Happy Australia Day Australia

Unfortunately Botswana doesn’t celebrate Australia Day with a public holiday so I am forced to sit at work today. However there will be a few beers this evening at the local pub to celebrate the occasion. We have also convinced some New Zealanders to join us. Of course this just confirms that all New Zealanders wish to be Australian!!!!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to celebrate Australia Day (perhaps a little prematurely) with other Aussies living in Gabs. The Australian High Commission in Pretoria organised an Australia Day breakfast with the special guest being the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. In fact it is the first time that an Australian Foreign Minister has visited Botswana so it was an occasion to be marked.

It was a great chance to actually meet the other aussies here who total only about 25. There was a lot of hand shaking and introductions. The two most commonly asked questions were certainly “What do you do here?” and “How long have you been here?”.

Ngaire and I managed to be invited to sit next to the minister during breakfast. I think this was probably because we were the youngest ones in the room!

It was a fun breakfast and perhaps if the Australian foreign policy changes here in Botswana we will have Ngaire to thank. She had a little whisper in his ear…

My niece and nephew celebrating Australia Day. Thanks for the photo big sis!

sin city…africa that is not vegas

Sadly Heather has flown the coup so she will no longer be my sidekick in this blog. But as a tribute to her I have included her photos of our weekend in South Africa’s version of Las Vegas.

We spent two nights in Sun City which is about a 4 hour drive south east of Gabs. There are four hotels to choose from ranging from only-just-affordable-if-you-stretch-the-budget to  I-can’t-even-count-that-high. It is worth a visit though and included in the price is a buffet breakfast and entry to the Valley of the Waves.

The five star enormously expensive Palace Hotel

Our opinion of the fact that us commoners were not allowed to enter the hotel or even its gardens.

View of the front of the Palace from the Valley of the Waves

Valley of the Waves

The water slide that almost ate Heather’s bikini bottoms. The slide is almost 90deg.

And Heather thought she was so funny…

Does this remind anyone else of Magic Mountain?

the week that was…

It has certainly been an emotional roller coaster this week.

Heather’s friend Ngaire arrived from Perth to start her 2 year contract with the University of Botswana. It’s been good to have another Australian around.

Sadly Heather’s job has fallen through so she is returning to Australia in a week. Nothing has gone right for her since we arrived. A three month wait to get registered as a health professional with the Ministry of Health and then when she finally gets a job and they renege on her contract. Add to that a great deal of frustration with the immigration department.

There is an upside though. Due to Heather’s imminent departure we have packed in everything we haven’t got around to doing in the last six month. This has included climbing Kgale Hill, visting the Odi Weavers (where Heather bought a wall hanging that tells the story of village life) and going on a game drive and cheetah visit at the Mokolodi Game Reserve. We  are also making sure she has sampled the food at every restaurant in town!

The cheetah visit was pretty amazing and not to mention a little scary when they started fighting not 1metre from where I was standing in their enclosure. They were purring most of the time just like domestic cats but this didn’t make me feel any safer! I could see the headlines – ‘Cheetahs have Australians for dinner’.

Here’s the pics from Mokolodi.

View of Gaborone Dam from Mokolodi

According to our guide Benjamin, a group of giraffes is called a journey

One of many impala that we saw

A Kudu illustrating the art of releasing his bowels. Apparently they can jump as high as 12 feet (according to our guide Benjamin) and often cause quite a few deaths when they jump over car headlights and land in the windscreen.

Heather giving the cute little cheetah a pat.

The two cheetahs we saw were 12 years old which is quite old in cheetah terms. Life expectancy is about 14 years.

They were pretty cute – in a scary I-could-kill-you-in-a-second kind of way.

she sells sea shells by the sea shore…

We had a fantastic holiday over the Christmas/New Year break to Namibia.

We stayed our first night of the trip in Ghanzi which is close to the Botswana border with Namibia. It was about a 6 hour drive from Gaborone. There is not much to see at Ghanzi. It really is just a halfway point if you are travelling up to Maun or across to Windhoek in Namibia. They say that the unpublished unemployment rate in Bots is about 40% but I reckon from what I saw in Ghanzi it was about 80%! To be fair I guess it was the holidays. We stayed in a rondavel (traditional style circular hut) for the night at the Kalahari Arms Hotel.

We managed to make it to Windhoek (the capital of Namibia) the next day. We were pleasantly surprised. It was a lovely big city with well manicured public gardens and an obvious German influence.  This is certainly the most developed and well maintained city that I have actually seen in east and southern Africa (admittedly we haven’t seen much of SA).

We stayed at a large complex called Hotel Safari about 5 minutes out of the city centre. It had 2 swimming pools, a brand new gym, 4 restaurants and a beer garden. We stayed over Christmas and consumed a large part of their buffet lunch on Christmas Day. We then sun baked in the shade by the pool for the rest of the afternoon. What a hard life and a very relaxing Christmas Day!

We stayed 3 nights in Windhoek before making the four hour drive to the coastal town of Swakopmund.  Apparently this is one of the most popular tourist destinations of Namibia, especially over the holidays. It was booked out.  In recent years it has transformed into the adrenaline junkie capital of Namibia with quad biking, sand boarding, skydiving etc on offer. But for us adrenaline-less junkies we chose the more sedate adventure of a 5 hour nature and sand dune drive.

The town is quoted as being ‘more German than Germany’. And this is absolutely true. The architecture, not unlike Windhoek, is a mix of traditional German and modern European. It is a quaint little town bordered on one side by the Atlantic Ocean and the other by the largest sand dunes I have ever seen. For me it felt like a German oasis in the middle of the African desert.  It was not like any other town I have seen in Africa.

We spent our days shopping, eating seafood, playing in the sand dunes and sampling all the beers Namibia has to offer. It was certainly a bit surreal to be visiting a German seaside town in Africa and I had to keep telling myself that we hadn’t changed continents.

Heather had a small issue with her Botswana visa so we made the long (over 2000kms) journey back to Bots through South Africa. This was in case she got rejected for entry into Bots and I had to put her on a plan headed back to Oz in J’burg. Thankfully she got back in without any dramas.

Note: 90 day visas for Bots are reissued every year.  Great timing really as we re-entered on the first of January.

Here are a few photos from our trip. Enjoy.

Parliament House gardens in Windhoek

Windhoek city skyline

German looking building in Windhoek

Heather at Christmas lunch

Namibia’s unique Welwitschia plant. It’s a bit Day of the Triffids meets Little Shop of Horrors.

‘Moonscape’ view near Swakopmund

Sand dunes at Swakopmund

More sand dunes

Me attempting a handstand on a dune.

German pub in Swakopmund