Day Forty Seven – Pooped at Epupa

We had planned on leaving to get back to Windhoek but after our exertions over the last few days we decided we should stay another night and recoup. Using palm nuts we played boules at the river side, we read our books and called our shocks supplier in South Africa to find out where it could get replaced. (Six weeks and ten thousand kilometres for it to fold like a wet tissue.) It can be done in Windhoek when we get our tyres.

The heat was too much to do anything during the day, infact we spent the day moving our chairs with the shade, but as the sun sank we walked west along the river. Few things have left me in awe and Epupa and the Cunene are one such location. Five hundred metres of rocky ground have three or four clefts down which the water is channelled. At this, the driest time of year the water still roared. The river is bordered by huge palm trees that appear as an oasis tonic to the towering yellow scrub hills that fill the rest of the picture. Huge 800 year old Baobab trees cling perilously to the edge of the falls, physics defies their existence when so much of them appears to be suspended over nothing. One of the trees bears testimony to those that got too close to the falls. The names of the deceased fill the visible trunk of a tree that is seven metres in circumference at its base. We walked further along the river to a depth measuring tower. The deepest measurement was in excess of twenty one metres. The water was nowhere near this level. I couldn’t see far enough down the measuring rail for fear of falling into the canyon. Even here where a concrete and iron monitoring tower had been built, drift wood and desiccated plant material had wrapped itself around the ladder way above where the measuring rod ended. All around us, drift wood was strewn amongst the rocks. It was truly beautiful. We agreed that one day we would return at the height of the rainy season.

Another fire and again Eric provided. This would be our penultimate steak.