Saturday 06 January 2017. Photos.
Highlights: The San people / Bushman Experience

Today we truly become venturing into more desert areas of Africa as we continue our march further south. We left the Delta Rain Campsite at a late time around 8.30 am as our drive today was only 500 km on great roads meaning we got to our Ghanzi campsite around 2 pm. Boy I wish our travel time per km in East Africa had been similar.

As we drove further south the landscape continue to change to more arid and hot. You could feel the temperature radiating from the ground every time the wind come around. The Ghanzi campsite confirmed this with the sandy landscape that the tents and huts sat on. Further this campsite only had power running between 7.30 pm and 9.00 pm on diesel fuel, this was off the grid somewhat.

Most of our group had selected to have a bushman experience ($10 USD) followed by a dancing performance (another $10 USD) from the San people, a nomadic people who speak with a lot of clicks in their language. These people were the inspirations for the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. Very few people can translate their language and most Han people don’t speak anything but their local language, luckily we had an interpreter. The lead Han member was over 80 years old and seemed to be going very strong.

During our bushman experience we got shown which roots cured headaches and diarrhea, which gave you strength and energy for a hunt, would roots turned to soap with rubbing, how to start a fire and how to hunt (which is now banned even for indigenous people). We also learnt how the scorpions can quickly kill you and how to spot their locations, actually a little scary considering how many we spotted.

After dinner we move to the reception area and the Han group started performing various dances starting with ‘healing’ dances and moving onto ones for entertainment. They finished by getting us all up to perform the last dance which used a lot of energy, I don’t know how they did all of those dances when we struggled with one!

Upon returning to my room the power was cut, just after I saw a huge spider in the room. Once I got my touch to find it again it was nowhere to be found. It was not easy sleeping knowing it was in the room somewhere 😦