Days 14 and 15: Days of Rest...and then Nothing

Because we had nothing major to do the next day, we slept in a little bit and had a leisurely and delicious egg breakfast.  We chatted with a guy, who's name may have been Michael, but who we dubbed Dr. Pangolin, because he had spent around a year studying an animal called the pangolin.  The pangolin is a mammal that kind of looks like an armadillo.  It's covered in scales and curls into a seemingly impenetrable ball when threatened.  Fun fact:  The pangolin is the only mammal with skin that is also covered in keratin scales.  They eat ants and termites, although they do not have any teeth.  Stones that accumulate in their stomachs help break things down.  We had heard about these before we had gone into Etosha, but they're incredibly hard to find.  Dr. Pangolin was one of a handful of pangolin experts and had only a few sightings over his year of research.

We spent the read of the day hanging out and reading before going shopping in what seemed to be a deserted mall.  Neil and I needed to make sure we would have food for ourselves after Thomas left the next day and Thomas needed to make sure he had snacks for his ride back to South Africa.  We decided to find an interesting place to celebrate Thomas' final night with us.  We ended up going to Joe's Beerhouse.  It's kind of hard to explain the kind of character this place had.  Let's just say it was full of knick-knacks of all kinds, had a large fire pit in the center, and served things like Zebra, Kudu and Oryx.  I had either Kudu or Springbok (I can't remember) on top of spatzle with mushrooms.  I was a little hesitant, but it was surprisingly good and it was nice to have something different than rice or cous-cous with beans.


The next day was a little less relaxing than the day before.  We could no longer procrastinate the financial business that needed to be done in order to make suer everyone was paying equal parts.  Thomas and Neil tried to come up with some intense spreadsheet and equation on Thomas' computer, but we finally went old school and did some serious multi-digit addition to figure everything out.  It was no fun, but it needed to happen and we got to sit in the sun by the pool of the CBB.  The three girls who were bringing Thomas back to South Africa in order to take one of his final exams, met us at the hostel in the early afternoon.  We heard a little bit about their adventures and their multiple flat tires, before we said good bye to Thomas.  Neil and I said one last goodbye to the Card Board Box and headed out on our much less direct journey back to South Africa.

We had already decided on some key places we wanted to go and our first stop was an extinct volcano.  We had seen that there was a campground on the outskirts of it, but when we arrived there was no one there.  The buildings were completely empty, the windows gone and the floors were covered with feathers and bird dropping.  Because we had no where else to go and we really wanted to hike into the volcano, we decided to stay at one of the campsites.  It was a beautiful location, but it was a little bit spooky to be staying in such a deserted place.  We climbed to the top of a small hill to watch the sun set and could see only one town on the horizon of our 360º view.  We literally were in the middle of nowhere.  After that, we made dinner and buckled down for an cold and EXTREMELY windy night.

Our home!

We could not leave without sneaking a picture of the van that the Brits were driving.  I think this picture pretty much speaks for itself.

While we were driving, we randomly came across this sign.  We drove past, looked at each other and asked if we had really just passed a sign that said "Tropic of Capricorn."  Obviously, we turned around.  This is a picture of Neil, pretty must being Neil.

Me.  We clearly had been in a car for a while.

The view from our tent.

Before heading up the hill to watch the sun set, we walked for a while in a ravine-type thing.  This was what we were walking on.  Neither one of us knew what kind of rock it was, or what would have made all of the lines, but it was pretty neat.

Sunset.

This picture barely does justice to how deserted of an area we were in.  When we were trying to find the road to the volcano, we drove through a tiny village.  There was a school and a tiny store and some, what I would call, homesteads.  It's crazy to think about how isolated these people were, where they got food and what would happen if there was some kind of emergency.  You can see, perpendicular to the horizon, the road that Neil and I drove in on.

Neil took these!