Damn, it’s been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to post here. In that time, I’ve made almost a full trip across the world, from Africa, to Hong Kong, and back to Canada. I won’t post about all my travels here, but I’ll recap some moments I found most memorable…

We spent three nights in Swakopmund, Namibia’s adventure capital. The first day, we decided to go for a camel ride; we were in the desert so it seemed appropriate. We sign up for a 45-minute ride in the desert, or so we imagined based on the flyer we were given. However, when we arrive at the “camel farm,” some batty old woman who appears to owns the place (some house off the highway with camels, dogs, chickens, and tortoises) tells us we only get 20 minutes because “everyone wants to ride the camels.” Finally, we wait our turn and get on the camels. I ask the old crone to take a picture of us and she says, “I’ll take a video instead!” which eats up way more battery life. She claims she’s filming us and, a couple minutes later, she says the camera has turned off. I check and sure enough the battery is dead. “Well, at least you have the video!” she says. I go to check the thing after—no damn video. I yell out, “What the hell was she doing the whole time then, just staring at a blank screen!?” Suddenly, she appears behind me and has heard my entire tantrum. Whatever, the old bat deserves to get kicked in the camel toe.

Camel debacle aside, we signed up to go ATV-ing and sandboarding back to back the next day. Quadbiking was amazing! The boy got a manual ATV, while his brother and I, lacking the proper hand-eye coordination to work a shifter, opted for the automatic ones. We couldn’t go as fast as the boy could over the hills, but I sure did try to. Many times I felt my ATV wasn’t able to hit the top of the hill and then started sliding down the hill sideways. Scary, but not as scary as when I came down a hill too fast, swerved to make a turn and got thrown from my ATV. I landed on my left side and smacked my head on the ground. Good thing I was wearing a helmet! I kind of thrashed around on the sand for a bit, in some pain and checking that all my limbs were in good shape. Then, I broke the cardinal rule of all accidents and stood up. Turns out I was fine, so I hopped back on my ATV and continued driving up the big hills, only not as high as I was originally going at them.

If I thought falling off an ATV was painful, I learned even more pain sandboarding three hours later. I’ve tried snowboarding once before at Mount Baker and found it pretty damn hard. Sandboarding was a bit easier on the body, but I could not turn my board for the life of me without toppling over for the first hour. On my last run, which was pretty steep, I finally got the hang of it and didn’t fall down. Success! I possess functioning motor skills!