Day 10: Mushara Outpost Lodge to Okonjima Plains Camp

Cullinan says: 345 km / 214 mi, 5 hr
Google says: 339 km / 211 mi, 3 hr 31 min
Actual: 340 km / 211 mi, 4 hr (gravel roads 22 km / 14 mi)

It poured down last night and I was woken up several times between 12am and 3am. We decided to leave a bit earlier today as our next hotel wanted us there by 2pm in case we had torrential rain which stopped us arriving there.

We left at 8.30am and retraced our steps to Tsumeb, which was uneventful apart from me getting pulled over by the Namibian police for speeding! The B1 is flat, straight and featureless and the speed limit switches from 100 to 120 and back without any good reason. I got caught doing 108 in a 100 zone – the guy pulled out his book to show me that fines started at 106, and my fine would be N$300 or about £25, payable in Tsumeb police station.

But then half way through saying all this, he started to write out my ticket and suddenly said, “but we all make mistakes… you are free to go!”. I’ve no idea why – but I suspect he took one look at the very long, very Welsh address on my driving licence and thought “I’m not writing all that out”. We kept an eye out for the police after this.

We didn’t stop at Tsumeb, stopping instead at Otavi where we tried to get tea and coffee in the Camel Inn cafe, but their machine was broken so we went to the Total garage next door and had a terrible tea and coffee from them instead.

Further down the road was a busier town, Otjiwarongo, and we went into the Superspar (the Spars are Superspars now!) and had a sandwich and drink in their cafe, which was very nice. We didn’t hang around the town too long but we did get a quick look at the Dutch Reformed Church.

Our stay tonight was the very Japanese sounding Okonjima Plains Camp, 22km down a gravel road off the B1. Our room is amazing – looking out onto the plains and within an hour we’d seen warthogs, springboks and jackals.

We arrived at around 2pm, took ages to check in, rested for a while in our room and the came back to the main building at 3.30pm for afternoon tea and to go on a leopard hunt (that’s a hunt where you find them, not kill them). We had a torrential thunderstorm just before we went out, but we did manage to get out just after 4pm in another small jeep – there were about 8 of us in total.

Looking for animals in the reserve was much better than the national park – we saw kudus, hornbills, zebras, oryx and finally, a leopard! Our guide found him by good old fashioned VHF direction finding, and we followed the leopard for 15 minutes or so. What was more worrying was driving along a dry river bed, turning a corner and seeing water rushing towards us – the heavy rains had refilled the river, and we only just managed to make it out of there and beat the water, otherwise it would have taken 3-4 days to recover the jeep from the river (and yes, there’s leopards about too).

We had drinks in the middle of the reserve as the sun went down. Beautiful evening – I can’t recommend the leopard hunt enough.