South Africa is a wonderful place to live, with many tourist attractions and a must visit to everybody here on Steemit. We have one of the most excellent countries …
I was recently invited to join a few friends to visit Rosh Pinah, Namibia, an area next to the Diamond filled “Sperrgebiet”. A 15 hour drive from Pretoria, South Africa passing through the Richtersveld National park.
For those that do not know what the Sperrgebiet is, it is actually a piece of earth filled with rough diamonds. You pick diamonds up from the ground. Obviously you cannot enter the area. It is actually directly translated from German into "Restricted Area"
See image below.
The whole story around the Sperrgebiet is a story for another post. The reason for the trip is that Namibia, like South Africa has the worst drought in many years. The strongest river, in South Africa, the Orange Rive’s mouth is just at the South of Namibia. The mighty Orange River as we in South Africa calls is, is dry!!!
It is just terrible, as this is the source for water to animals in Namibia. So the reason for the trip to Namibia, was to assist with culling some of the animals, to save them from starvation. We are on our way to hunt “Oryx” or Gemsbok (Afrikaans Name). What a beautiful animal!!
These animals cannot survive in droughts like we currently have in Southern Africa. We need rain!!!
It is quite a distance from Pretoria to Rosh Pinah, on not the best roads in the world. Around 10 Hours drive from Pretoria to Uppington, and then another Hour and 30 Minutes to the border. It was my first time crossing an international border with my hunting rifle. It is a bit of a mission as you need an export permit for the weapon at the South African side of the border, then you need an import permit on the Namibian side to take the weapon into their territory.
A lot of paperwork is all I can say.
It took us around an hour and a half to go through the border post. Not too bad if you think you go through the normal Immigration, Customs , then Border Control and the only difference now is that you also need to do the paperwork at the police station.
Finally we went through. We decided to cover a lot of ground during the evening and early morning hours. We went through the border around 01:30 in the morning and we had another 90 minutes to Karasburg, the first town in Namibia. We were driving merrily along and then it happened,
3 Wild Horses crossed the road, and it was too late for us to stop in time!
Needless to say we had a terrible accident. We hit the last of the 3 horses. I will never forget the sight of the horse’s eye, as it felt like it was looking directly at me when we smashed into it at around 50km per hour... I am a huge animal lover especially horses. The horse was badly injured, and who would have thought that the first shot of my rifle would be to take a horse out of its misery.
Now reality start setting in… We are in the middle of a desert, pitch-dark, next to a road with trucks coming at us at around 120 km/hour. It is 3 Degrees Celsius, a dead horse in the road, a vehicle which was damaged beyond repair and cannot be moved.
Surely this was the end of our hunting trip …
But for now I need to get back to work. I will post the rest of the story in a follow up post.
Please follow me at @jacor should you enjoy the read.