Tagging Along With Germans, Part II

After two full weeks in Namibia I had yet to get outside the city. It’s been surprisingly hard to find tours that work with my schedule – there aren’t that many on the weekend and most excursions required a minimum or 3-4 people to book or required a 50% ‘singles surcharge’ that I was not willing to pay. Of course, advance planning might have helped with some of this… Happily, on Friday afternoon, Adolph, my Austrian tour guide from last weekend, called to let me know he had a day trip to Oropoko on Saturday and invited me to join.

Oropoko is a game farm about 80km away from here. Adolph’s brochure describes it as follows:

Oropoko Lodge was built in 1993 on a 11,000ha farm, and is one of the most beautiful lodges in Namibia. Only 130kms from Windhoek, it is an ideal staring point to several destinations. As it has been sited on a hilltop, the panoramic views are amongst the most spectacular of any establishment in Namibia, all set amongst the natural beauty of the Khomas Hochland. 'Oropoko' is the Herero word for 'beautiful place between mountains'.

Adolph wasn’t giving the tour (sadly, I enjoyed him) so one of his associates (I can’t remember his name, so I’ll call him Fritz) was our guide for the day. Fritz picked me up at Puccini House at 9:30amSaturday morning. My companions on the tour were two middle-aged German men (whose names I also don’t remember) – so once again I was the odd-ball out with the language. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English at all, so our efforts at any sort of small talk were unsuccessful. Franz, like Adolph, did an amazing job speaking in both English and German. In our gourmet tours minivan, we drove about an hour, passing some “naughty baboons,” as Fritz called them, playing at the side of the road. We took a break at a small rest stop off of the highway to go to the bathroom and check out a local craft market. They had all sorts of amazing wood carvings, jewelry, wall ornaments, baskets, etc. Everyone wants to sell you something… I need to refresh my bartering skills. I got pretty good in China – if you’re in the right mood it can be a lot of fun.

After about ½ hour we got back on the road to Oropoko. The lodge was situated on top of a huge, rocky hill and surrounded by gorgeous wooden observation decks. Fritz brought binoculars so we watched animals from the observation deck for about an hour before lunch. It took me a while to spot the animals – the giraffes blend in extremely well, their colors were much more muted than I imagined (I suppose bright yellow with dark brown spots wouldn’t last very long in nature…). After a while my eyes adjusted and I could spot a lot of animals without the binoculars (and without Fritz having to spend five minutes explaining exactly where I needed to look to see them. We ended up seeing a bunch of giraffes and a whole family of rhinos, including a baby rhino and mom! It was so cool – I took about 100 photos from the observation deck. There were also some ostrich, warthogs, and donkeys, but I found the rhinos and giraffes most entertaining. We had lunch at the lodge – I had kudu steak, mashed potatoes, and veggies. All the meat here is grass-fed, hormone free, and absolutely delicious. We had coffee, watched wildlife from the platform for a while longer, and waited for the “other tour bus” to arrive so we could go on the game drive (driving tour in a safari vehicle around the farm). Thinking it’d be another group of 3-5 people, I was a bit shocked when 50 German tourists piled off of a massive tour bus. The lodge was prepared and loaded us on two massive safari cars, and off we went. Fritz sat next to me and translated.

After watching the animals from the observation deck it felt CRAZY to get so close. We saw the family of rhinos right away… it was awesome! They were so close they were in the shadow of the safari bus – it was insane. The drive was about 2 ½ hours and I wished it could have been even longer, we had perfect weather and the feeling of fresh air, sunshine, and the vast landscape was wonderful. After we finished the game drive, we had a “sundowner” (a drink at sunset). Enjoying a Tafel and watching the sun set over the mountains (with a nearly full moon coming up in the east) was definitely the best experience I’ve had here so far. Of course, I went nuts with the rhinos and used up all my camera batteries, so I don’t have photos of the sunset. You really can’t capture a moment like that with a camera anyway.