Thursday 2019/12/26
Twyfelfontein – Ugab River
Get up early in the morning with just a quick coffee to get the earliest tour possible. Later it would be too hot. The walk to the rock paintings, which are up to 6000 years old, is great and impressive. Today the drawings are interpreted as pictorial message board with information about water holes, game species etc.
Then we continue to the Organ Pipes, beautiful rock formations in a river bed and to Black Mountain, which rather disappointed us. You have to fill out the forms every time and pay for the permits. Then we're off to nowhere on a 4x4 track that Wolle has sorted out. Sometimes it jerks quite a bit and Brigitte violently bumps her head on the side rail.
Brigitte is a little dim in the evening and Astrid has a headache the next day. It is just a bit more difficult for the passengers to react in time. But Leo and Wolle manage the track really well. The most difficult parts are right at the beginning and end of the route. Shortly before the Rhino camp, the "road" leads through a partially narrow river bed.
We take tons of landscape photos and have a very nice picnic in the tiny shade of one of the few trees in this landscape.
We make a detour to a volcanic crater, but to reach it, you still have to walk for a while. Leo and Astrid turn around and wait patiently in the heat for Wolle and Brigitte. The crater at the end of the walk through a gorge is less impressive. You can probably also reach it from the other side, where it is steeper but you don't have to take such a long detour. The place from which you hike the crater would also be a nice place to stay.
The Ugab-Save-the-Rhino-Trust-Camp, in which we spend the night, is located on the Ugab River and is very simple but ok. The ranger assigned to the conservatory tells us that the small infrastructure of windbreak bamboo fences has to be redone after each rainy season. He asks us if he can get some of our non-potable water (we have a tank with about 50 liters) because the water source here contains not much water and it's salty too. The next morning he tells us that the coffee made with our water tasted very good.
From time to time a large group of lions and also elephants are coming to visit this camp, but we get nothing to see except a few birds. Maybe that's better this way.