We had a sleep in this morning…yay. David had a few issues with getting the donkey boiler to start – damm wood wouldn’t keep a light! This is strange because we have found the wood from the Mowani tree to be excellent firewood, that seems to burn forever.

We travelled to Twyfelfontein where we found the world heritage site –was only about 10km from our campsite – this area has a large concentration of petroglyphs. We had to sign in at the carpark, then walk up to reception where we paid our fees and were appointed a guide, the Damaraland people also speak with clicks and pops – there is no way we could pronounce our guides name- so he called himself Brian- much easier on the tongue. We had to have good shoes and a hat to do the walk. Brian guided us around 1 of the 4 tracks in the area, which allowed us to see the ancient engravings/ pictures on the rocks.

These petroglyphs have been carbon dated back 6000 years. There are giraffe, which were sacred in the day, elephant, rhino, lion, wildebeest even a flamingo ,seal and penguin and human feet– they were nomadic people. Brian explained some of the drawings/ stories – some pictures were stretching it a bit though. When you stopped and looked around, they were everywhere, though as the rocks have fallen, some of them are eroded and faint. Geologists are still finding more in the area daily.

Back at the carpark we hired a local guide, Arthur, who for $600 Namibian dollars (approx. $AUD60), would take us tracking for the elusive desert elephants. These elephants have longer legs and are taller than the average elephant. It took us over an hour of bumping along, crisscrossing 4×4 sandy tracks- much longer than we had thought, but we eventually found a herd of them! They were in a dry creek bed under some trees- some were having a nap! Yes, they had longer legs, but I didn’t think they were too much larger than some of the others we had seen along our travels so far. After watching them for a while and numerous photos later, David dragged me away…Mr Meanie…

Next stop was the Organ pipes & burnt mountain. The organ pipes are a mass of angular dolomite, vertical, columns of rocks that have formed along a large creek bed in the shape of pipes – burnt mountain was disappointing – basically a few mountains which were black in colour – we decided not to go back for sunset, which was supposed to be impressive!

We then stopped at the Damaraland Living Museum, this was very much like Sovereign Hills in Ballarat, locals have dressed up as the past traditional people would & live the life for the day – our guide Simon- who was a bit of a showman, showed us some of the traditional herbs & plants people used for medicines – & still do today, blacksmith – making tools/ knives etc, ladies making crafts – ie necklaces from ostrich eggs/ porcupine quills, shells etc, fire starting, followed by a traditional song & dance.

We went back to camp for an extremely late lunch. A cool wind started blowing, so a good sleep tonight.

We finished dinner & showers before sunset today – yay no torch needed!

We sat up our chairs on the rock surface at the front of the campsite and watched the sunset- it got a bit chilly, so we had to dig out our jumpers.

Once it was dark, another vehicle came in, they were uncertain of where they were going, stopping and starting, reversing and going again till they worked out the correct entrance to their site, David and Brendan then wanted to play the lion recording we had… this kept them in stitches for ages – small things!