Around 8:30a we left for Ruacana, planning to stop in Oshakati at Fruit and Veg for fruit salads and ice cream/yogurt. Sadly, Fruit and Veg was just opening and did not have the fruit bar ready or any ice cream made. Half of the group decided to wait and get fruit and yogurt and the rest of decided to head over to KFC.
I never eat KFC and am not even sure when the last time that I had it was – and I would never think of eating fried chicken at 9am. But somehow, when you’ve been up since 5a, a KFC Twister (chicken fingers on a wrap) and fries sounds and tastes really good. Once we got back on the road, Cat said that she would like to pick-up some hikers on the road and give them a lift. We all hate when we are passed by when needing a lift, so we wanted to spread the love. The first time we decided to stop, we decided too late and pulled off the road rather quickly. We were going too fast to stop near the meme that we wanted to pick up. We passed by, created a huge dust cloud and probably scared her to death, so she didn’t attempt to come get in the car. We were more successful the next two times and ended up giving a ride to a tate and to a boy.
Once we arrived in Ruacana, we went to Hippo Pools, the campsite, to check it out before heading to the Falls to explore. To get to the Falls, you must go through the Namibian border post. Once you pass through, you go straight to the Falls or turn right to go through the Angolan border post. At the Namibian border, they warn you to go straight and not turn into Angola. We went straight, parked and got out of the car and started to explore. We came across this long, steep stairway that led down to the rocky riverbed. There were only a couple of small trickles of water falling and some pools in the riverbed, so we had lots of opportunity to climb around and explore. A couple of girls had brought their swimsuits and went swimming in the water. I wish that I had, as it was a beautiful day. Some had heard that there were crocs in the water, but we were not sure if it was true or not and figured that it was not because there was really nothing for the crocs to eat around there. We are still not sure if that is true or not, but everyone survived the swimming. After several hours of exploring the Falls, we decided to head back to camp to set-up the tents and get ready to cook dinner, etc. As steep as those stairs were coming down, they were a thousand times worse climbing back up. It didn’t help that only a couple of people brought water to the Falls – most of us left our water bottles at camp. We were all dying when we made it up to the top and I felt really out of shape.
Before coming to Ruacana, I had seen pictures that some of the year-long volunteers took with a concrete marker that says “Angola” on it. I knew that it had to somewhere near by, but we had not seen it yet. Brian, Cat, Colleen and I were determined to find it and thought that maybe it was just through the Angolan border crossing. So, on the way back to camp, we took a detour and turned left through the Angolan border fence. The other car did not follow and went straight back to camp. There was a cuca shop just inside Angola and I stopped to ask some of the people there if they knew where it was. There was an African woman, a Portuguese man and a Chinese man outside the shop, but they did not really know what I was talking about. They just kept telling me “Here is fine. There is fine.” and gesturing that it was okay to drive wherever we wanted. We drove in a little further, knew that we were not going to find the marker that we were looking for and decided to leave. Once we were back in Namibia, we stopped at the Namibian border post to ask them about the marker. They did not know what I was talking about either, but kept warning us not to go into Angola – little did they know that we already had. We decided to give up our quest for the moment and head back to camp, planning to come look for the marker again the morning.
We decided to go find a store before heading back to camp because we wanted to get some beers and we were in dire need of water. We stopped at the first place that we saw and they did not have cold beer and the water was N$12 for one bottle. Typically, a bottle of water is N$4-N$6, so we decided to drive closer to the Ruacana village in search of cold beer and better prices. We bought one bottle of water to share because we were so thirsty. Although this store did not have what we wanted to purchase, there was a Himba woman sitting outside – the Himba have not adopted Western influence and still dress as their tribe has for generations.
For dinner we roasted hot dogs and s’mores over the campfire and made hot chocolate. While we were hanging out by the fire, we heard the sound of roaring water and could see that the river that had no visible current earlier was now running briskly. We assumed that the damn had been released upstream and that the Falls were now flowing. The sound of the water flowing lasted well into the early morning hours and I am sure that it would have been a great sight.
After dark, which was at 6p, it started to get chilly out and we kept adding more layers of clothing and adding to the fire to stay warm. Nearly everyone went to sleep around 8:30p, except for me, Cat and Brian. We were sharing a tent and stayed up (or at least outside of our tent) until 9:30 or so. Once we got into the tent, we were giggly and laughing and could not sleep. We were also freezing. I think that we picked the coldest weekend of the winter to go camping. I was wearing a t-shirt, sweatshirt and fleece, sweat pants and socks and was zipped completely into my sleeping back (which is for as cold as 7 C or 45F) and was still shivering! At 1:45a, we realized that all three of us were up and again started giggling and laughing about anything and nothing.
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