{"id":1531,"date":"2016-05-22T07:41:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T12:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/?p=1531"},"modified":"2025-03-01T09:10:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T15:10:38","slug":"summer-camp-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/2016\/05\/22\/summer-camp-is-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Camp Is Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in Windhoek from Scout camp\u2014er, Etosha National Park.<\/p>\n

In mid-May 1983, I became Scoutmaster of Troop 19.\u00a0 Accordingly, mid-May 2016, it\u2019s not surprising that I commemorated this auspicious event by camping\u2014albeit in a \u201crest camp\u201d in a national park in Namibia.<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t get much rest, though, because Etosha National Park is one of the \"\"<\/a>largest preserves in the world.\u00a0 Created in 1907 under the Germans, it was once almost 50,000 square miles.\u00a0 It\u2019s now closer to 15,000, but still substantial.\u00a0 Etosha means \u201cgreat white place,\u201d and it is: one of the major features (about \u00bc of it) is a salt pan, which does fill if there\u2019s enough rain\u2014but hasn\u2019t for nearly 8 years.\u00a0 The salt pan shimmers white, looking for all the world like a distant ocean.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not the salt pan we came to see; it was to work on Nature requirements, and Etosha does have a strong \u201cmerit badge\u201d program.\u00a0 There\u2019s a variety of ways you can study nature:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Go to a museum. Or the National Park variant covered in the story told by Eagle Scout Chris Perillo, who, when we saw an alligator swimming in the \u2018Glades,\u2019 told us he\u2019d just come back from the North Cascades where his family took a nature hike at night.\u00a0 The ranger said she\u2019d been there earlier in the day, and there was an owl\u2014and she pointed her flashlight at the tree, and sure enough the owl was still there.\u00a0 This continued till the end, when she asked Chris to say behind\u2014and carry the stuffed animals back.\u00a0 That\u2019s the origin of my comment about \u201cautomated\u201d or \u201crobotic\u201d or \u201canimals on demand\u201don hikes.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t a problem for us.<\/li>\n
  2. A second variant is to go to a game park. Our guests did this at various stops while we were in our business visits, and got some great pictures feeding cheetahs.\u00a0 You\u2019re sure to see animals, which is also true if you go to a zoo.<\/li>\n
  3. The private preserves like I went to last year (adjoining Krueger National Park in South Africa) offer a different blend. Lots of animals, but they\u2019re like fish in the sea.\u00a0 The sea has a lot of fish, but you can\u2019t always find them.\u00a0 At Sabi-Sabi, the driver plus tracker were radioed in to other vehicles, though, and we were able to spot lots of wildlife, and because it was a private preserve, pursue them off the road.<\/li>\n
  4. Etosha was a great challenge (and excitement, really) because you never knew what you were going to see, and you couldn\u2019t go off road in pursuit.You might be fortunate enough to have an old bull elephant almost close enough to touch as he went across the road, which our vehicle did, or see a leopard dragging a kill, which some of our other trekkers did.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I chose plan A, which was to have \u201conly\u201d three game drives\u2014but one was from 6:15 am until 5:30 pm, and took us from our rest camp across to the other end of the park.<\/p>\n

    It was easy enough to meet the requirement to identify 10 different animals, and here are some we saw:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>Lots of antelope.\u00a0 Some of their relatives we had for dinner, since they\u2019re vegetarians and generally at the bottom of the predator food chain.\u00a0 I know why lions love impala (I do too), oryx (on the Namibian seal, but also on the menu as schnitzel or lasagna), kudu (menu item, too, but a big one), and the South African rugby team mascot, the springbok.<\/p>\n

    The bigger mammals.\u00a0 The giraffe has an lovely gait, and it was just fun to\"\"<\/a> watch them.\u00a0 They move both left legs at the same time, then the two right legs\u2014so they\u2019re always in step, but I wonder why they don\u2019t topple.\u00a0 Other animals like to hang around with them because they can spot the carnivores a long distance away, and that\u2019s a plus.\u00a0 The black rhino, who have bad eyesight, (and are an endangered species partly because they can\u2019t see the poachers) are just one of the animals with a symbiotic relationship with giraffes.<\/p>\n

    The others:\u00a0 I said our group didn\u2019t see many cats, but we saw their followers\u2014the jackals and hyenas that our guide called \u201ccowardly,\u201d but I think they\u2019re smart\u2014like people, they let others get the food for them; the \"\"<\/a>honey badger, that looks like a skunk and inhabited our campground going from garbage can to garbage can; the banded mongoose, who scurried from a furtive feast in a termite hill when we stopped to photograph them, like boys caught doing something wrong; zebras all over the place, looking like painted horses; and the wildebeest and warthogs. I thought we ought to have an \u201cugliest\u201d contest, but they\u2019d probably all enter\u2014and all win.\u00a0 Check out wildebeest and see whether you think all babies are beautiful.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>The highlight for me\u2014as those of you who know me might guess\u2014was the discovery at the east entrance of the park of the original German fort, built in 1907 to block the entrance of diseased cattle into German lands.\u00a0 It\u2019s now a hotel in that rest camp.<\/p>\n

    Well, summer camp is over, I\u2019ve completed my Nature requirements, so I think I\u2019ll go on a high adventure trip to Ethiopia.\u00a0 That begins tomorrow morning, as my new best friends scatter, some going home, some staying in Africa for more adventures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Back in Windhoek from Scout camp\u2014er, Etosha National Park. In mid-May 1983, I became Scoutmaster of Troop 19.\u00a0 Accordingly, mid-May 2016, it\u2019s not surprising that I commemorated this auspicious event by camping\u2014albeit in a \u201crest camp\u201d in a national park in Namibia. We didn\u2019t get much rest, though, because Etosha National Park is one of … Continue reading “Summer Camp Is Over”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa-2016"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8422,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions\/8422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}