I don't know how often I'll be able to post, but I'm going to try to update our blog now and then with news from our trip. Some of this is excerpts from family emails, so the updates might not be very formal.
We picked up Erik Grant in Bloem on Saturday, the 10th of June in afternoon. He is here for a missions internship from Hobe Sound Bible College. From Bloem we drove on 2 hours to Kimberly. We spent the night at the African Evangelical Band mission home there. The missionaries there are Ian and Marezelle Waterson. Ian is a close friend to Jannes van der Merwe. It was my first time to meet his wife. Ian was on an outreach, so he wasn't their. His wife and her mother, who was visiting, graciously gave us a place to stay and breakfast Sunday morning.
In the arid parts of South Africa and Namibia, there are few tall trees for the weaver birds to use for their nests. Instead, they use the telephone poles and build "multi-unit condos" on them. There were hundreds of these as we drove along!
Sunday we drove on to Namibia. The border crossing was uneventful, but not nearly as streamlined as we are used to between South Africa and Lesotho. I think it took more than an hour. We slept last night at Grünau at the Grünau Country House. The budget rooms were clean, plain and affordable. Overall, we were very satisfied with our short stay there and felt we got excellent value for money.
We really enjoyed the interesting scenery along the way. From Kimberly on it was semi arid or desert. Around Upington along the Vaal and Orange rivers there was quite a bit of agriculture in spite of desert like conditions. I was especially surprised to see extensive vineyards. The Khalahari desert of Southern Namibia is very dry. There was some goat farming, but it looked like the only thing to eat was rocks!
Between Grünau and Keetmanshoop we went through some very interesting mountains. Mostly just piles of boulders. It looked like igneous or metamorphic rock. A few miles east the mountains looked more like the sandstone plateaus of the Free State. Wonder if it was some kind of a seam or extrusion. The elevation along the big rivers was less than 3,000 feet but we climbed back up to around 5000 feet in those mountains.
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Both the sunset last night and the sunrise this morning were spectacular. As usual, pictures didn't do it justice.
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| On the 8th of June 40,000 Bibles arrived in Windhoek, Namibia |
In the arid parts of South Africa and Namibia, there are few tall trees for the weaver birds to use for their nests. Instead, they use the telephone poles and build "multi-unit condos" on them. There were hundreds of these as we drove along!
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| Weaver bird nests |
We really enjoyed the interesting scenery along the way. From Kimberly on it was semi arid or desert. Around Upington along the Vaal and Orange rivers there was quite a bit of agriculture in spite of desert like conditions. I was especially surprised to see extensive vineyards. The Khalahari desert of Southern Namibia is very dry. There was some goat farming, but it looked like the only thing to eat was rocks!
Between Grünau and Keetmanshoop we went through some very interesting mountains. Mostly just piles of boulders. It looked like igneous or metamorphic rock. A few miles east the mountains looked more like the sandstone plateaus of the Free State. Wonder if it was some kind of a seam or extrusion. The elevation along the big rivers was less than 3,000 feet but we climbed back up to around 5000 feet in those mountains.
Both the sunset last night and the sunrise this morning were spectacular. As usual, pictures didn't do it justice.
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