Abandoned Building – Iona Park Picnic Spot (Day 38)

22 June 2019

Distance: 208km

Distance to date: 8294km

Road Conditions: (out of 10)

General: 3

Some stretches of road are relatively good, there are quite a few fords (a shallow place in a river or stream allowing one to walk or drive across)

Coffee, Tea, Rusks

Snacks

Lamb machonchas, boerewors, beet salad, stirfry salad

Mom was up early with the camera in hand to take some photos of the sunrise over the river. Because of the area, we packed up quickly (Mom and I even stayed in our pajamas/track suits most of the day) and drove to the beach, without having our morning ablutions, so that Dad could try fish some more.

Dad stopped to say hello to the other fishermen, who had spent the night on the beach and to see if they had caught anything – which they hadn’t. Nonetheless, Dad tried a few more casts while Mom and I sat and relaxed.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

At the one stop, we spotted a few birds around something that had died. We have seen plenty of dead seals along the beach, and also a dead, and extremely stinky, whale at Flamingo Lodge. We also saw some turtle shells along the beach at the river mouth, so we thought it could be one of those. I walked closer to go and have a look while Dad was fishing and was astonished to find that it was a dead crocodile. Most of the flesh around its ribs had decayed and its tail was also missing but the rest was still intact.

• 

• 

Dad gave up his fishing expedition and we turned back, first stopping to tell the Police Officer that we were leaving and then driving towards Espenhierra. At the Iona Park Entrance, there was a brief moment where the official was confused, because it was written on the paper that there were only two people, but the other official had remembered us from the day before.

We drove out of Espenhierra and on towards Oncocua, Chitado and then Ruacana Border post.

Along the way we have found many Himba villages once again, even within the park with their cattle and goats. Most of the women in these tribes don’t wear shirts, and the people also wear very intricate headdresses.

The vegetation along this area is still relatively arid, although there are many more trees and bushes than before. Most of the trees aren’t very tall, and there are also some that are strange colours – one has a purple trunk and the tips of the branches have a red colour and another one looks almost gold.

We found a spot on iOverlander that looked good, it mentioned that the place was a newly built picnic spot within Iona Park and had a pit toilet and a lapa. It was only a couple of kilometres as the crow flies and so we decided to spend the night there. What we didn’t know was that they road would get even worse and that it would take us almost another two hours to get there, and we ended up arriving in the dark.

• 

• 

• 

We were very happy with the spot though (despite the lone scorpion with small pincers) and unpacked our things and started with the fire to heat up some water to shower with. As we were busy, we could hear music coming closer – this ended up being a motorbike with a speaker or a radio strapped to it blaring music.

The moon was once again late to rise, so we had an amazing view of the stars, satellites and a couple of shooting stars as well.

After dinner we used the shower areas (which didn’t have water or shower heads, but did have a drain) to wash.

We spent some more time stargazing while we had our evening tea and then went to bed.