Namibia

Most of last week I was in Windhoek working, but I stayed for the weekend and saw a bit of the country near the city. Namibia is the second least-densely populated country in the world (after Mongolia) - two million people in an area six times the size of England. The capital, at 300k inhabitants, is spacious and laid back (and there are low levels of violence; you can actually walk around in the streets without getting mugged), and if you drive twenty minutes in any direction you see.... nobody; and nothing - except trees and bushes. I didn't see any of the famous sand-dunes, as you have to drive a couple of hours west to enter the desert area - so I'll need to go back, as the desert sounds like it's well worth seeing - some dunes are nine storeys high. However I did see a Himba woman, in the centre of Windhoek, which was an unexpected pleasure.

Yesterday my colleague took me to an old German farmhouse an hour out of Windhoek which now caters for tourists; the place was built in 1910 - there's a large community of Germans in Namibia, some of whom, apparently, have a certain, er, nostalgia for a certain period in the past... swastikas are not unknown. To get to this farm you turn off the well-tarmacked highway onto a dirt track, drive for half an hour, ford a small river, then give up at a large river - you then phone the farmhouse to come and get you in a Land Rover, which then takes you through this river - and another one - with water at bonnet level. We were served Oryx steak and then taken out to feed the farm's collection of leopards and the cheetahs, which are kept in very large enclosures - however they're not difficult to see as they hear the Land Rover and come running for their meat. Feeding five cheetahs is spectacular - and more than slightly scarey - as they jump around very close to the vehicle, trying to catch the chunks of meat as the driver throws them - and squabbles break out, with some very loud feline roars and screams. The Land Rover is completely open, so there's nothing to stop these cats actually jumping up and into the vehicle to take a closer look at the buckets of flesh - or the tourists - if they feel like it. (The purists in Timbavati would frown on all of this, of course - this place is a zoo, not a properly run eco-park; so I should probably feel guilty for having been there - but to be honest it didn't cross my mind until now.)

Above: a Himba woman and baby (courtesy of National Geographic, I didn't take a photo of the lady I saw; when I go back I'll go north, where these people live); a young eagle near the farm; a German dining room c. 1910; a leopard; a cheetah waiting to be fed; jumping for dinner; and a weaver bird nest (I learned that there are 18 species of weaver birds in Southern Africa; distinguishing the nests is an advanced form of bird watching....).