DAY 4-QUIVER TREES AND THE DESERT LANDSCAPE

Slept really well..after a breakfast of eggs, juice and fruits, we set off. Our first stop is the “Fish Bridge” over the Fish River (what else?).

Spot some cheetah in areas fenced off by barbed wire. Namibia has the largest population of wild and healthy cheetahs but they are in danger from the farmers who lay traps to kill them to protect their livestock from them. In order to protect these cheetahs from extinction, those that are captured on these farms are turned over to cheetah sanctuaries. The other extreme is the abundance of elephants in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. There are an estimated 14000 elephants in the Kruger National Park and some conservationists and park officials believe that culling is the only way to control their numbers. Their increasing numbers represent a threat to the vegetation and the water supply that support the other rare species.

To fill up on gas and buy some other essentials, we stopped at the town of Keetmanshoop. It seems to be an important town for travelers, having many gas stations and gambling seems to be a favorite pastime of the people here. We passed many buildings in the town that read “gambling house”! Check out the photo!

Next on the itinerary is the Kokerboom forest. The Kokerboom trees are also called quiver trees-so called because their branches were hollowed out and used by the Bushmen as a quiver for their arrows. These trees are indigenous to Namibia and South Africa and the Kokerboom forest region where they grow in abundance is a national park for the conservation of the quiver trees. The quiver trees have no commercial use and coming from India and more particularly Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country where the real estate prices are one of the highest in the world, I just could not imagine all the area of the Kokerboom forest being utilized to preserve trees that are not particularly useful-the place could have been better utilized to for a mall or housing complexes. I know this thought of mine was scandalous and “capitalist”. Then I thought that only if the efforts and the will that can be seen in Namibia to protect the wildlife, flora and fauna could be seen in India too-our tigers would not be on the verge of extinction. Being winter, some of the quiver trees had yellow blooms and lent some colour to the desert.

The social weaver birds build nests on the quiver trees that can house upto 400 birds. The entrances to these nest face downwards and the huge nests are a marvel to watch.

On our way to the Stampriet Historical Guest House, we stopped at the town of Mariental. Just outside the toilets there was a picture that showed a flooded Mariental in the year 2006. Jojo told us that these floods took place because of human error-the gates of the Hardap Dam were not opened to allow the water into the Fish River for a period of seven days! What a tragedy!

Today is the first time that we also passed through the Kalahari Desert which covers Namibia, Botswana and South Africa and is home to the San people or the Bushmen.