A cultural visit

Welcome to Ongula Homestead! After driving the hardest roads of Namibia we headed toward Ongula Homestead covering 293km in total. The landscape quickly changed before our eyes.  The vast and unpopulated landscape quickly evaporated into a dense and chaotic atmosphere. The driving for me has become increasingly more dangerous. I now had to concentrate on the moving objects that were scattered along the road; most of them being donkeys, cattle and goats. At the same time more and more people would appear and were randomly crossing the road without giving much thought to the passing traffic. Boy do these people believe in God! Soon we were close to our destination and I began to relax.  This of course was the wrong thing to do. As we exited two more roads which were considered D roads we then saw a sign that sent us once again into desert driving. The sandy road at first seemed to be okay, but within minutes the road became a crazy deep off road with multi-lanes of deep sand with sparetic signs of encouragement guiding us the way to the homestead.  It became increasingly more difficult since they had a rainstorm the night before leaving pools of sand and mud at many of the turns. In the end we were successful and Selma our hostess was impressed since she said most of the guests get stuck and have to be pulled out. The biggest surprise to most of the Namibia people that we have met are all assuming that Frank is the driver and are always surprised to see a woman getting out of the driver seat. We had a wonderful place to sleep with authentic African style food from this region. 

The tour of the cultural experience was a vacant village where two or three women played the various roles displaying the type of work which is done within the tribe.  We both left with the feeling that we had visited a fake Chinese communist village or a former DDR cultural center. Our favorite part was that a group of young girls sang and danced for us and then talked a bit about their schools. Then the next morning we then had to make our way out again through the desert which had turned to quicksand due to the rain fall that happened in the night.  Thank god we didn’t get stuck and as we slowly made our way to the Elegant Guest house.  Here is where we met a woman whose grandfather started Helmringshausen and explained a bit about the politics of Namibia. Born and raised here in Namibia she hopes she will never be forced to leave. In fact her family has plans to try to buy the farm back if possible. From there we returned to Windhoek, we returned the car after filling it with gas and much to our surprise they hardly inspected our muddy vehicle.  We had accomplished our self-driving section of our tour covering 5000 km. Spending one night at the Oliver Grove we then flew off to our next adventure Entebbe Uganda.