So after 2 days of traveling, having finally reached Katima, Jemma and Glenn lead us down the sand path through the bush to their house in the Zambezi Fish Farm. At the first sight it’s very sweet; the outside walls are painted light green and the roof is thatched. It’s not exactly thatching as we know it, more of a thin layer of dried grass over a wooden structure. The door is locked with a padlock that holds a metal bar across the inside of the door. Stepping into the house there is the kitchen, which comprises of a sink, one cupboard and a small wooden counter that is attached to part of a tree that grows through the centre of the floor. On the other side of the counter is the living room, which has two entire walls from waist height to the roof with just open space; it‘s so hot in Katima all year round that it‘s largely pointless having a completely enclosed house, plus it‘s cheaper than using glass. Instead of being windows there are metal grids (for security) which are covered with mesh to stop the bugs swarming you. It does have a few holes in the mesh so it doesn’t always work so well for the latter. Then to the right of the living room is the bedroom (which does have glass in the windows) and the bathroom. The bathroom has the usual sink and toilet, with a small extra tiled room for the shower which is basically a hose with a shower head on the end pinned into the ceiling. When you use the shower you get an electric shock from the taps, it definitely keeps you on your toes. From this room there is a metal grid door leading to an open air room with a bath. It took me quite a while to have to guts to use the bath, as Jemma informed me that about a week before we arrived there was a killer bees nest underneath it. It’s very homely (mainly because of Jemma’s hangings etc) and has a nice comfortable feel to it despite the concrete floor and lack of ceiling. When you look up you can see the wooden structure of the house and the underneath of the thatch.
The Zambezi Fish Farm used to be a working fish farm but is now more of a residential plot. It’s mostly bush with houses scattered about in between. There is a set of stables with 6 horses and loads of overgrown dams remaining from when it was still a working farm. It has a huge wire fence surrounding it which is alarmed and also electric (I found out the hard way). Being so close to the Zambezi, you tend to get people swimming across the river from Zambia to come and steal things. It’s quite common for people to steal things they need; cutlery, car tyres, crockery etc. While I was there we woke up one morning to find that they had stolen 2 wheels from the car, alloys and all. We think they were going for all four but must have got disturbed. They also nicked half of the Cluedo set, a bottle of vodka and two chairs that we’d left in the garden. Apparently they’d cut a hole in the surrounding fence, I’m not entirely sure how they got round the alarm and electric shock.
Having had a tour of the house we settled down on our first night in Namibia to catch up on all the gossip. Mum and I hadn’t seen Jemma since January and it was the first time we’d met Glenn so there was a lot to catch up on. I was sat by the back door (which was open) stroking Henry the cat. After a while I noticed him buckling and slowly backing away from me. I turned around to see what he was scared of and there was a snake slowly making it’s way towards me. It was less than a meter away. Having never been particularly bothered by snakes I merely pointed at it and said “oh look, a snake”. Glenn jumps up from his seat and shouts at me to get the hell away from it as it’s a Puff Adder. Mum’s trying to peer round the table to get a look at it with Jemma dragging her backwards. I pick up Henry and move into the kitchen while Glenn grabs an axe and tries to persuade it to go back out the house. With all the commotion it decides to turn around and head back out, until it comes face to face with Oscar, the other cat. Oscar’s a tiny little female cat but seems to lack a sense of fear, no matter how big the thing she’s facing (she seems to think that a huge water monitor is no match for her, much to the distress of Jemma). Glenn has no choice but to kill the snake (it’s either that or Oscar’s going to die) so he brings the axe down on it. It turns out that dead snake smells really bad, it took days to get rid of the smell. On the bright side the appearance of the Puff Adder meant that the Black Mamba must have gone from the roof as snakes tend to be territorial. It was a real shame we had to kill it, especially as it was only a baby but regardless of my love for all living creatures (apart from bugs) I think I’d rather kill the snake than watch it kill the cat.
The novelty of the house wore off after a few days when I’d be sat reading my book and bugs would drop out of the roof into my hair. In the first few weeks of me being in Namibia it was unbearably hot, at one point it reached 51 degrees. The heat brings out the cicadas which are huge beetle like things that have clear stained glass type wings. They are harmless but seem to love flying into me, I really hate them. Glenn thought it was hilarious to catch them and shake them at me (when they‘re threatened they make a horrible scream like noise), watching me shriek with terror and run away. Oscar seems to think it’s great fun to lie on her side and bat them with her paw, she tends to lose interest when she’s killed them enough to stop screaming though. To add to the cicadas there seem to be hundreds of different types of wasps. They are less aggressive than our wasps but have dangly legs that are a bit creepy. The sort of fly around aimlessly, not really knowing where they want to go. With the house being quite open all of the bugs make their way in. There were hundreds of crickets, frogs, dung beetles, wasps, bees, flies, millipedes, centipedes, beetles and not to mention spiders. The bugs are absolutely huge as they don’t need to use their energy to heat themselves so they use it to grow instead. The worst of all are definitely the Huntsman spiders. They are huge, horrible quick moving things that scuttle across the floor. They are also harmless but when one’s around I tend to stand on the sofa and refuse to get down until it’s been dealt with. We think we have found a fail safe way of figuring out if something is poisonous; if I run away screaming it’s harmless, if it doesn’t scare me it’s poisonous. Also on the first night I noticed a spider sat next to me on the floor, it wasn’t particularly big so didn’t really bother me. I picked up a piece of paper and prodded it to see if it would run away, then Glenn’s huge foot appeared and squashes it. He had a quizzical look and commented “that was poisonous!?!” I think he had worked out by this point that I’m not the best judge of dangerous creatures.
When the rainy season started in mid November there were non stop thunder storms and torrential downpours. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole sky is constantly flashing with lightning for hours on end and the rain is so heavy that the noise is deafening. Another joy of the thatch is that it tends to leak. Oh and as well as the rain causing the electricity to go out it also causes the termites to hatch. There are thousands of them flying around every time it rains. They’re horrible little things and are equipped with wings for one flight to find somewhere to go and build a nest. There would constantly be a swarm of them climbing the mesh of the windows, unfortunately they would usually find a hole to break through so we would have loads of them flying around the house. Once they’ve landed their wings fall off so on top of the creepy little gits crawling along you would also find disgusting wings everywhere. The first night it happened I spent hours squashing them until I decided I was fighting a losing battle. After that I just kind of got used to them. Apparently if you fry them and eat them they taste a bit like butter.
I think I’m definitely not cut out for the ‘wildlife’ of Africa. I spent every evening securely tucking in my mosquito net, not to avoid the mosquitoes (although they did seem to enjoy my foreign blood and I have the scars to prove it) but to be sure that no spiders could come crawling across me while I was asleep.
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