Day 30 – It’s official – donkey’s are stupid

Opuwo to Otjiwarongo, Acacia Park

Today we start heading to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, which is where we need to return the campervan on Thursday.

As a result, there isn’t much to blog about – other than the bit where we only just made it to Kamanjab with the petrol gauge reading below “empty”, and then the car not starting once we had filled it up, it was pretty uneventful. Oh yeah … we also saw some giraffes, zebras and antelope in the bush on the side of the road (apparently the elephants often break out of Etosha and let the other animals free)…but we’re pretty ho-hum about those sorts of things now, being the great African adventurers that we are …….

Over the last couple of days, we’ve had to negotiate all sorts of animals (both wild and domesticated) on the road, and if there’s any correlation between an animal’s intelligence and its road sense, then from smartest to dumbest, they are:

• Elephants – the only time we saw one on the road it moved off as quickly as it could when it saw a car approaching – which might also explain why we’ve seen so few elephants so far.
• Antelopes- there are a number of types of antelope, with slightly different behaviours, but they generally get going – fast – as soon as they work out you’re heading for them.
• Giraffes – They are almost always seen off the road, but if they are on the road when you are approaching they quickly move away when they see you, in a loping canter.
• Goats - they see you coming and start moving off the road, and are pretty much out of the way by the time you get to where they were
• Zebras – they stay on the road for a while, but as you get closer they start moving faster, though if you drive up on them slowly they tend to stay in place a little longer
• Cows – they see you coming, but don’t bother to start moving until you get close, and even then they only move slowly. At least they do move though
• Donkeys – I have no idea whether they can see you coming – they don’t move, they don’t look up, and they don’t even register when you drive past them at 100kmh – which might  explain the dead donkeys on the side of the road!

Of course, we haven’t yet worked out what the animals are doing on the road in the first place – there’s nothing to eat, and there’s all that traffic to avoid!