Donkey Car

Many things in Tsintsabis catch the eye of a visitor unfamiliar with the village. One of those things is the donkey car. A donkey car is the Namibian equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage, an SUV or sorts. It generally consists of a team of donkeys hitched to the bed of an old pickup truck, which is outfitted with seats for passengers. Some cars are little more than a collection of old scrap metal riding on a single axle. Others are certifiably indestructible and are probably made from old parts of Land Rovers. Some have no seats, so the passengers have to sit on blankets or bare metal. Others have a bench for the driver, seats in the back and a nice soft suspension system. There is definitely a range of quality in these cars, but as we know from the states, a big engine can make up for any other shortcomings in your vehicle. Translation: if you have more than three donkeys in front of your car, people will look at you reverently as if you were driving a Ferrari.

 

Since the day I arrived in Tsintsabis, I’ve wanted to ride in a donkey car, so I decided to try one out one weekend when my friend Nell was in Tsintsabis (She was volunteering at the local school). I recruited Paul, one of the workers at Treesleeper, to help me find someone who was willing to rent out their car. We walked around on Saturday morning and inquired at different donkey pens around town looking for available cars. Eventually one of Paul’s friends, the former cook at the school, gave us a good deal – $3 for an entire morning of donkey-drawn bliss – and we agreed to return the next morning.

 

At about 10am, Nell, Paul and I returned to the donkey-car garage to pick up our ride.  The sons of the car’s owner rounded up two donkeys for us and hitched them to the trailer as we looked on. The donkeys appeared to be in pretty good shape. One was clearly a little older than the other, but both appeared to be well-fed and neither caused any problems as they were being hitched to the cart. The hitching gear was a collection of rope, string, chain, and pieces of old tire put together with nails to create a harness. reins, blinders, etc. The cart itself consisted of scrap metal bound with wire to parts of a car frame. Thankfully, it had a hard wooden bench to accommodate the driver and a copilot. Passengers had to stand in the back. It seemed solid enough and was balanced chariot-like over a single axle that had wheels outfitted with tires from China.

 

After pumping up one of the tires, we hoped in and started driving. I took the reins and turned the team toward the Treesleeper office. Stasja had told me to come by if I managed to get a cart and said he might be interested in coming along on our joy ride. Everything went relatively smoothly and we made it to the office without incident. On the way we picked up George. Stasja decided not to join us, so we set out north on a dirt road toward Angola.

 

Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to Angola. In fact, we hardly made it out of Tsintsabis. As we drove away from the office, the young donkey began pulling to the right, dragging the cart off course. I tried to haul him back to the left with a hard tug on the reins, and he reluctantly moved back into line. A minute later he again pulled to the right, almost sending us off the road and into the bush. I yanked hard on the reins and managed to get him back on the road only after running over a couple of stumps. It continued this way for the next 15 minutes. The donkey pulled to the right, and I (and later Nell) hauled on the reins to get it back on the road.  When we finally managed to get the donkeys trotting in a straight line, the older donkey, which had already stumbled a few times, fell down and nearly catapulted us out of the wagon. Luckily it recovered quickly, just scraping its knee, leaving us with quickly beating hearts.

 

When we passed the road leading back to the donkeys’ pen, they decided they had had enough running for the day and tried to turn at the intersection where we had planned to go straight. They ended up turning the cart a full 180 degrees and only after we spent some time wrangling with the reins and getting out to push the stubborn beasts did we manage to get them pointed in the right direction. When we were back in the car, the donkeys, not to be outdone, turned it again to face the direction from which we had just come. By that time, their stubbornness had won out over our resolve. We directed them toward their pen, and they took us back straight away, no yanking or pushing required.

 

Our morning on the donkey car wasn’t exactly the joy ride we had expected it to be, but the experience was well worth the money. I met one of the donkey cart’s owner’s sons it the club the other night and he told me that they are still training the younger donkey. Realizing that we may have just had some bad luck with our donkeys has renewed my flagging interest in taking another donkey car ride. If I do go out again, though, I’ll make sure to get a cart with 4 donkeys.

Treesleeper Update

I don’t know if I’ve written anything about what is going on at Treesleeper since I posted about the success of the beads project a couple of months ago. Here’s what is going on at Treesleeper right now:

 

Raleigh International arrived at the camp almost 3 weeks ago to start volunteer work on the new cultural center. I wan’t around the first week, but the goal that week was to dig trenches for the foundation. The soil at Treesleeper is full of soft limestone rocks, so digging is a lot of work. The volunteers quickly tired of such tough, thankless work and basically stopped working. We had to hire some local labor to dig the trenches while the Raleigh people worked on backup jobs around the camp.

 

I arrived when the foundation trenches were more or less complete. Since then, a week and a half ago, I’ve been digging a lot of sand for the concrete of the foundation. The routine has been to drive to the sand pit, dig, drive back, unload, and repeat. It’s been hard work, but we were rewarded yesterday when almost all of the sand was used in pouring concrete for the foundation. It was also the first day the volunteers have really worked hard in a coordinated way. They had a goal – to pour all of the concrete – and they were all working together to achieve that goal, so they seemed more motivated than usual. It was good to see.

 

Today was our last day of work. Tomorrow this group packs and leaves and on Monday a new group arrives. The camp workers and I will have a few days to recover from the three weeks of grueling work. On Saturday I will go to Etosha with everyone from the camp (Paul, Moses, George, Me, Stasja) as well as our Dutch volunteer builder. It’s an expensive trip for the local guys, so we decided that each foreigner will pay gas and entrance fee for one local. The guys don’t get to travel much, so this will be a fun trip. Moses may even bring his 3-year old son. Sunday will be a big braii (barbecue) day for me, Stasja, and Bas (the builder). We have a lot of kudu meat and plan to spend lunch and dinner at the camp cooking and eating. I’m looking forward to that.

 

In other camp news, the adventure never stops with the beads project. Things were going well until one of the women, Kapuku, left to volunteer with Raleigh. Now, only two ladies are left and they aren’t very proactive, i.e. they don’t do anything on their own. They have had a dozen bead orders from Raleigh for two weeks and have not taken the first steps to making beads. I had a meeting last week with Eda, Paul’s sister who is involved in the project, to see what their plans were, and she seemed motivated to work. It’s been a week, though, and she hasn’t done anything. It seems to be her way of saying she isn’t really interested in working on the project. It’s indirect, but clear. Bead making will likely begin in earnest again when Kapuku gets back, but that won’t be until the end of the tourist high season, which means that the ladies involved will be missing their biggest opportunity of the year. They’re aware of that and it’s their choice; I can’t do much more than advise them what to do at this point.

 

That’s what’s new at treesleeper. I have five more weeks of hard work here punctuated by a visit from my parents. Then, on September 4, I begin my journey home. Pretty soon, I’ll be back in the states!

Birding in Namibia

I just got back from a 2-week road trip around Namibia with my friends Nell and Diede. We started in the desert south and west, continued north to Etosha national Park, and then east to the Caprivi Strip, an area rich in wetlands and wildlife. We drove more than 2500km and identified more than 100 bird species. Namibia’s rich bird life is partly a result of its innumerable ecological zones, many of which have conditions that have created endemic or near-endemic bird species.

 

The desert is home to many unique birds, perhaps the most visible of which is the ostrich. The ostrich stands 6 feet tall with a bare pinkish neck and legs and huge dark brown feathers. They are visible from hundreds of yards away as black specks on the shimmering desert horizon. For me they evoke images of ballerina ostriches in Fantasia with their prancing run and showy feather-flapping. We saw our first cool raptor in the Namib, the southern pale chanting goshawk. Colored a pale gray with orange feet, an orange beak and buff white underbelly, this bird is sleek and majestic. The one we saw was posed on a fence post in the golden light of the setting sun, creating quite a striking image. The bird life may have been unusually rich in the Namib because Sosusvlei, a normally dry lakebed, is full of water, providing water for birds like the sand grouse, which carries water in its breast feathers for up to 40km to its nest. We saw many grouse along the road and wondered if they were off to feed their chicks. We also spotted two larger birds not often seen in the desert, the Northern Korhann and the Egyptian goose. Who knew that so many birds live in the inhospitable Namib?

 

From the Namib, we drove north and west to the coast. Our first stop was the Walvis Bay lagoon, which shelters millions of migratory birds each year. Unfortunately, the flamingoes for which the lagoon is famous were absent. Cape Cormorants had taken their place and appeared to be traveling south, ostensibly to their summer homes on the Cape. Some plovers and gulls accompanied the cormorants and we were lucky enough to see the goliath heron, one of the largest herons in the world. Further north on the Skeleton Coast the cormorants were still on the move as were some arctic terns, which migrate from the arctic to the antarctic and back every year. Honestly, it was surprising to see any living thing along the coast – the barren sand and gravel flats extend as far as the eye can see.

 

From the coast, we turned inland toward Etosha National Park. En route we stopped at Spitzkoppe, a huge granite mountain in the middle of the inland desert plain. Spitzkoppe is home to many unique birds, including many types of martins and swifts, that favor mountainous terrain. We saw plenty of them but the real treat was seeing a corie bustard in the bush not far from Spitzkoppe. The corie bustard is the heaviest flying bird in Africa and is rarely found outside of protected game areas. After Spitzkoppe, we continued on to Etosha. Once we were inside the park, the bustards were as common as gulls on the coast. My favorite birds in Etosha were the rollers, which are colored a brilliant incandescent blue with lavender chests and long split tails. We also saw the Namibian national bird, the crimson breasted shrike, a pretty little black bird with a blazing red chest. The real treat in Ethsoa was seeing a secretary bird, an odd mix between a shore bird and a raptor with knees that bend backward, a sharp beak and a floppy red crest. They hunt insects and snakes by stomping them with their large clawed feet and then snapping at them with their sharp hooked bills. We saw two stamping on and snapping at grasshoppers as they marched purposefully through the tall brown grass.

 

We continued on from Etosha to the Caprivi Strip, the furthest northern and eastern part of Namibia, which is home to huge numbers of birds and other wildlife, which congregates around the big rivers in the area. The first bird we saw was a bataleur, a scavenging black eagle with a short tail and a brilliand red bill and legs. We were all excited at our first spot; little did we know that the bataleur would be only one of many new raptors we would see in Caprivi. Among the plethora of raptors we saw were about a dozen African fish eagles with their unmistakable white heads and breasts contrasting with their brown bodies; a few ospreys, direct relatives of those found in the US; Marshall eagles, some of the largest birds in Southern Africa; two species of owlet, tiny but fierce owls; and snake eagles, which dine solely on snakes. Caprivi is also home to dozens of species of water birds including the African Jacana, or Jesus bird, which appears to walk on water; the purple heron with its huge pointed bill that dwarfs its little head; the African pygmy goose; the open-billed stork, which flies in huge groups that evoke certain Hitchcock films; and coukals, large copper-colored birds that steal rather than build their own nests. My favorite birds in Caprivi were definitely the white-fronted bee-eater. Their name comes from their white foreheads which contrast with their black eye streaks. They have bright red chests and incandescent green backs with some blue and yellow patches. We came across groups of bee-eaters a couple of evenings when they were feeding, flying wild spirals and diving unexpectedly to catch flying insects. Their brilliant colors enhanced by the evening light and their death-defying flying provided some of the best before-dinner entertainment I’ve ever witnessed.

 

It was disappointing to leave Caprivi, but Nell and I have been exploring Tsintsabis and have already identified a few new specits. Snakes are pretty cool, but birds definitely have a chance of passing them on my list of “cool animal groups in Namibia.”