Boxing day meant time to move on! Sleeping and eating in the lodge for the last few days had been exactly what we needed but our bank balance was telling us its time to return to camping!

Getting middle man dressed we noticed he was covered in bites! They were everywhere from his cheeks to his toes.  Well over 50 bites, he had fallen out his mosquito net last night but surely they all couldn’t be mosquito bites?! He also admitted to playing with an ants nest but insists they didn’t bite him? Either way he was in for an itchy few days 😦

The journey to our next stop Nata Lodge was pretty uneventful,  the salt pans we drove through would have been impressive had we not been spoiled by Etosha. We had a pleasant lunch stop at the Planet Baobab as all the shops so far had been shut.

On reaching Nata we found a small corner shop open. It didn’t sell much but we stocked up on water,  bread and beans for the next couple of days.

The drive had been very hot, I think Middle Man described it perfectly when asking ‘Are we nearly there?… Its boring hot’. We were relived when we reached Nata lodge and it was great, probably the best of the trip.

The campsite was very sandy, even before we had finished setting up the tent the boys looked feral. They spent the next two days looking that way as they played in the sand. Building roads, castles and play fighting.

Mum described Middle Man as Mowgli in the below picture:

There wasn’t much to do around Nata, as we found out on one drive when all we discovered was the entrance to a mine. But the boys didn’t care, they loved playing in the sand and swimming in the pool.

One morning we did wake up to the porch full of ants. Middle Man was rightly weary hopefully having learnt his lesson. His bites seemed to increase in number over the first day meaning a very uncomfortable night spent rolling all over the tent and us. But a couple of days and lots of cream later they were gone. And it was time to move on again.