The last generation?

At the end of August and beginning of September, my grown-up married daughter who lives in the UK, in the very pleasant rural western county of Devon, came out to visit with her husband and her two children, the first time in Namibia for her children - my grandchildren - and the first time in 9 years for them.  So recent, yet as time rushes by, seemingly so long ago - the sole memento of their visit being my grandson's punctured football still lying in the garden - my garden unfortunately being replete with spiky cactus plants.

They did all the normal tourist things, accompanied by me - and of course we went to Etosha, which I myself had not been to for ages.  This is the best time of year, the end of the dry season, with animals clustering around the few waterholes, and no white mud which sets like cement in the engine compartment of your car! The amount of animals we saw was phenomenal - being literally mobbed by hundreds of zebras, and later, a quartet of lions sitting idly by the side of the road with two perched on top of a small bridge, just like carvings at the entrance to some stately home, and nobody in sight.  Then, as a finale, we almost literally ran into a herd of elephants, on the normally uneventful tar road exiting the park via the Anderson gate. 

The most moving image for me was at the Halali waterhole late one night.  From out of the darkness into the patch of yellow sodium light around the inky black patch of water came an elephant and a rhino.  They drank, almost motionlessly -  for large animals does time run slower? - for half an hour.  Again, there was nobody else watching - it was past the bed time of most doughty tourists.  Then, equally slowly, they turned and walked solemnly away, the rhino first, then the elephant, until the darkness swallowed them.  Was this a melancholy metaphor for extinction, and will my grandchildren be the last generation to see these monumental beasts in the wild?

We are lucky to live in a country where, just a few hours drive from the capital city, such sights can still be seen, and where poaching is to some extent controlled.  My suggested solution to the rhino horn trade is to manufacture a synthetic horn - if synthetic diamonds now can routinely be produced I cannot see how this could be so difficult - indistinguishable from the original article, and then flood the market with it.

On the way back to Windhoek we took a detour to see the dinosaur footprints, about 60 km off the B1 between Otjiwarongo and Okahandja, on a farm which regrettably I cannot spell or pronounce.  The farm is very isolated, owned by an eccentric German couple, as you might expect.  Yet again, not another soul was around.  You take a short walk to a sandstone river bed, and all of a sudden, quite unmistakeably, there are a set of three-toed tracks leading down into the grass, and a short distance away, a set of smaller tracks, which I took to be the footprints of a baby animal.  Not so, they were made by two completely different species of dinosaurs.  The impressions, in darker stone, look like tracks in the mud made only yesterday, but it is numbing to realise that the animal which left the marks did so 200 million years ago.  Have you seen anything 200 million years old?  

The same strands of life - literally, the DNA, connects eons of life in Africa, except of course it wasn't even Africa then but Gondwanaland - a vast chunk of continent comprising Africa joined to South America.