Otjiwarongo

Two Otjiwarongo brothers on a jumbo jet to India

On the night of 16 September 2022 a Boeing 747 with a tiger’s face painted on its nose took off from Windhoek carrying eight cheetahs and no paying passengers. The main cabin had been altered so the crates could be strapped down where the vets could reach them. Two of the crates held brothers, five and a half years old, from the thornveld east of Otjiwarongo.

Elton, Freddie and the tiger jet

India declared its own cheetahs extinct in 1952. Seventy years later Namibia gave it eight, and the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which works from a 58,000 hectare reserve outside town, prepared them. The brothers came off that reserve. One of the five females had walked into a trap cage on the farm next door in mid 2022, been let go, and was caught there again a couple of months later. The rest came from Erindi, Gobabis and Kamanjab. All eight sat out a month of quarantine and were fitted with satellite collars before the crates were loaded at the centre.

The plane came through Hamish Harding, who ran an aircraft brokerage and was a friend of Laurie Marker’s. He managed the flight himself and went along. The paint job was a coincidence. Nine months later he died on the Titan submersible on its dive to the Titanic.

Marker wrote afterwards that the cheetahs chirped to one another in the night and then mostly slept. The plan had been to land at Jaipur. They came down instead at the air force base at Gwalior, where the crates went into two helicopters, four cats in each, for the half hour to Kuno National Park. The brothers, Elton and Freddie, were let into a hunting enclosure on 5 November. Three days later their first kill was found, a chital, which is a spotted deer that does not live in Africa. They took four in ten days.

Newspaper trees

The cheetah capital of the world is a fair claim, but be clear about what it means. Most of Namibia’s cheetahs live outside the parks, on private cattle and game farms, and the farms around this town have been studied since the early 1990s. For ten years from 1993 researchers radio tracked about fifteen groups here and came out with a minimum of 2.5 cheetahs per 1,000 square kilometres. A three month camera trap survey on the farms below the Waterberg, finished in 2006, took more than 6,800 pictures and put it at twelve. The average home range is about 1,600 square kilometres, much of it bush you cannot see into. Your chance of spotting a wild one from the B1 is close to nil. The cheetahs visitors see are the resident ones at the centre.

Researchers find the wild ones by other means. Cheetahs leave scent on particular trees, usually one with a thick trunk, a wide crown and a view, and keep coming back to the same ones. In Namibia they are called playtrees or newspaper trees. Hang a camera on one and the spots tell each visitor apart, as a fingerprint would. Eli Walker, who later rode in that 747, led the study on why they pick the trees they do. The other method is a dog. Finn, a border collie with a cleft nose from a rescue shelter in Maryland, started work here in 2009 sniffing out cheetah droppings for the researchers. In 2023 he turned sixteen, retired from fieldwork and living at the centre with Marker.

The best known cheetah here was an orphan. Chewbaaka arrived in 1995 at ten days old and lived sixteen years, about twice what a wild cheetah manages. At fourteen he stalked and caught a hare in his enclosure. His DNA went into the cheetah genome study published in 2015, and his portrait hangs at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington.

Expert Africa, which sends people to the lodge on the reserve, says the verandas look across the bush towards the Waterberg and that the morning run is what most guests remember. The travellers’ reports it publishes are mixed on the rest. One family in 2023 called the run spectacular. A couple in 2025 thought the food and rooms average, and one guest in 2024 was put out to find that check-in is at the gift shop.

Termite colonies that breathe like a cow

The termite mounds on the farmland here have had their own scientists. In the mid 2000s a team of engineers and biologists from Britain, the United States and Namibia, with Loughborough University among them, ran a three year project at Omatjenne, the research station outside town. They mixed gypsum with borehole water to take casts and capture the shape of a whole mound, tunnels and all. They were after ideas for buildings that need less power. Their finding was that a mound, which can stand five metres high, is a wind driven machine for airing the nest deep underneath, and that a colony breathes at about the rate of one cow.

The same mounds feed people. After the February rains omajowa mushrooms push out at the base, some as wide as a frying pan and weighing a kilogram. Pickers are told to leave one or two behind so that they come up again the next year.

Crocodiles for Korea, and a banned rocket

The crocodile ranch in town dates from 1980 and was started to hatch young crocodiles for farmers in South Africa. Dieter and Annè Noelle took it over when it was struggling. New Era reported about 6,000 animals there in 2015. By 2022 it was nearer 2,000, because during Covid the owners destroyed eggs instead of raising hatchlings they could not afford to feed or be sure of selling. Skins that once flew from Windhoek straight to South Korea now go through Durban.

Nobody agrees on what the town’s name means. “Beautiful place”, “the nice place where the fat cattle graze” and “the beautiful place with water and green grass for cattle” are all in print. Oom Blok de Wet, whose collection a Travel News Namibia writer was shown around in 2008, kept the toys of his farm childhood: wagons made from warthog, cow and giraffe jawbones, pulled by horses that were cow hooves and knuckle bones. He also had the radio his father got in 1939 for twenty karakul pelts, and a rain rocket of the kind farmers once fired into clouds. His story was that the authorities banned them after one brought the rain down on a neighbour’s land.