Ok, so to complete my recount of my Namibian adventures.

The second day in Opuwo we traveled north towards the Angolan border river. As I mentioned there is a mobile school system for the Himba’s which is funded partially by a Norwegian NGO. We had three of the teachers coming with us in the car and we stopped and various schools on the way to deliver exam papers and similar. We where a bit unfortunate about the timing as the where few students attending at the time we where at the schools, but it felt good helping them out. When we reached the river we stopped for lunch and it happened that there was a Himba village just next to the river so we managed to get a few pictures taken while there. The border river was quite fierce and there was a small waterfall where we stopped so we managed to get some nice scenery shots too. At the very end of the drive we stopped at a local center where I managed to bumble right into the middle of a poolio vacination project. Unfortunatly the presence of my white self caused quite a stir and all atention shifted from the poor guy trying to explain to the local why they should let their children to be vacinated to the strange white guy walking around.

On the way back our teacher friends tried taking us by a Himba village for some more photos, but most of the villagers where out moving their cattle when we came in so there was just 4 people to be taken picture toghether with.
So when we finally came back in the evening I went out together with Stephanie to take some pictures of Himbas living closer to Opuwo. With Stephanie as translator things went easier, although it still felt kinda weird going over to people and asking permission to take pictures of them (for which they charged us though :) Had another great evening at Ingrid and Stephanies place in Opuwo; although I guess our joke ‘themes’ wouldn’t have lasted that many more days without getting replaced so maybe it was good that we left the morning after before a lack of creativity would make our jokes very stale :) On the other side it is incredible how the presence of beautful women tend to increase my creativity tenfold.

Next morning we headed south towards Zwyfelfountain which was a site with 2000 to 6000 year old stone carvings. It was a long drive and we didn’t reach the area before late in the evening. We ended up staging at a game lodge not to far from the site. At arrival they told us all their cabins where rented out, but that they had a tent we could rent. Well…. the word tent didn’t do it justice. When you have something that has its own garage, a concrete floor, real beds and its own garden then calling it a tent is almost funny even if the walls are made of fabric :)

Zwyfelfountain was nice and it was really interesting to see these ancient drawings where obviously where used by the old hunters to teach their children about different animals, their movement and how their footprints look. The carvings depicted for instance elephants and next to the elephant there was carvings of elephant tracks.

Leaving Zwyfelfountain we went towards the coast, also known as the skeleton coast due to all the ships that have stranded there. A beautiful desert landscape, but the constant wind contained a lot of sand, which ended up costing us a heavy 1000 namibian dollars extra due to the sandblasting damage incurred on the car.

Out of the desert (with an almost stop due to lack of gasoline) we reached Swakopmund, a little german city. Felt strange walking the streets at night seeings german style buildings, mostly white people on the streets, german names and words and yet being in Africa :) Have to admit though that if I where to move to Namibia (not very likely) I think Swakopmund would be the place I go simply due to it being a modern city by western standards.

From Swakopmund we traveled towards a place called Susevlai which is located in a majestic red sanded dune desert. As the story goes we never actually reached the place due to being a bit cocky and getting our car stuck in the sand. After digging it out by hand and getting some poor italian tourists to push us out there wasn’t enough hours left in the day for us to reach the actual site. We did climb one of the giant dunes though and got some nice pictures of the place.

Final day in Windhoek we stayed once again at the hostel called the Cardboard box. Ended up talking at lot to the girl in the bar, Rejoice, who turned out to be a computer science student at the local university. Very cute girl and she seemed to have her priorities straight too.
It also turned out that she had also been working as an intern at Schoolnet which is a namibian NGO which tries to provide internet and computing services to the local schools. Wingo has been working with them since he is the sysadmin for his local school so Wingo and me also went out later in the evening for some beer and dinner with Uwe Thiem who works at Schoolnet and has also been a long time KDE contributor.

Ok, the concludes my long recount of my vacation trip. wingo already has some of his pictures from the trip up on his website (bottom). He got some better Thimba pictures than me it seems, but hopefully Thomas will help me getting ym personal site running when he returns from his music festical in Belgium next week. :)

So I am now sitting in Barcelona on my desk at Fluendo. Feels strange, but I am very excited as we have some really cools deals in the pipeline which will change the multimedia landscape :)