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Published: December 1st 2007
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The Orange River
Swimming on the border between SA and Nam I don't like camping. I like hotels with soft mattresses and big fluffy duvets and en suite bathrooms with power showers and flat screen TVs with numerous cable channels and tea and coffee making facilites and minibars and biscuits in cellophane wrappers and room service and your bed made up every day by someone else. Memories of camping on family holidays still give me the shivers, and I swore never ever to do it again.
It therefore came as quite a surprise to a lot of people, not least me, that I spent five of the last seven nights with Gemma lying on the ground with only a thin mattress and sleeping bag for protection, in a two man tent made from canvas that didn't have any room to stand up in, and where a trip to the toilet meant a torch, a long trek, and a shared ablution block.
We set off last Sunday morning from Cape Town in an "overland truck": our transport came in the form of a converted freight container, with windows and comfy seats and room below for all our bags and other bits and pieces, painted a military shade of green. We shared
Truck Gets Puncture
Cook Franco swings into action to fix it. it with a host of Aussies and Kiwis, a smattering of Americans, a couple of Swiss, a brace of Germans, a pair of Portuguese, two other Brits, a Spaniard, a Japanese and a South Korean: the First World on the move, through the outposts of the Third. Our tour leader was a South African lady, and we also had an African cook and driver.
Our first couple of nights were spent on the South African side of the border. The highlight was canoeing down the Orange River, which for a long stretch forms the border with Namibia. We were even able to swim "abroad" and back. There was a wonderful bar overlooking the river and across to the red-tinted mountains on the far side. We saw a scorpion scuttling across the bar floor, and were always reminded to zip up our tents tight in the evening and check our shoes before putting them on.
Namibian border formalities were pretty straightforward, though the guide had some fun with my passport. "You are from London? That is where Wembley Stadium is. You know that England lost 3-2 to Croatia there? Not in European Championships? Ha ha ha!" He was only
repeating what the Germans and even the bloody Aussies had gleefully taken every opportunity to say. Thanks, Steve McClown...
Tuesday to Friday involved four, five, six hours driving every day through Namibia to reach each day's campsite, from which we could conclude that Namibia is a spectacularly empty country. It only has 1.8 million people and there is a statistic to the effect that there is only one person per square kilometre or something like that. Frankly, I can only say I am surprised it is that many. A whole day's driving would pass by and we would either see no signs of habitation whatsoever, or at most a tiny, backwater mining town or farming concern. Most of the way, we were just passing through arid, parched desert or semi-desert.
It is, though, a very beautiful country: the changing colours of the sands and the dunes at different times of the day, the rugged grandeur of the mountains, the ever-powerful sun. It's lovely and warm, but because it is so dry - pretty close to zero humidity - there are no mosquitoes or other bugs and thus no need to spend the day and night plastered in DEET,
Gemma of the Desert
On the top of Dune 45 nor do you find yourself dripping with sweat whenever you move.
Highlights have included the Fish River Canyon, which is the second biggest in the world and has to be seen to be believed. The "river" itself is completely dry, although apparently in winter there are occasional rains and a torrent can then rush through it.
We also had a great desert walk with a "bushman" in Sossusvlei, home of huge sand dunes, and one of the driest places on earth. He explained to us how life survives in the desert. Just a few drops of water brought an apparently dead "ostrich plant" back to life. He rummaged around in a spiky bush and picked out a tiny lizard - they can provide you with enough protein to survive for a couple of days in an emergency. A green, pod like plant could be squeezed and turned into a source of drops of water. His ability to locate spider's nests by following tracks in the send, or to identify people by their footprints, was amazing. He took us to "Dead Vlei", where nothing has lived for 600 to 900 years, and all there is are the stumps of
Camping - The Proof
Proof that I really was under canvas tree trunks standing in a salt pan. A little further down the road, we struggled our way to the top of "Dune 45" - 45 kms from Sossusvlei and 45 dunes from Sesriem, or it may be the other way round - and watched the sunset.
We're now in Swakopmund, which after the rest of Namibia is really rather odd: a modern, and indeed very well appointed town (thank the German colonists), coastal and cloudy. We've "sandboarded" this morning (still washing the sand out), and I'm quad biking tomorrow - Swako is known as something of a desert adventure playground. We're here until Monday, when we leave our tour group, who are a good bunch who have bonded well, behind and travel on to Windhoek, from where the next blog will probably come.
And, praise the Lord, here in Swako we have beds with a nice duvet and a mattress and many of the things I listed above. I survived the camping, and even slept a few hours most of the nights. Bonding with the group over breakfast, lunch and dinner round the camp fire was fun. But at the end of the day, there's no substitute for
Climbing Dune 45
On the way to the top the comforts of civilisation. Why let all that evolution go to waste?
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