A grand day out

I was going to start a bit on the blog on our community and did manage to post some pix of in and around our house. However …
David arrived back from the Rundu trip (altogether 2,200 kms) on Thursday and we have had torrential rains whilst he was away. Friends recommended we go to Ruacana Falls (200 km North of us, on the Angolan Border) because they were in full flow (intead of the usual trickle).
We usually don’t go ‘away’ on our day off as everywhere is really quite a drive and David has often just got back from ‘quite a drive’ and has had enough of being behind a wheel.
But yesterday we packed a picnic and went off. On the way, we stopped at a hollow baobab tree that was used in 1800s by the local tribe to hide women and children from a raiding neighbouring tribe during a 10 year war. Under the German rule (I think), it was a post box. The South African defence forces used it as a holding cell during the war for Independence, and then as a church. Now it remains as a little church. The tinsel is from a recent wedding there! The tree is over 600 years old, 45m high and 38m circumference.
You can also see pix of the flooding we saw along the journey. The language here has a special word for the kind of flood these flood plains of the North get. It is ‘Efundja’. It is the same word used in the Bible for the Flood in Noah’s day.
The Falls were great. We had to pass through the Namibian border post to get there as the Kunene River marks the border with Angola in this area. You will see, when I post the photos, that the Nam border post is MUCH smarter than the Angolan side. And the tar road ends on the Namibian side. Fr those who read the report posted by David when he went to Angola last year, you will know how much the infrastructure in Angola has suffered from the war and has not really recovered at all.
We found a nice pool for the children to play in. One photo looks like they are in the full flow but it is not so, though David is near it. The force of the water was awesome … our own mini Vic Falls. But see how GREEN everything is!
Our water comes via an open canal from the Kunene (there are only occasional outbreak of cholera here, and mainly on the Angolan side) and there is a hydro-electric station there.