Camping at Daan Viljoen Game Reserve – December 2006

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Rainy Season

The Kudu is Daan Viljoen’s “heraldic animal” and, of all antelopes, it is most at home in this hilly, bush-covered area. A Kudu had immediately triggered the association “Daan Viljoen Game Park” in me. But in reality, the wildebeest should be the heraldic animal. We have only seen very few kudus. Wildebeests, on the other hand, are guaranteed to be on every corner. For example, there was the group of three wildebeest bulls who always came down the hill from the north. The three were the least shy of tourists and went to the campsite lawn to graze. Then there was a large herd of about twenty animals coming from the west almost every morning. The animals drank from a large puddle in the middle of the plain and often some – young and grown-up animals – were jumping all over the area, stirring up a lot of dust. Most of the time they went back to the hills of the park at about 8:00 to graze or to lie under a tree and rest. On our game drives, we met another rather large herd at the northern border of the park. There were many young animals there as well. We had to wait because a mother suckled her baby in the middle of the road. Who wants to bother? We enjoyed waiting.

Wildebeests are the most beautiful ugly animals. With their black faces and massive horns and upright manes, they always look very dark and dangerous – almost like damned creatures from the underworld. This impression is intensified by the massive neck, which somehow brings the whole animal out of proportion. But in reality, they are good-natured and gentle animals. During the first week of our stay, the sun blasted down from the sky every day and pushed the temperatures to over 36 degrees Celsius in the shade. It was unbearable in the sun from noon until about 18:00h, and we spent these hours – as already mentioned – with books, binoculars and water bottles in our armchairs in the shade of a large sweet thorn acacia. In the second week, at Christmas, the rain began. For Namibians, rain is the most beautiful thing there is. Rain brings life and freshness. When it rains, everything comes back to life. When it rains, the Mahali weavers twitter louder, more frogs croak at night, and all local people have a smile on their faces. Tourists don’t understand rain and are upset because of it. Rain did not mean weeks of cloudy weather or continuous rain. Mostly in the morning, there was a blue sky. During the day the rain clouds built up and in the afternoon it rained, in short, heavy showers, often accompanied by thunderstorms. In the evening the clouds tore open again and caused a fiery red, exaggeratedly kitschy sunset. But we had a slightly wetter variant of this scenario around Christmas. There were more clouds and frequent showers. It was an excellent opportunity to test if our tent was rainproof. Our tent is not designed for continuous rain. It is a typical Namibian tent for standard Namibian weather conditions. It was designed for a hot environment with lots of insects. Lots of shade-net was used, which keeps off insects and is air-permeable at the same time. Draughts of air is essential so that one can endure the nights and does not have to sleep like in a fever. These shade-net windows can be closed with canvas, but even the canvas is not leak-proof in prolonged rain. We understood that in the rainy season, from December to April, we always had to take our large, blue, heavy duty tarp made of sturdy plastic with us. We pulled it over our tent and anchored it. In this way, everything stayed dry, and the only question was: How can you barbecue if it starts to rain again and again? If it only trickles, the answer is to make the fire even strong with more wood to generate even more heat that the fire and the embers are not extinguished. The next step (continuous drizzle) meant that I built a roof out of the barbecue grate and metal garbage can lids and hoped that the rain would stop at the time of the barbecue so that the barbecue grate could be used for its real purpose again. In heavy rain, we would have fried our chops in a pan on the gas cooker. We made it to stage two. We were in Namibia, the country where you always make a plan with wire and other resources.