EASTER

A long weekend in Lubango seemed a bit too long and boring to me, so I had booked myself into the Flamingo Lodge over Easter. The lodge is situated along the coast of the Angolan province Namibe, in the Namib Desert. From Lubango it takes about three hours by bus to Namibe ’city‘ and there the people from the lodge pick you up. That last bit proved a little bit tricky because the bus company had not paid road tax on the particular bus I was travelling with and therfore, the police took the bus, with all the passengers still aboard, to the police station. I had to phone the people from the lodge and ask them to pick me up at the police station rather than the bus station.

After that, all went smoothly and I arrived at the Flamingo Lodge just before lunch, which I considered excellent timing. After lunch I wandered through the desert. The landscape is desolate, but very impressive. The desert is mostly rocky, but it is a very soft sandstone full of fossils. It appears that a muddy bottom with lots of shells in it was pushed up not too long ago. The fossils seem so young that I am not sure they actually deserve the name fossil.

The next morning I travelled further into the desert and saw some jackals and a springbok. In the afternoon I visited a canyon. Very impressiove and somewhat scary. Those sheer cliffs are made of the same soft crumbly sandstone as the stuff i saw the day before.

On the last day I went fishing for a few huors and I even caught a cod-like fish (the South Africans call it kob) of about three kilos. The freezer of the lodge was already full and I did not fancy fish for dinner, so we released the little beast.