Kelly had a great idea earlier this year. We started putting dots on a highway map of Namibia to show where we had stayed the night or visited. Pink dots for night stays and yellow dots for visits or tourist stops during the day.
We had three groups visit us in Namibia, so those trips added to the dots. Some dots had little "L"'s or "T"'s on them to show that was a place that Larkin or Tristan stayed the night without the rest of us.
Not including our house in Windhoek or our initial hotel in Windhoek, we have stayed at 37 different places in Namibia during the year. Eight of those are "Larkin only" (mostly communal conservancy research and Polytechnic excursions with students) and one is a "Tristan only" site (his school excursion).
In addition to these 37 lodges/camps/farms/guest farms, our map has 29 yellow dots indicating major stops to visit some kind of tourist site or other destination. This does not count all of the tourist destinations in Windhoek or nearby.
The gaps in our map (no dots) are the Kalahari in southeastern Namibia, the far northwest region of Namibia up near Angola, the area around Fish River Canyon in the far south, and the area in far eastern Namibia, below the Caprivi. We made it to Zambia and Botswana, but not South Africa. You have to leave some for next time, right?!
We had a goal, when we came to Namibia, of seeing the country. I designed my research to get us away from Windhoek and out around this diverse country. Kelly set an aggressive budget agenda to save money for traveling. I think we met our goal! I doubt we can say we've stayed in that many places or seen that many destinations in our home state of Nebraska!
No comments:
Post a Comment