Safari day 4 and evening waterhole excitement!

Another restless night because of wind and rain. But we were still up before 6:00am in the morning. We crawled down from the rooftop tent, and what do we see? Something else crawling!

A giant centipede. Or is it a millipede? Not sure, but it was about 6 inches long and almost as thick as your finger!

Kind of nasty looking, but apparently harmless as one of the other tourists picked one up this morning without an issue. Not me, thanks!

One of our readers asked if the large safari groups in the campground were "annoying". Not really, it's just that we'd prefer to have a little more privacy and when they all start moving in the morning it's not very peaceful considering it's sometimes before 6:00am. We had one instance where a group got up around 5:00am and made so much noise it was like they weren't at all considering that some people (the rest of the camp!) might still be trying to sleep. And then another reader suggested we join the big tour groups in the communal kitchen when it was raining, but in all honesty there wasn't room! Even if we could have stepped inside, there was certainly no room to try and cook.

There are other couples here doing self drives though. Last night there were probably 8 or 10 other tents set up the way ours does. And, some people from South Africa who are towing their own camping trailers. Some of them are pretty interesting and we'll do a blog post about that another day!

We planned only a short drive yesterday morning, and we ended up not seeing very much but then we were only gone a couple of hours. I think we did 57 kms (35 miles). Again, lots of zebras, and this time some interesting birds as well.

Zebra relaxing.

The zebras don't seem to mind the hot sun. The wildebeest and giraffes and even the antelope all try and find shade in the heat of the day, but the zebras just stay in the sun.

A northern black korhaan.

We came back to camp around 10:30am. We watched at the camp waterhole for a while, and then spent a couple of hours in the afternoon just snoozing by the pool to try and catch up on a couple of nights where we didn't sleep the best. There are lots of birds around camp though, so we took a few photos around here.

Okaukuejo Rest Camp. There is a restaurant here, a small store, a campground, and quite a few chalets for rent. The place is pretty busy!

Lots of thirsty animals at the waterhole!

Hmm. The squirrels around here seem slightly more "masculine" than back in Canada.

This is a southern yellow-billed hornbill. Now you know!

Around dusk, we went back to the waterhole and watched the sunset. There weren't too many animals around, but there were a group of giraffes in the distance who eventually made their way to the water's edge. One seemed to hang back a little, almost as if to be the lookout man for the rest of them.

Giraffes by the waterhole.

The giraffes seemed really nervous. And it wasn't long before they left the waterhole and we could see them in the background. Then, we saw why they left the waterhole! 

Four lions came as a group to have a drink....

Here are two of them.

By this time, it was getting too dark to get any more decent photos. The lions only stayed about 15 minutes, and then we left as well.

The rhino often makes an appearance at this waterhole at night, so we're going to head back there tonight and hopefully he'll show up!