Hobbas Camp - Namibia

I spent last night knocking seven shades of sh1t out of my testicles.

Well, I had dinner first. We had mealie-pap – a traditional African dish consisting of ground up corn, mixed with water and cooked to the consistancy of mashed potato. Bland on it's own, but it's traditionally eaten with the right hand, rolling it into a ball, then using it to scoop the various gravies and sauces. We had a meat thing, and a peanuty sate vegetable thing. I asked Lissom, our assistant guide and cook what was in it, expecting a list of ingredients. 'Peanut butter and cabbage', he said. Jamie Oliver eat your heart out.

After dinner, we hit the bar. The barman, Leon, was a Cape Town guy who was working there for a few months, having just come back from an eighteen-month stint in London. It was fantastic to be able to talk to another native English speaker. We got each other's jokes, and everything! It was funny seeing the remarks I've been making that have been sailing over everyone's heads suddenly finding somewhere to land. Anyway, my Swiss bus-mate, Radda, is into 'fire dancing' – that is, swinging two lit balls on chains around in spectacular fashion. She had some new ones that hadn't yet been 'sooted', so I spent half an hour practicing. I'm getting quite good, and I aim to do it with fire by the end of three weeks. I kept smacking myself with them, though. The knocks weren't too bad, until a spectacular double-hit to the nether regions sent me reeling backwards onto the floor, uttering all manner of expletives, to much hilarity from those still drinking in the bar. I crawled back to the table, answering their enquiring stares with, 'It's just the left one. The right one's fine.' It must be something to do with the way, in taylor's parlance, I 'dress'. Anyway, there's a small core of us forming who quite like more than one drink a night, so together with Leon, we played 'Jenga with dares'. Each piece had a handwritten instruction on it. I won't go into details, suffice to say that by ten pm, I was wearing Heidi's jumper, and yelling 'bus!' at our truck (they hate it when you call them busses). Fairly vanilla stuff

So, some of us went cannooing today. There were about eight of us with various levels of fitness and expertise. Watching the two Korean girls, though, was one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. Round and round in circles, they went. It was a leisurely glide down the river, with a couple of 'rapids' that were so torpid they were 'ungraded', according to Leon, who was 'guiding' us. We had a good laugh, mainly at the Koreans.

Anyhoo, we jumped on the truck as soon as we were back at the camp. We headed to the Namibian border, which consisted of a portacabin with a young bloke inside wearing a jacket two sizes too big for him, and with an hilarious photo of 'his excellency' the President on the wall. The road is fairly awful now, and it was a couple of hours to the camp, which was 'sandy', but with a rather cold breeze. We pitched, then headed straight to Fish River Canyon to hike and catch the sunset. The canyon is, apparently, the second deepest in the world and there's an eighty-five kilometer hike you can do in winter. Not in summer, though: it reaches over fifty degrees centegrade at the bottom. We hiked along the edge for twenty minutes, and were met by the truck, snacks, and some beers we'd bought earlier. To be honest, while the canyon is stunning, the sunset was rather hazy, with little contrast. I think it would be great to see it from the other side of the canyon (or, come to think of it, just see the sunrise instead). There was a Dragoman truck there, too, and heard a group of english guys...'So, your first pick is Annelka. Why do you want Annnelka?' To be honest, I think I'm happy to be on the Nomad truck.

And now we're back at camp. We're clicking as a group now, and I can hear lots of laughter outside, round the fire. This trip's beginning to take off. Just need some more engish speakers. We're losing Evie, our kiwi dairy farmer, at Windhoek, but gaining two Australian girls. Whether this is a trade-up, down, or across, remains to be seen...

So it's a twelve hour drive tomorrow – longest of the trip. We're waking up at five. Lucky we had a huge spag bol tonight. There's nothing more important than heavy carb loading when you're going to be sitting on a truck for half a day.