Leaving Windhoek is an ordeal. One last errand turned into three frustrating hours – but it is interesting in the end; we find some take-away food in the industrial area and chat with the shop owner, an expat from Angola. He loves Namibia, and Angola as well, but living is much easier in Windhoek. Like many people he asks us about Trump and what we expect. Some people open the conversation with “whom did you vote for?” Cheeky question. I tell them the choices were limited.

We are on the road toward Mt. Etjo Safari Lodge Campsite quite late in the day. Coincidentally, the route takes us through Okahandja where we’d recently spend a rainy night in a minuscule hotel room, just for the use of internet. Okahandja on this bright sunny day is charming, I think. We fuel up and find the butcher shop. It is the Friday before Easter and the butchery is hopping – Jim says it’s no wonder everyone eats meat, it is dirt cheap, and we stock up.

By this time it is really late, there’s road construction, complete with baboons watching from fence posts, and we find ourselves driving through a brilliant sunset and on into the night. We arrive in the pitch black, build a fire and sit down – no dinner, just the fire and a glass of wine. It’s been a long day. Joining us is this amazing stick insect – never seen that before.

Mt. Etjo Safari Lodge is the real deal. Created by a white Namibian and now run by his family, it is where the Namibian government signed the independence treaty with South Africa in 1990. Photos of the founder with various celebrities adorn the walls; my favorite is of him with John Wayne – turns out the lodge owner was the animal trainer for the movie Hattari. The whole place reeks of pith helmets and wardrobe trunks and white-tie dinners. While we didn’t make it here for the Golden Age of safaris, at least we made it here now. Just to top it off, there are 219 million year old dinosaur tracks nearby – their Golden Age having long since passed. And so on we go.