Today, we are in Swakopmund, Namibia. It's like we've walked out of the thirdworld and crossed the border into the first world. This may be a small town of 25,000 people or so, but it's the first western town we've been in with all the trappings. From the time we left Malawi things have become more and more developed. Zambia may have had more potholed roads, but you could see the poverty level was less. Livingstone was obviously a major tourist destination. The Zim side was previously more developed, and I suppose still is, but very delapidated and abandoned. Then Botswana was nicer still, with better roads and stores with aisles and aisles of food. I bought a can of Tab and some Tang. Delicious. Absolutely fantastic. But then walking into Namibia was just crazy. The things that we notice are a sign of where we've come through. Street signs, mileage signs, painted lines on the roads, street lights, robots, curbs, parkings spaces, trash cans, glass windows with no bars over them, watered plants, policemen at night, ATMs, mini-blinds, lampshades, tiled floors, the list just goes on and on. I suppose that we'll forget the newness of everything, but right now it is striking.

Today we were supposed to go skydiving, but the weather was not cooperating, so it's been pushed to tomorrow. Swakopmund is a veritable hub of adreline activites. Paragliding, skydiving, quad biking, sandsurfing, etc. We've got a busy day tomorrow of quad biking and skydiving, followed Sunday morning with paragliding. Should be lots of fun. Erin's pretty nervous about jumping out of a plane, but it's all old hat to me. (Or at least that's the facade I put up.)

Wednesday the 1st we stayed at the Cheetah Park, which was odd to say the least. There were 3 tame cheetahs that we sat with and took pictures of ourselves while petting it. Very strange. We all checked out the cheetahs for a bit, and then saw the largest mastiff ever and thought that the dog was probably even cooler than the cheetah, just because no one was really comfortable knowing that this 'tame' animal could just rip you to shreds if he wanted. The cheetahs had names, which was nice. We took pictures with Cindy.

The Cheetah park is actually a working livestock range and guesthouse with an amazing permaculture garden since they're so far away from everything. They take cheetahs from the farms, where they would be shot by ranchers just like ranchers out west shoot wolves, and put them in a large fenced in area. So it's basically a zoo. We hopped on the back of pickup truck and watch the guys throw chunks of zebra into the air as 15 cheetahs collides with teeth and claws bared. These were not the tame cheetahs we were petting earlier. They were the 'wild' ones. But we were only about 4 feet from them and they knew the truck meant dinnertime, so I'm not so sure you can call that wild.

Then yesterday we drove here, passing by Spitzkoppe, which was a pretty cool granite area with some cave painting that were underwhelming. But walking around the area on large rocks and seeing great rock formations was a lot of fun. Then we arrived into town, arranged all our activities for the weekend, and the proceeded to the bar, then another bar, and then the dorm kitchen, and then it was 5am and we had to go to bed before the sun rose or things might not look so rosy the next day. The next day being today.

And as a last note, I have update the overlander pictures with captions, and brought us up to date on the tracking map.