Day 16: Dinosaur Tracks to Wewelsburg camping

We left the camping place in the morning towards Otjiwarango. We wanted to visit the Africat Foundation south of Otjiwarongo and if possible camp there. As we do not have any booking we were not sure whether we will find a camping spot there. Also as it is Namibian holiday time it is highly unlikely to get a place as they are usually heavily booked. When we reached there they said camping is not available but we can still visit the foundation as a day visitor. We decided to do that and we took a 1.5 hour which included an introduction about the foundation, visit to some of the resident cheetah enclosures, medical, feeding enclosures and a museum of stuffed animals of the region.

The area covering the foundation is huge ~ 20,000 hecters, which housed the cheetahs (around 24 of them) and wild leopards. The leopards are the original resident cats of the farm whereas the cheetahs are mostly rescued from other farms. The foundation usually does rescue, rehabilitation and also caring of cheetahs which cannot be released back to the wild. They also run some awareness and educational programs. They have one more sister organisation in the south of Etosha national park which monitors the lions coming out of the Etosha park boundary into the surrounding cattle farms. They help the farmers in building protective fences for their cattle, and also track the problem lions by collaring them.

We had lunch there afterwards and then drove south towards Windhoek. Our initial plan was to camp at Waterberg national park. As if was almost 4 pm as we left the Africats foundation we decided to drive south and camp at some place on the way. On the way we stopped at the Wewelsberg farm north of Okhahandja where they also provided camping place for tourists. The farm had the camping place in the garden, which was nice. The greenery provided a soothing effect to the eyes which was tired of the seeing the dry arid landscape all the time. In the evening we heard some calls from some strange bird. For me it sounded like that from peacocks. Since Africa didn’t have any peacocks we were wondering what the source of the noise is. Surprisingly it was indeed coming from the pet resident peacocks of the farm. They had a couple of male as well as female ones there. Pretty strange to find these beautiful birds in this part of the world!