The answer should have been "no!"

With Helen working on-call this weekend, I was invited to go on a "walk" with some of the VSO crowd in town - mainly Jorrit and Jesse, who are both from Holland.

I was expecting this "walk" to be of the Sunday afternoon sort, particularly when the heat is in the high 30's / low 40's, but apparently this is a 10 mile walk (we checked with the GPS) up to the nearest plateau so they can look back over the town.

Exhaustion is too mild a word - I had to stand in a cold shower for ten minutes afterwards just to try and get my body temperature down.

If you look in the photo, Opuwo is the town below the hill - in the distance!

PS, Helen sms'ed me while I was on the "walk" to say that she had helped to deliver baby that was stuck. And she managed to do it without vacuum or forceps - purely by hand. I'm not sure what that means, but I have a picture in my head of her covering the woman's nostrils, and blowing into her mouth!

African Wild-life (2)

In line with our earlier note about wild-life, we thought we would show you something a little closer to home.

We think this little fella is a "Cotton Stainer Bug", is about 3cm long and was found on our dining room wall. It is the most exciting animal from the house we have a photo of - we missed getting a photo of the scorpion, and quite frankly, nobody wants to see a photo of a cockroach!

Hmmm - no wonder my work hasn't started!

African Wild-life (1)

Helen finished her TB course on Friday, and to try and enjoy our last day in Windhoek before we headed back up north, we went to a swimming pool, with a crowd from AIM, in the Daan Viljoen game park on Saturday. A very relaxing day was had by all - except for the fact that a baboon stole the packet of chocolate chip cookies which we had brought with us. It came face to face with Helen who quickly debated whether to try and chase it away, until she realized the size of it.

Later, as we were leaving, we decided to do a quick drive around one of the routes (about 6km) and at one point we turned a corner and came across a herd of giraffe on the road ahead of us. We slowed the car down and drove slowly past them; giraffes on both sides of the car.

Our New Car

So one of the main reasons we are down in Windhoek this week is to try and find a car (the other is because Helen is here for a TB course). After a few days hunting we found the car we wanted, had it checked out by the AA (which they do have here - but not for roadside pick up), made an international banking transfer (thanks John & Pauline for your help with that) and we were driving around Windhoek in our very own Toyota Rav4.

It was exactly the car we were looking for, and at the price that we had roughly budgeted for. So we are very pleased!

What better time to start!

Helen has finally reached that milestone event of turning 30, and so I thought it can only be an appropriate time to start actually trying to do something with this blog (notwithstanding the requests made by certain people - Mr Matthews, you know who you are!).

I've stripped out all the old stuff, which referred to our thoughts on going to Uganda (that seems a long time ago), and with the help of the Windows Live Writer I can now actually do a lot of this off-line, which helps when you only have dial-up.

I'm not sure what you can expect to find here, but hopefully it might give you a little more insight into our lives, and a few more events "as they happen", than the monthly newsletter will do.