Girls on the Road


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Africa » Namibia » Fish River Canyon
July 3rd 2013
Published: July 8th 2013
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The other morning I woke up early, really early. The purpose of this exercise was to see a sunrise, namely that over the very large ‘Fish River’ Canyon in Namibia, and it meant that at 04:45 we were up and folding away our rooftop tent for the first time ever. The intuitive will deduce from this that we had just slept in it for the first time ever, and the morning report to each other came back that the sleeping conditions were very acceptable for on top of a Toyota, a sigh of relief what with that tent being central to our sleeping plans for the next seven months. The morning report was also good from our stomachs, which had just digested our first attempt at a campsite dinner. Gas canisters still not filled, and with no fresh meat (and probably not brave enough to attempt a fire yet), we made do with some things we could throw together. So on our first night we had toasted with a metal bowl full of pilchards in tomato on top of a bed of creamed sweetcorn. This dish was a cold purple sludge that occasionally produced a pilchard spine and which actually tasted divine. Ish. The wine probably helped. We drove the bumpy 10k from the campsite to the canyon viewpoint, somehow arriving half an hour early, and waited. We were both tired, both hungry, and both wondering why as two heterosexual mates why we had bothered. The answer came at sunrise. It was an amazing sight, the concentrated red glow on the horizon that hung like a bullseye before exploding into the top half of the dartboard was quite something, and we sat quietly and appreciated it. Appreciating done, we were still tired, so returned to the campsite and fell asleep. Rooftop tent put away, Dan opted for the driver’s seat in the sun and I for a bench in the shade and a nice cool breeze. When we both awoke an hour later, Dan was boiling, and I was about fifteen seconds away from being the newest plaything of a large male baboon which had crept its way to within meters of where I was sleeping, scarpering when I sat up, and in doing so giving me just the smallest of frights. It then proceeded to sit, yawning and scratching itself about twenty meters away from us, the way it sat leaning on a rock with its arms folded and rested on its knee’s was so incredibly human that I sat transfixed watching, half expecting it to turn and ask me what I was doing up so early.

We hit the road, bound for the other end of the canyon 70km away to a place called Ai-Ai’s where hot springs bubble up into the dessert and tourists and locals alike happily sit in them. What many people do is hike the canyon, a grueling five day hike along the river from the viewpoint to Ai-Ai’s with the hot springs as a cherry on top of the achievement. As I said, we drove, it took an hour and a half and we got to listen to the Beatles whilst sitting down the whole way. One thing that struck us about Fish River was how un-river like it was, in the fact that there was no water. Namibia is a semi-dessert country, and one which is currently in drought; many places haven’t seen rain for over two years with none forecasted until next year. When you hike the canyon you live off the water in the river, and with no water, there can be no hikes, and we were a little annoyed that we could have got away with not doing it even if we had planned to. But how we arrived was un-important, there deep in the rocky landscape in the natural pools we sat, for a few days, watching the big families of Baboons walk single file high on the cliffs. In the evenings we made friends with groups of older South African tourists who saw sympathetically how new we were to the camping scene, ‘come to our camp for a braai later?’ they asked, ‘ok then’ we replied, and we’d spend evenings eating beautifully cooked meats while watching the host, Pete, not let his wife anywhere near the task of cooking. It was here we learned just how much you could pack into a car; beds, fridges, freezers, ice machines, awnings, tables, chairs, and enough cubby holes (fashioned by Pete himself) to hold every condiment known to man with enough space left for a few machetes. As a man who likes things neat and tidy, it was a revelation, and as I jealously nosed through Pete’s beautifully kitted and packed 4X4, gradually idolising him more and more, I felt myself getting older.

We were taken aback by how keen people were to help you plan a route; you couldn't mention the intended journey north without someone getting out a map and pointing out the best bits of the country and the most picturesque roads, then gifting you the map. It would be positively rude to ignore this great advice we thought, so this is what the next week consisted of, and I don’t think either of us were ready for the scale of what was coming. Namibia is a big place, three and a half times the size of Great Britain, and it boasts other interesting numbers. The population of Britain is 62,300,000; that of Namibia a tiny 2,100,000. That means you have a lot less people over a much greater area, small pockets of population linked by long straight roads that disappear into the horizon, flanked by mountains and vast arid plains. In good old GB we make our way around on 250,000 miles of lovely smooth tarmac roads, in Namibia they have only 40,000 miles of road, and a mere 4,800 are tarmac. After tar there are four other classifications of road, all varying degrees of gravel, bumps, rock, bumps, sand, bumps and salt, lumpy salt. We had been assured many times that Namibian roads are some of the best in Africa, but they still take some getting used to. ‘How the f*ck these could be the best in Africa?’ we found ourselves wondering aloud, a stage on reflection I think of as denial, and denial lasted a good few days. Then came acceptance, and it’s in acceptance we found that it’s better to bomb along them at 110km an hour, floating gracefully rather than bumping over rocks, sometimes listening to the prodigy at full blast, a big grin on your irresponsible face. Another thing you notice about the roads is that largely, nobody uses them; ‘maybe it’s because of the bumps’ we wondered, though it could be that it’s so bloody far to anywhere, but you can drive for hours without seeing another car. The sensation of stopping in the middle of the main motorway through the middle of the country in the middle of the day, getting out and sitting on the roof admiring the view for twenty minutes and not seeing another car is as alien as it is exhilarating, and we made plans to try it one day on the M4 between Bristol and Cardiff.

We worked our way through the increasingly German country. Places like Luderitz, Aus, and Swakopmund, which would have you eating Schnitzels, Stroganoff, and Eisbein with Sauerkraut. We climbed the blood red sand dunes of Sossusvlei, watched wild horses roam the plains, explored the sand filled buildings of an old diamond mining ghost town, looked at ancient rock carvings, tried sandboarding and quad biking the dunes, and gawped daily as we drove at how the landscape could produce so many stunning variations of dry and desolate. A week later we eventually made it to the capital, Windhoek, and it was at our hostel in Windhoek that the world fell out of our communal arse. We went in our minds from two guys on a big crazy journey driving through southern and eastern Africa to a couple of guys on a comparatively easy trip, as it was here we met people on journeys of their own. There were the three guys and a girl who had driven from London on route to Cape Town in an old English Police marked Land Rover Defender, a retired couple who had bought the huge emergency vehicle from Coventry airport, kitted it out and driven from England into Morocco then ‘turned right’ and driven through the entirety of West Africa and will ultimately drive back to the UK. We were even told we had just missed a man who was riding a bicycle, that’s a bicycle, for two years over the entire length of Africa. Then there was Tony, a guy who had driven alone from Europe and, unlike most people who avoid the Democratic Republic of Congo like the plague, had driven straight through it, and then Angola, and told us stories of how he had actually cried with joy upon arriving in Namibia and seeing how good the roads were, ‘yeah they’re great aren’t they’ we agreed, feeling a bit girly. Capital cities bleed money, and so after a few days of partying and not much else, we took a big group photo with all our cars, and hit the road again.

One thing that Pete said to me was, ‘every day is a school day’ (the second learning based life motto of the trip), but he’s right, and I was about to have a few. The first lesson; some people in this world will treat complete strangers like family with as little as a friend in common. After a Facebook status of mine mentioning Namibia, a friend in the UK messaged saying she had friends who had a game farm near Windhoek, and they in turn passed a message on that we should go and stay for a few days. Again, not wanting to be rude, we accepted, and in doing so met Ian and Chantelle. They are a young couple, recently married, and due to the even more recent passing of Ian’s father, have had the job of running the family farm and charcoal business dropped in their lap while still in their twenties. The farm is far from Babe, it’s a 10,000 hectare expanse of Namib outback populated by semi-wild cattle, horses, giraffes, wildebeest and much more. For the next few days they looked after us like royalty in the evenings, while by day we watched from the shadows as they went about the work of the farm.

The second lesson; rounding up, trapping, branding, tagging, logging, and castrating several hundred semi- wild cows and bulls in the scorching heat isn’t even easy as a spectator. But I’d still rather try that than getting eighty of them onto an auction bound cattle truck one by one, which was the next morning’s agenda. On top of this work, Ian seems to forever be shooting things, from Kudu’s that have been horrifically injured by poachers, cattle with broken legs, to Baboons who are running riot in outhouses, the harsh tasks of the farm became more apparent by the day, and his cowboy persona was making me feel just a little girly, for the second time in a week. Ian isn't the only one shooting, game farms attract trophy hunters who can legally pay to kill, and we were told many stories, my favourite, if that is the right word, being that of the 85 year old Texan lady who had paid to shoot a Giraffe then flown the entire thing back to the US; there are all kinds of people on this world, and many have too much money. On top of the farm there is the charcoal factory, which exports charcoal all over the world including most of the UK supermarkets. If you know your charcoal industry well, it’s thanks to them that all charcoal bags must now go through metal detectors, somehow a rouge bullet ended up in one of theirs giving a woman in Hull a barbecue based fright, and them a lawsuit.

The third lesson; I can close my right eye on its own, but not the left. Obscure yes, but relevant if you have been taken to the firing range and given permission to play with Ian’s rifles, thus needing to close your left eye to look down the rifle sight. So whilst Dan and I played Rambo, I did so with a piece of cardboard ripped from a beer box stuffed behind the left lens of my sunglasses, and everyone else laughed, and I was girly again. When our time on the farm was over, and we insisted we had to crack on, they insisted we take the keys to their flat on the coast. So we did. And we stayed there. For almost a week. You know, so as not to be rude.

Over three weeks had passed in Namibia, and the only thing that stood between us and Botswana was the jewel in the Namib crown, Etosha National Park. This was to be our first proper taste of safari, and with plenty in the coming months we were keen to master the art, and keen to road test the binoculars. Our plan was to stay three nights, one at each of the campsites in the park and in doing so working our way through its huge area day by day. Part of the gear we had bought in the mega outlets of Cape Town were wide rim hats, zip off trousers and UV repellent sweat-friendly long sleeve shirts fit for the safari purpose. Of the gear we bought my trousers are khaki and shirt green, Dan’s vice versa, like safari minstrels, and we minstreled up and headed out. We were greeted by a harsh scene. The drought has left many waterholes and rivers dry and we learned that herd numbers have plummeted, on the plus side that did mean we found a very cool skull and spine number. We learned that for the first time ever the Namibian government recently bought in five huge trucks of grass, which made the scale of the problem clear. There is still plenty of wildlife to be found and the scenery, especially the never ending Etosha Pan, still incredible, but you do feel sorry for the buggers. We learned to love the small encounters, rather than huge herds we liked finding a solitary giraffe or elephant, getting as close as possible, and being alone, the three of us, two minstrels and a zebra arguing over who’s pattern was the best. Probably our best experience of Etosha came at the lit watering hole of the first campsite; each has one lit through the night, and on the first night we sat and watched two lions, two elephants, a giraffe and a rhino drink from the same small pond. The lions then left, one of the elephants walked over to us, and the rhino first chased the giraffe away and then promptly, tentatively, got into the middle of the pond and sat there up to its eyes having a bath not moving for half an hour, where we left it, and went to bed.

The final campsite in Etosha is set in the restored and converted Namutoni fort, it’s an amazing building beautifully restored. On the 28th January 1904 seven German soldiers tried defending it from five hundred local Owambo warriors. They didn’t succeed, but by all accounts they gave it a bloody good go, and we were spurred by the story back onto the road. So with one night left in the country, spent in the thoroughly mention worthy town of Rundu on the Namibia/Angola/Botswana border, we were ready for pastures and passport stamps anew, pastures where we had heard rumors of water, and we were thirsty, thirsty minstrels.

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8th July 2013
War room

Book
Presuming that old version of Southern Africa Lonely Planet is Dan's... "It says we're 100 miles south of Rhodesia"
8th July 2013
Sossusvlei

Fantastic colors
Love your photo
21st August 2013
Sossusvlei

Thanks. Believe it or not this was taken with the humble iphone 4, the colors do all the taking.

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