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Category: photographs

Reading the signs (in northern Namibia: #7 in series)

In northern Namibia – and just about anywhere else in Southern Africa – the pictured takeaway food outlet’s “alarming” sign would cause no unease whatsoever, nor would its meaning be unclear.

”Russians” – with or without chips – have long been a great favourite of southern Africans, whether “dining out” or “cooking up” in their own homes.

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Reading the signs (in northern Namibia. #1 in series)

 

 

 

The photo (copyright Doug Spencer, taken on 08 November 2022) shows a typical northern Namibian shebeen.

Signage in northern Namibia often provides visitors with delight…and/or surprise, confusion, bewilderment…

You’ll find no superb photography in this single-image series; almost everything in it was shot “on the fly”, through the window of “our” bus, as it zoomed past one one of many thousands of owner-operated businesses.

All were small, in reality.

However, their signs often “talked big”…

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Waterhole at night, Etosha, northern Namibia (3 of 3: giraffes)

 

Giraffes harvest most of the water they need from the leaves they eat, so they do not need to drink every day.

However, they do need to drink.

On that occasion, the current world’s longest necks are “not long enough”.

As every lion and crocodile knows, the only occasion when it is a good idea to “move in for the kill” on an adult giraffe is when that giraffe is drinking.

Every giraffe is acutely conscious that his or her “killer kick” defence system is entirely disabled whenever s/he has to splay his/her legs to enable his/her neck to reach down far enough to make drinking possible.

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Waterhole at night, Etosha, northern Namibia (2 of 3: rhinos)

 

 

Five rhinoceros species (within which are eleven subspecies) still walk “our” planet’s surface.

All are in trouble; their total number is lower than ever before in human history, and they now walk “freely” only within a tiny portion of their former range, in discrete populations in various National Parks and “Reserves”.

Diceros bicornis, commonly known as the “black” rhino, is the smaller, now rarer – and allegedly, more ornery – of the two African species.

It and Ceratotherium simum – the so-called “white” rhino – are in fact both grey.

The fifth night of November 2022 was a good one for rhino-watchers at the Okaukuejo waterhole; the rhinos’ demeanour was not at all ornery, and they broke only wind – loudly.

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