July 19

NICOLE:
This morning after catching up on some internet at a local café, we packed up and said goodbye to Swakapmund forever, heading toward Windhoek and our final destination. Mom and Dad thought they had remembered that on the way there were some more huge dunes, and we had kept our boards, hoping to catch some more dune sliding fun. We were surely disappointed when the landscape turned out to look more like Utah than dune-laden Namibia. It’s so desolate and bleak—beautiful in its own way I suppose. We arrived in a little town in the middle of the desert named Solitaire in the late afternoon. It’s a big dot on the map, but it sure holds true to its name. It consists of a general store, bar, petrol store, lodge, and campground. I’m pretty sure the tourists greatly outnumbered the locals. There we set up camp, had some time to swim in the pool, lounge around in the sun and do some hiking before supper time. The last few days have been much more relaxing than before, which is a nice change of pace from the rest of the trip, although I usually am one that wants to keep moving. Now that we are on the home stretch and have everything planned out where we’re going to be when, we realize we have time to relax and have to keep reminding ourselves of that. The entire trip, Dad has been wanting to make bush pot-pie. Not to be confused with the regular kind. Bush pot-pie goes something like this: Dad asks Mom how much flour and eggs it takes to make a double recipe of pot-pie dough. Mom recommends 4 cups of flour and 4 eggs. Dad throws 9 cups of flour and 13 eggs in a dishpan, along with some water and whatever milk we happen to have left. Dad then takes two big logs from our stack of firewood and uses an axe to make a smooth, table-top surface on them both. No utensils allowed. We throw some water, potatoes, and chicken in a black pot and put it in the fire. Then Dad and I each use an axe to smoosh the pieces of dough Lisa and Renae give us before throwing them in the black pot. If it falls in the sand you’re not allowed throw it into the fire. Instead, you give it to Dad, who has a special method of blowing (/spitting) on it, thus cleaning it completely. If all the dough squares don’t fit in the pot, you just roll them up into balls, put them in a smaller pot with some boiling water, roll them in cinnamon sugar, and have them for desert. It’s quite a process, really. And quite delicious. We then sat around the campfire complaining about our stomachs, looking at the stars, and, realizing it was our last night of camping in Africa, decided to stay up really late. It didn’t work out-- we were all in bed before 10 once again.
Nicole