Meals in Strange Places

 

We've had meals in unusual places in our time. This is breakfast in the bush, in the middle of Mikumi National Park in Tanzania. The park had plenty of big game, including elephant and lion, and in the normal way one is discouraged from alighting from a vehicle, but there must have been something about this spot that our guide felt made it safe. Perhaps another member of the camp staff had checked it before our arrival, perhaps it was simply that we stopped in the middle of a large clearing in the bush so that, if a lion had approached us, we'd have had a chance of making it back to the vehicle before we became a breakfast.

Here we are sitting in the shade of a huge overhanging rock in the middle of Namibia's Namib Naukluft National Park being served lunch by our guide, Ernst, a man whom we liked immensely. Before we started the meal Ernst asked if it was okay to say grace, which he did. As with the Mikumi meal, there should have been other tourists with us but we were fortunate to have had both guides to ourselves, which in Ernst's case enabled him to ask us what we would like to see, which is why we visited a mica mine - see earlier post here.

This is another lunch with Ernst, again in Namibia, again in the desert - though a rather different one - on the day we took a trip to Sandwich Harbour, to the south of Swakopmund. It wasn't as memorable as the previous meal except for the incongruous 'no entry' sign in front of the massive dune which rose steeply behind us. A few minutes after this picture was taken two four-wheel drive vehicles appeared at the top of the dune and came slithering down the precipitate slope. Later, we drove to the top of a similar dune and did the same.

Dusk was falling at the end of the first day of our Namibian holiday, and we were on a game drive at the Afrocat Foundation site at Okonjima, when evening drinks and snacks were served. While I had felt slightly nervous as we ate breakfast in the middle of the bush in Mikumi, I didn't feel the slightest concern here: disappointingly, the Afrocat Foundation kept the hyenas, leopards and cheetahs we had come to see in high-fenced enclosures.

The photos are interesting as they illustrate one of Africa's great divides, between those safari companies, like Ernst's, which swear by Land Rovers, and those which are wedded to the Toyota Land Cruiser.