Believe it or not, I have not quite dropped of the face of planet earth – I’m just in one of the remote corners of it. In the last week I’ve been travelling through large parts of Namibia in search of the puppies we gave away a month ago. On all our long journeys we see some great landscapes, awesome vegetation and refreshingly few people… You can drive for 100km in some places without passing a single car on the road. The roads are also so straight you can see tomorrow coming, so the only driving challenges are dodging the odd pothole and staying awake!
Anyway, the object of the whole story is to find all the puppies on the farms where they have been placed; do a check-up on them (and how the farmer is treating them); talk to the farmer about how the dog is working and make sure he is happy with the puppy. The farmers we see range from black communal farmers to Afrikaans and German commercial farmers, so it’s quite interesting to see the differences among them. I travel with a black chap called Gebhardt (which apparently means cheetah in German) who can speak English, Afrikaans, Vambo and Herero; so he’s able to talk to nearly every kind of farmer in Namibia.
The dogs that we have are placed as far north as the Kaprivi strip (where I’m hoping to go sometime) right down to the southern Luderitz district. At the moment I’m staying at the largest private reserve in Namibia called NamibRand – it literally borders the Namib Desert near Sossusvlei. Naturally, it is strikingly beautiful, especially at this time of year just as the rainy season comes to an end. So how on earth did I score a “paid holiday” to this place when all I’m doing is checking dogs on farms? Now that is quite a long story…
Towards the end of last year, CCF released five of their captive male cheetahs into the NamibRand reserve in the hope that they could return to the wild. This is the first time adult cheetahs that have spent their lives in captivity have been released into the wild. In order to make sure that they didn’t die of starvation or move onto neighbouring farmland, CCF has kept someone out here to monitor their movements by radio tracking them. This lucky someone’s name is James – a Canadian that’s been in South Africa for a few years and has FGASA and trail guides training, so he knows his stuff about wildlife. Furthermore, CCF has now planned to send two females down to NamibRand to release them (as the males have been very successful) and try to establish a cheetah population in the reserve.
Lucky for me, the southern-most farms with livestock guarding dogs are in this area (about 300km away), so I got a lift down with James and I am using NamibRand as a base from which we can visit the farms. Of course, this means that I get to see the released males – who are currently as fat as pigs after taking down an adult female red hartebeest and her calf – and admire this stunning area. The area itself is just a mountain range away from complete desert, so it’s pretty hot with no moisture in the air. The main vegetation type is grassland with a few trees here and there. The most amazing thing about NamibRand, though, are the small mountains that rise out of the flat grassland – they seem as though they have just been planted into the ground in random places.
Unfortunately, I have to leave this desert paradise tomorrow to go back to CCF – a loooong drive. So, that’s life as I know it at the moment, hopefully I will be able to update the blog more often from now on – so much to tell with so little time…
No comments:
Post a Comment