Pre-historic carvings & petrified forest

One huge advantage of this trip is that the kids experience life, geography, and history at 1st hand. For example, in Oscar's class, they have a book about the life of children in an African village. He has been able to visit real children in real homes in Kenya and Namibia. A lot is changing, and he sees that too, in a way that books can never keep up with.

Today, we had 1st hand lessons from two very different periods. The 1st was the era of the bushmen (4000-8000) years ago. The 2nd was the forests of 280 million years ago.

In North West Namibia, there are several sites with bushmen carvings. I had relatively low expectations of what we would see, but I have to say I was utterly wrong. The carvings in sandstone are in magnificent condition, and better they show genuine skill and have meaning. There are maps showing the location of water, there are many pictures of giraffe that they considered to have special powers to bring rain, there are priests dressed as giraffe, and there are carvings of animal footprints used to educate young hunters. Quite incredible.

In the same area, there is a petrified forest with trees from 280 million years ago. Huge trees more than 30m long. They are also thick and were three or four hundred years old when a glacier pushed them over and moved them hundreds of miles south. You can still see the bark and the rings. It is also incredible that all the original organic material is gone and replaced by various crystalline stones.

We end the afternoon with a 200km drive to the next camp, which for once is a moderately bad road, i.e., one you would never drive on in Europe. We get to the camp just 30 minutes after a magnificent sunset. En route, I spotted a 🦒 and shouted to everybody to look. In my excitement, I did not see three more Giraffes and just missed crashing into a large bull. He also got a bit of a scare and ran off.Читать далее