What is Tafelling I hear you ask.  Tafelling is the new word for what was once called "a shower beer".  All those who once were good, young footballers at The Mount, early 90's, would understand what a shower beer is.  A Tafel was just an opportunitic word that popped up in conversion when I took one into the shower with me at The Cheetah Park.  It has since stuck.  But in true Demtel style, wait there more.  It has already evolved to include pretty much everything that we do and see on this trip.  Eating breakfast: good tafel this morning (bacon, eggs, whatever).  Drinking: how many tafels?  Toilet: I'm off to tafel.  It's become the word of the trip.

After Swakopmund we ventured back into the namib desert to a place called Spitzkoppen.  The drive was shit, nothing to see but the place had a great magical feel to it that just needed some exporation.  Didn't happen though, too tafelled (see above).  Altough the sunsets that have followed us at the end of everyday so far pailed into comparision with the one that occured here.  Unfortunately we hadn't seen anything remotely dangerous on this trip up till this moment ... but that was about to change.  Today we went to see the Cheetahs.  On this farm, the owner has spent the last 20 years trying to save Cheetahs that have been found in the wrong locations.  During this time he has also raised Cheetahs from birth that are quite happy to be petted.  Honestly there seem to be just like big tabby cats with big round eyes that could tear your throat out if they wanted to.  Thank god they didn't.

Etosha National Park is the first great African Park that we were to visit on this epic Safari.  What we 'could' see left me frothing at the mouth; what we 'did' see was almost as good.  Once again Zebra and Springbok dominated the animal count, giraffe coming in third and everything else some way off.  But we did get our first glimpse of a wild Elephant and I managed to see my very first Rhino.  Man they are walking tanks!!  Head held low, ploughing though the undergrowth, nothing stopping it.  Awesome.  This afternoon game drive wasn't enough for Audrey and myself so we jumped on the night time drive as well.  This was my first one that I have ever done and I didn't really know what to expect.  A slow drive and a lot of dark is pretty much it and if you do see anything it really is just an utter fluke.  So when we came across a pride of 10 lions out on the hunt it made my day, or night as you will.

We spent the next day doing a full game drive though Etosha and came across a single female Lion feeding on an unfortunate Zebra, dead of course.  The male came wandering across our path on the way to claiming his share, along with 27 Jackals, and it was wonderful to watch nature at it best.  I hope to see more of it in the following weeks.

Well we are off to Windhoek tomorrow.  The beer is terrible, lets hope the town is not ...