The Bar

I do like a beer at the end of a day, particularly at the end of the sort of long, hot African safari day we used to enjoy when we'd encountered plenty of interesting wildlife, seen some magnificent scenery and, at sundowner time, met some like-minded people who also enjoyed exploring a fellow-traveller's world. So it might sound odd that we used the bar very sparingly at Etendeka, our favourite camp during our stay in Namibia in 2009.

We weren't being parsimonious, nor were we feeling unwell, it was just that the more one drank at sundowners and after the evening meal the more likely one would need a pee during the night, and to get from the tent in which we slept to the toilet involved going outside.

It wasn't the antelope that crowded close to the tent all night that bothered us, because we understood why they were there: they knew that human proximity deterred the carnivores. From our point of view though, we'd have preferred them not to hang around our tent attracting the carnivores so we could then have had a drink or two more at the bar.