide where to stay. To make a choice, first you have to pick your #1 priority. The table below will help you to work through your options.

If your #1 goal is to…	…Then you should…	… Keeping in mind that…
Have a fancy, indulgent lodging experience	Stay outside the park	The NWR lodging in the park doesn’t suck. It’s just not fancy and the food isn’t amazing.
See Etosha on a shoe-string budget	Camp outside the park	Campsites outside the park are probably less expensive than those in the park.
See all the animals	Stay inside the park	Through NWR you can book night and early morning game drives, plus there’s the watering holes at night at the rest camps.
Have fancy lodging and still see all the animals including big cats (and you have an unlimited budget)	Stay at Onguma	We haven’t been there but it’s supposedly the best place to stay in/near Etosha.
Have a pleasant camping experience	Camp outside the park	Just about any campsite outside of the park gates will be a better experience than camping at the NWR facilities.
Save some money and still see animals	Camp inside the park	Camping inside the park can be crowded, noisy, and messy.
Go to Etosha during the high season at the last minute	Stay outside the park, or camp inside the park	Chances are NWR facilities will be fully booked unless you want to camp

From Windhoek, the closest gate is the Andersson Gate, which is about a 4-hour drive. Okaukuejo is the closest rest camp to Andersson, which is convenient since the watering hole is amazing and we can arrive on a Friday afternoon and still have time for a short game drive before the gates close. For these reasons Okaukuejo is also the busiest rest camp and is most likely to be fully booked. The vibe there is much more frenetic than at Namutoni, for instance.

We are heading back to Etosha again next month, and I’m already so excited! You never know what lies ahead, and that is the best part.

Tips for visiting Etosha National Park

Classic Etosha: springbok and zebra

First of all let me say that WordPress has been a huge pain in the butt lately and I have no idea if this post is going to publish the way I want it to. Text keeps disappearing, photos reorder themselves, and it’s general choas. I’ve spent 30 minutes trying to fix the photo captions and I’m giving up. Maybe they’re trying to get me to start paying to use their platform. HA.

Moving on.

One of our favorite things to do in Namibia is to go to Etosha National Park. We’ve been enough times now we basically know what we’re doing (Kind of? Maybe? We haven’t seen a cheetah yet so who knows.) There’s a massive amount of info on the internet about visiting Etosha, but I think I actually have some meaningful contributions to make!

I’m not going to tell you where to go to find the big cats or where the elephants like to hang out because frankly I have no clue. Each time we’ve gone they’ve all be somewhere different and Etosha is almost the size of New Hampshire so there is some wiggle room.

Spotted hyena in the morning

Here are our tips for making the most out of your trip to Etosha:

Get out the gate as soon as it opens. 
Yes, sometimes that’s quite early and yes sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed. But most of our favorite sightings have been early in the morning, and the light is great for photos. Similarly…

Black-backed jackal family near Okaukuejo

The Etosha morning commute

Exit the park right before the gates close. 
More great photography lighting and the animals are finally coming out of their shaded hidey holes. Pack a cooler with some beverages, find a watering hole, turn the car off, have a sundowner and just watch the animals emerge. 

Pack your meals to go.  
Or at least pack enough nourishing food to sustain you between meals if you get up early and plan on eating breakfast around 9 at your rest camp. On our most recent evening at Okaukuejo we made sandwiches for dinner while sitting alongside the Okaukuejo watering hole because we only had one night there and I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss an amazing sighting to go eat a mediocre expensive pork schnitzel at the restaurant. Some of our favorite meals-to-go: cold quiche, hard boiled eggs, hummus and pre-sliced veg, cold pizza, and of course sandwich fixings.

Bring lots of game drive snacks. 
I’m talking cookies, popcorn, gummy bears, chips, biltong, apples, granola bars, and more cookies. Everyone has their kryptonite snacks; bring those. Things that will make everyone forget their sore butts from enduring bumpy roads, keep whiny children and grownups from losing it, and generally make things more enjoyable. 

Bring a way to make coffee and large to-go mugs.
If you stay at an NWR facility there will be a water kettle; we bring ground coffee, a french press, and thermoses, and we are good to go.

Have everyone go to the bathroom whenever the opportunity presents itself. 
Toilets are few and far between. The LAST thing you want to hear when you’ve found the perfect watering hole, turned off the car, and cracked open a beverage is, “Mommy, Daddy, I REALLY have to poop.” Trust me.

Share information with other tourists whenever you can.  
If we hadn’t told a truck full of Namibians where we had our lion and rhino sightings, they never would have told us about their leopard sighting. And we never would have seen a leopard. Relatedly…

We never would have spotted this beauty without a tip-off and good binoculars

If you’re staying somewhere new and you don’t know where to go to find the big game, ask or look in the sightings book. 
If you can find a game driver they might help you, or maybe not, who knows, they can be proprietary about their info. Every NWR reception has a sightings book; take a look and go to those watering holes.

Buy a map (or several) before you start driving around the park. 
M gets one in the back seat, we have one in the front seat. They also function as an animal guide, which is helpful when you see things like the bird below, which is a puffed out male kori bustard.

Pay at once for as many consecutive days as you’ll be in the park.
You can pay for as many consecutive days as you want, and this will save you time each day. You don’t need to fill out the paperwork or go back in to pay, and sometimes the queues can be terrible.

Don’t get jealous when other people see things that you didn’t. 
There’s ALWAYS that guy that brags about how he saw a lion take down a zebra, but when you ask where exactly he saw this, he won’t/doesn’t want to give you a straight answer. It’s stupid. People are territorial about their sightings and it’s childish. But that’s life.

Lower your tire pressure, keep your vehicle in 4WD-high, and don’t drive too quickly.
The dirt roads in Etosha aren’t great, verging on really bad. We lower our tire pressure to 1.5 bar and take it slow and steady. After all how else will you see animals. The first time we went we saw a flipped over rented vehicle, probably some tourist who didn’t know how to properly drive on gravel roads. Don’t be that tourist.

Bring binoculars.
Good ones. This is not the time to figure out that your binoculars actually suck.

Take the advice on travel blogs with a grain of salt.
Most of them are written by tourists who went to Etosha for two days during the dry season, happened to get lucky with their sightings and now think they know everything. Have zero expectations: the only things you are truly guaranteed to see are zebra and springbok. Don’t waste your time researching where to find animals at Etosha on the internet because, speaking from experience, it never pans out. Instead look in the sightings book or ask.

Springbok for days

Whew. Well that’s more than I expected to write. In the next post I’ll cover our Etosha trip reports and go over some advice on how to pick where to stay!

This baby giraffe just couldn’t handle the morning traffic

Highlights of our first year in Namibia

One of our first sunsets in Windhoek

It’s hard to believe that we have already spent a year here in Namibia. Even harder to believe is how much the world has changed since we first arrived. It’s so insane, it’s almost funny.

Despite all the heartache and uncertainty, there have been some really great moments. Here, in no particular order, are my favorite things from our last turn around the sun in Namibia:

• Our house: This is the first time in the Foreign Service that our house has truly felt like home. It’s not as big as our last house, and the space is much more usable and I love it. We’ve also reached “peak kitchen” with this house; I will never live in another house with a kitchen this big or with this much storage. Sure the range is electric rather than gas, but I honestly don’t even care because everything else is so great. This entire house has so much built-in storage it’s amazing. And it has a GARAGE!
  

  Once you accept the bars on the windows, it’s a delightful place to be. My favorite spot is the corner of windows on the left.

  

  The patio space off the living room. We spend a LOT of time out here!

• Oysters along the coast: Yes, you can also get oysters in Windhoek, but there’s something about the sea air and the sound of the waves when you’re eating oysters along the coast that just makes them that much more enjoyable. I had no idea that oysters were a thing in Namibia. It’s glorious.
  

  So delicious and so inexpensive.

• Visits to Etosha National Park: Whether it’s seeing lions out the car window, rhinos crossing the road in front of us, or elephants at the watering hole at sunset, Etosha never disappoints. I will never forget the first time we saw lions in Etosha. We were driving along a quiet dirt road and I said “Go slowly, this looks like the perfect spot for lions.” Then, I kid you not, one minute later I saw a lion snoozing under a tree. I literally screamed. It was so incredible.
  

  Just another day at Etosha.

• The sundowner game drive at Gocheganas: If there’s anything better than drinking gin and tonics with white rhinos, giraffes, and wildebeest, with the sun setting over the mountains in the background, I honestly don’t know what it could possibly be. We did our first Gocheganas sundowner game drive about a week after arriving. It was our first “holy shit wow” moment in Namibia. We did the same drive a few months later with our first visitor and it was just as incredible. More so, even, since we were sharing it with one of our best friends.
  

  Just some G&T with the rhinos and giraffes

• Sammy the giraffe at Omaruru Game Lodge: The style of conservation at this lodge is a little different from other places in Namibia and the wild animals are somewhat…. tame. You can feed apples to the elephants on game drives and you can pet Sammy the giraffe. Whether or not you agree with this strategy, I’m not going to lie, it’s a lot of fun and M absolutely loved it.
  

  Elephants mobbing the game drive truck at Omaruru Game Lodge

• The birds in Namibia: I’ve always enjoyed watching birds, but before moving to Namibia I’d never gone out of my way to take a picture of one. (Except for maybe a bald eagle here or there). The birds here are amazing. Colorful, interesting, noisy, enormous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s incredible. And I have some decent photos of them.
  

  A hornbill eating an armored bush cricket at Mt. Etjo

• Learning how to braai: I had no idea that grilling could be such a cultural phenomenon. But it is! And it’s awesome.  A traditional braai is done with wood; you get the fire going in a box-thing and then you rake the coals under the grate, the height of which is usually adjustable. Plus most braais have a hook for your potjie (pronounced “POY-key;” it’s essentially a spherical cast iron pot with legs). When we get our braai going we usually cook a lot of food because it’s more labor intensive than grilling in a Weber. We have several potjie pots of varying sizes and we’re always on the lookout for new recipes.
  

  We started out a small cast iron potjie pot, which worked well for camping when it was just the three of us

  

  Then as we started camping with friends we upgraded to a larger enameled cast iron potjie pot. It’s so pretty!

• Camping at Spitzkoppe: Spitzkoppe was the first place we camped in Namibia, and it’s the only place we’ve camped at more than once. It’s stunningly beautiful and so much fun to explore. The campsites are more minimalist than most other campsites, with no running water, electricity, tables or shade, but it’s just the best.
  

  Tents at the base of Spitzkoppe

  

  The arch at Spitzkoppe

I could keep going. But these are the things that are unique to Namibia or that I found surprising/unexpected. We’ve done a ton during our first year here, but it also feels like so much was cancelled, rescheduled or cut short. I’m just glad we have another two years to keep exploring!

A spotted hyena and a wary springbok at Etosha

A weekend at Erindi

A huge elephant by the Camp Elephant watering hole

One of our best friends from Muscat came to visit us, and we decided to go check out Erindi Private Game Reserve. Just about everyone in Windhoek told us Erindi is absolutely amazing, and (spoiler alert) they were right!

There are two lodging options: Camp Elephant or Old Trader’s Lodge. At Camp Elephant, you can either tent camp or stay in a self-catering chalet. No matter which option you choose, I don’t think you can go wrong. The camping looks seriously nice: there are private flush toilets and showers, a refrigerator, hot water, grassy areas for your tent (grass!), picnic tables, and a kitchen sink. Coming from Oman where there was literally nothing if you didn’t bring it with you, the camping there is hardly even camping, other than the fact that you have to sleep in a tent.

Self-catering chalets

We booked the self-catering chalets since we weren’t sure if we’d have our camping gear or not. The chalets all border a watering hole and have two bedrooms, a bathroom, air conditioning, and a well-equipped kitchen with a microwave, toaster, and a two-burner stove. Then outside there’s a picnic table and two (two!) braai areas. It was awesome.

The front of the chalet, with a view of the watering hole and two braai spots

Watering hole and chalets at dusk

I can’t tell you much about Old Trader’s Lodge because Camp Elephant guests are “strictly forbidden from visiting Old Trader’s Lodge at all.” I’m guessing it’s fancy? I have no idea. I’m also curious about what must have happened to institute this ridiculous policy.

We visited Erindi on Thanksgiving weekend, so we decided to do a glamping Thanksgiving. We cooked all the food, except the turkey, on Wednesday and Thursday. We got the braai going as soon as we arrived, heated up everything else, and had a humongous feast. In hindsight, the fact that we thought we needed to bring additional food for Saturday night is laughable. We went home without having cooked some of the food we brought, and we never even had a chance to make s’mores. Oh well. Worse things have surely happened.

Thanksgiving desserts!

Sausages on the braai

On Saturday morning, E and I went on an early morning game drive while Nate stayed behind with M and slept in. The game drive was…. alright, I guess? It certainly wasn’t my favorite. There were a bunch of loud hungover people that arrived late, drank throughout the entire thing, wanted to wake up the lions, asked if you could hunt rhinoceros, watched youtube videos and video-chatted during the game drive, and asked the driver if he had more drinks. And the driver seemed hell-bent on driving through the tightest of spaces in an enormous safari vehicle. I sat in the middle to avoid getting swiped by thorny branches. He spent probably 10 minutes trying to drive over a tree. But we saw a male and female lion resting and then a cheetah family out on a hunt, so that was cool.

The next morning, Nate and E went on a game drive while I stayed behind with M. Their guide was awesome, super-knowledgeable about everything, and took them to see lots of lions (including cubs!). Plus there was the added bonus of no obnoxious passengers. So I guess the game drive tours at Erindi are a total and complete crapshoot.

Another option at Erindi is to do self-drive game drives. You have to stay on the road, so it’s unlikely that you’ll see any lions or large predators unless they literally cross the road right in front of you, but you’ll see lots of other neat stuff. We saw a lot of zebras, springbok, oryx, and giraffes. Plus some clusters of elephants and rhinos.

Since moving here I’ve discovered that I get carsick on the bumpy dirt roads (great timing, huh?) so Nate drove the first half and then I took over. I felt slightly better behind the wheel, but I need to buy some kind of medicine for next time.

The amount of wildlife visible from the chalets is awesome. Hippos and crocodiles live in the watering hole, and there’s no shortage of wildebeest, springbok, elephants and warthogs, plus a huge variety of birds. There are also scorpions and bat-sixed moths. A palm-sized scorpion wandered towards our picnic table while we were playing a board game outside after M went to bed. I shouted “Holy shit, a scorpion!!!” and I’ve never seen grown adults jump so quickly on top of a table.

Erindi makes for a nice weekend getaway, or a great first stop on a further-flung camping trip. There’s a surprisingly large well-stocked shop next to the reception with pretty much everything you could need if you forget something, including ice and firewood. That said, I started a list of things to make sure we bring next time: pool towels, tin foil, binoculars, extra dish towels, a silicon spatula, and a kitchen sponge.

Erindi, we’ll be back!

Update: We’ve since returned to Erindi and our second account was about the same. Guided game drives are a still complete crapshoot (even more so than last time) and the facilities are still amazing.

How to survive a game drive with a toddler/young child

Game drive vehicle at Gocheganas, the best place for sundowner game drives near Windhoek

Game drives are one of the most fun things to do in Namibia. You never know what you’ll see: maybe herds of elephants or a lion eating a zebra or springbok pronking. Or you might get to have gin and tonics with rhinos. You never know.

However, with a kid, game drives are not always so great.

One of the first things we learned when we moved here was that we needed a solid strategy for keeping M entertained and happy, particularly during guided game drives in an open vehicle. They’re usually 3-4 hours long, and sometimes you’re not allowed to get out of the vehicle. There can be lots of driving without seeing much of anything, and usually the animals are far more interesting to us than they are to him. I could watch zebras all day, whereas M is finished after 5 minutes, max. There are also times when you don’t want your kid making tons of noise. Best case scenario, it scares the animals away; worst case, the animal thinks you’re a threat and charges you. Or, if it’s a carnivore, it could try to eat your kid. This is why Erindi doesn’t allow children five and under on open vehicle game drives.

Game drive tire change at Mt. Etjo

On every game drive, we make sure we always bring…

• High-value snacks: I’m not talking about apple slices and carrots; I’m talking about brownies, cookies, M&Ms, lollypops, etc. The good stuff. It’s hard to talk when your mouth is full of food. And hangry kids are no fun.
• An extra camera: preferably a light-weight one with a wrist strap, easy-to-press shutter button, and a big display screen. After a game drive where M insisted on using my enormous DSLR camera himself nearly the entire time (and I asked if I could leave him with the rhinos), I always pack our little point-and-shoot from 2010 for him to use.
• A water bottle: It’s easy to get dehydrated in an open-air vehicle, and sometimes we fill it with juice when we worry that M isn’t drinking enough liquids.
• A jacket or sweat shirt: Especially on the evening game drives, it can get cold surprisingly fast. Or it might rain. Open-air vehicles in the rain are also no fun.
• Kindle/iPad/etc: We went on a game drive at Mount Etjo that took a solid hour longer than expected, and towards the end it was freezing cold and raining. Luckily we had M’s jacket and he was warm, cozy, and happy playing a game on his kindle while the rest of us sat there shivering and miserable.
• Close-toed shoes: All of us always wear close-toed shoes on game drives. You never know what you’re going to have to potentially walk through, whether it’s animal poop, rocky terrain, or thorns. M calls his sneakers his “safari shoes.”

Lastly, follow the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If your kid is happy doing one thing, don’t make them stop because you think they should be doing something else. We took M on the carnivore feeding tour at Na’an Ku/se and instead of looking at the caracals, leopards and cheetahs, he wanted to stay in the truck and play a game on his kindle. Was I annoyed? Yes. But it was a hot, miserable day and he was happy, so I let it go.

Zebras! But M just wanted to look at his Kindle, which was fine.

This list will morph as M grows and changes (and is allowed on the Erindi open vehicle game drives) during our three years here. But for now, this is what we’ve got and it’s working pretty well so far!

Riding in style at Na’an Ku Se