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Published: November 14th 2006
The various places that Amanda and I visited during the second week of our trip have one thing in common…. well, the heading for this blog entry has somewhat given it away… yes, SAND.
When we were planning this trip, the one area that I’d insisted on including was the Skeleton Coast. Amanda, fried from juggling what really amounted to two jobs at once (someone should do away with the concept of “part-time secondment” once and for all - there ain’t any such animal: you just end up doing your fulltime day job squished into whatever time is left from your allegedly part-time role in the client institution which role, itself, tends to expand beyond the agreed limits), was afraid that this would involve just too much driving and, a valid point, what was there to see anyway? For me, it was a place I’d heard a lot about since being out in this part of the world. Without noticing it creep up on me, I seem to be developing an increasing fascination with deserts: climate-wise they suit me (a dry heat during the day and often-cool nights, with little-to-no rain); geographically, I love the wide open spaces and lack
of people; and, ecologically, I am intrigued by the amount of life that they actually sustain. Granted, my experience to date has been pretty much limited to Namibia, but I am to keen to explore deserts elsewhere, including Mali and Mongolia, the latter being a destination that seems to cause my nearest-and-dearest a smidgeon of concern: something to negotiate over the Christmas turkey, I feel…
But that’s all in the future. After the incredible experience of watching elephant, and in such numbers, the previous evening, our next destination was Springbokwasser Gate, one of the two public entrances to the Skeleton Coast National Park. (I’ll skip quickly over the rhino-and-buffalo-in-the-night incident: woken by the sound of hooves, I’d peered through binoculars at a pale-coloured animal visible in the light of the full moon on the other side of the valley, and concluded that it must be a white rhino. Admittedly, there wasn’t enough light for the image through my binoculars to be absolutely clear, but what else could it be? Half an hour later, and there were more hooves… lots more hooves, not to put too fine a point on it… I will say that I never thought they were
buffalo, in contrast to some of our fellow guests: my knowledge of Namibia’s wildlife and geography extends that far. These guys would have had to have been a long way from home to have been buffalo.… perhaps 400 km west if they were from the Waterburg Plateau herd (and they’d have had to descend the Plateau’s near-vertical cliffs), or further, in a south-westly direction and the wrong side of the veterinary fence, if they were from the north. You’ve guessed it: we’d had a visitation from the local herd of cattle. Reluctantly, I conceded that the first animal was 99.99999% certain to have been a white cow.)
Back to the Skeleton Coast. Most of the area is out-of-bounds to tourists, with a limited exception for those with sufficient funds to afford Wilderness’s fly-in safaris. However, the coast between the Huab and Ugab rivers, perhaps 200 km, is accessible to tourists and, with its salt roads, it’s even accessible to 2-WD. The provisos are that you cannot stay overnight (except during peak season when the campsite at Torra Bay is open) and you have to enter and leave from different gates. The reason for the latter restriction is procedural. It’s
yet there is life
The rock is about fist-sized, its lichen evidence that life can exist, even here.apparently easier for one gate to fax its list of visitors to the other gate for them to check each visitor’s vehicle off the list as it leaves, than for that gate to deal with the complication of checking out its own visitors as well as visitors from the other gate. With me? This is Africa, and I love it! Anyway, we filled in the paperwork at Springbokwasser Gate, about 40 km inland, and headed west then south towards the gate at Ugabmund.
Amanda was right in one respect: there isn’t a lot to see. Or, you could say, there’s an awful lot of nothing to see. Yet no adjective can effectively convey the impression of this vast nothingness. Cumulatively, words can only get part of the way there: bleak, desolate, barren; haunting, eerie, unnerving; empty; stark, harsh, unforgiving, relentless; magical, mythical, bewitching. The suddenness with which the reds and pinks of the inland basalt and sandstone give way to the greys and occasional pale yellows of the rock-plains of the coastal stretch. The confusion of not being able to identify waves from dunes from fog in the misleading shimmering of a horizon that yet seems disconcertingly close. How
little, how rarely, you actually catch sight of the sea: had we ventured out of the car for any distance, I would have taken my compass. Yet how resilient life is, even here: from the welwitschias and occasional scrubby bush (is this really enough to sustain the small herds of springbok we met along the road to the coast?), to the barely-visible red and green lichens on the rocks of the coast. The lone ostrich, running elegantly parallel to the road, kicking up small dust-clouds behind him. The lone pair of blackbacked gulls enjoying cruising the winds when, misreading the hand-painted sign at the roadside, we got out of the car to track down the one shipwreck easily visible from the tourist-accessible road and looked in vain towards the crashing surf. The meeting of lapet-faced vultures at the side of the road, no carcass or other reason for their gathering apparent. (If I have said in the past that even vultures have redeeming features, I don’t include lapet-faced vultures in this, their red, wrinkly faces and necks seemingly still stained with their last meal.)
Even south of the Ugabmund gate, its vast skulls and crossbones a somewhat unnecessary decoration,
the landscape remains bleak and many of the other adjectives could continue to apply, this time to the endless stretches of harsh white salt-flats. Finally, like parched animals, we found the oasis of the Cape Cross Lodge, a lone habitation on these endless miles of coast, amid these endless desert wastes. That early afternoon beer was very welcome, and we awarded ourselves a relaxing afternoon snoozing and reading on our balcony while our brains, blasted by the enormity of the expanses we’d seen that morning, tried to remember life’s usual perspective.
The next day we paid a somewhat cursory visit to the Cape fur seals a few kilometres to the south. I am blessed - as I think with increasing frequency - with a “blunt nose”: the acrid smell emanating from even the dramatically fewer numbers of seals still residing there didn’t bother me, but it did Amanda so we returned to the road.
Our next destination was Swakopmund, the first of two places where we were to spend two nights and we’d booked ourselves into an A-frame at the Municipal Bungalows site. Although this type of accommodation can sleep six, this is with a squeeze, never mind
the resulting queue for the shower of a morning - as I can vouch from my one night there at the end of the first week of the Wild Dog trip in July - so we enjoyed the space and settled in. Its facilities would also allow us the economy of “eating in” on one of our nights there, but the first night we treated ourselves to dinner at The Lighthouse where my Cajun kabeljou was certainly the best piece of fish I have tasted in a very long time.
Next morning we awoke to overcast skies and a chill in the air. The weather on the coast is unpredictable. As Archie was to say when he picked us up, “Don’t ask me when the sun is going to come out. When the sun comes out, then I’ll tell you when it’s going to come out.” Mindful of the morning’s scheduled activities, we each put on more clothes than I have worn in a very long time, and I later regretted not adding a waterproof to my T-shirt, two fleeces and a rugby shirt. Our destination? Life on the ocean wave…. well, a few hours pottering around the lagoon
Cape Cross Lodge
Truly an oasis in the desert... at Walvis Bay, at any rate.
Our host and captain was Archie and his boat was the Laramon, named after/before/in conjunction with the name of his company. Archie lives in Swakopmund so, as we wanted to give the car (and me as self-imposed main driver) a rest for the day, he gave us a lift to Walvis Bay with the crew. That meant we had a little time to kill while they readied the boat, but there were people to watch, not to mention juvenile flamingos, incongruously close to human habitation at the shoreline (their parents know better and are only found further out, on the sand spit that creates the lagoon and separates it and Walvis Bay from the Atlantic).
The pier from which we were to embark was clearly The Pier for Walvis Bay, or just about, and a lot of boats go out onto the lagoon with tourists each morning. A seemingly disorganised stream of people, disgorged from coaches and cars, found themselves, by no small miracle, on the right boat which, as only one boat loads up at any one time, had had to approach the pier at exactly the right time to pick
young flamingos at Walvis Bay
Their pink older relations are too wary to come this close to human habitation. them up.
We found ourselves in the company of a local family, a middle-aged Dutch couple and, belatedly and only just, a young-ish German couple. The Germans had gone to the Wrong Pier, but someone radioed Archie shortly after we’d left the Right Pier, so we changed direction to pick them up. Whereas the Right Pier allows passengers to embark by descending a few steps, the Wrong Pier relies on a walking-the-plank-style exercise. Archie’s assistant, Itzak, reversed the Laramon to get her as close to the shore as possible. A couple of lads onshore then wheeled a glorified plank down to the water’s edge where it was positioned between the Laramon’s stern and the shore; of necessity, the shore-end in, perhaps, a couple of inches of water. The Germans didn’t look overly thrilled at the prospect of getting their feet wet. Indeed, Ms German hopped backwards in alarm with every lap of the sea on the shore. Mr German was the model of indecision: one minute untying his hiking boots, the next re-tying them, the next untying them… Eventually, Chris, Archie’s apprentice, took pity on them. (Mr Dutch had no such altruism and, without compunction, was standing at the
stern, camera in hand, waiting, as he told us “for a disaster”.) Chris shed his outer garb and, suitably shod in rock sandals, walked the plank and waded to the shore. There, to the initial consternation, but eventual bemusement, of Ms German, he bent down to give her a piggyback on board. Mr German could finally resolve the bootlaces issue once and for all and, rolling his trousers up, manfully waded the short distance to the plank and followed his beloved aboard. We just took another sip of the warming and generous quantity of sherry with which Itzak had furnished us all on leaving the Right Pier, and left them to it.
What a trip! My only foray out onto the Atlantic from the Namibian coast had been on board the Sedina out of Luderitz in July, where being frozen in the stern of the boat is my dominant memory, and the tepid hot chocolate on the way back surpassed the penguins as the highlight of the trip. This time, could not have been more different. Pelicans and black-backed gulls fed out of Itzak’s hand when he whistled to them. A trio of characterful Cape fur seals entertained us,
mostly to order: Casanova, a vast male, who comes aboard for fish and a snuggle with the ladies, Sally who rolls and does tricks in the sea for piscine reward, and Piccolo who nosed his way back on board on an unscheduled second occasion and was then extremely reluctant to disembark, even when Itzak dangled fish over the side of the boat. Flamingos blushed the sand spit pink. More Cape fur seals dozed in black mottled patches along the edge of the sand, while others dived for fish around us, one showing us how he would throw a fish around to take mouthfuls from it while hopeful seabirds waited for the remnants. Two varieties of dolphin, bottle-nosed and Benguela (also known as heaviside), leapt and played around the boat and in its wash. But the oddest sight of all was a mola mola, or ocean sunfish. This curious-looking fish - flatly near-circular, with a large fin at the top and at the bottom, and an unlikely frill in lieu of a tail - sunbathes by lying on one side near the sea’s surface. It was spotted, its flank barely breaking the surface, by some extremely sharp eyes. (Having just done
some homework on the web, I can now tell you that they can reach 3,000 lb and over 3 m from fin-tip to fin-tip… The one we saw was only a little ’un, I’m somewhat relieved to say!)
And we were not without refreshment. As well as the somewhat incongruous but very welcome glass of sherry when we first boarded, we had a large stock of soft drinks and beer at our disposal and, at lunchtime, large platters of fresh oysters and other bite-sized munchies from land and sea emerged from below deck, together with a couple of bottles of sparkling white from South Africa’s Nederburg estate. With the sun finally breaking through the clouds, it was a perfect end to a lively morning.
Later that afternoon, prising ourselves from the beds into which we’d collapsed on returning from Walvis Bay (it’s very tiring spending a few hours on the ocean wave, I’ll have you know!), we boarded a different form of transport, quadbikes, with which we were going to tackle the dusky golden sand dunes near Swakopmund. In contrast to bikes that I’ve ridden in the Karoo, my steed on this occasion was an automatic: I was
not going to be a manual-vehicle-snob this time and was happy to settle for something that required low brain-input, but which would give me fast, easy speed and a comfortable ride - which is more than I can say for the crash helmet which I reluctantly, but dutifully, put on: it caused my only next-day injury of the outing! Our companions, apart from the monosyllabic guide whose most remarkable feature was his “hey dude” walk, were an Australian family of two parents and two young boys, the latter riding on the back of their parents’ and/or the guide’s quadbike…. or, should I say, a mother and three young boys as Dad appeared to be the most juvenile of the lot. He’d opted for a fully manual quadbike as he’d done motor-cross in his youth and, to be fair, he could handle the thing. But he blatantly disregarded all of the instructions we’d been given at the outset about not leaving the tracks, not overtaking, not going off on your own, etc., and our guide seemed powerless (or wasn’t prepared) to stop him. Sermon over.
It was a blast! Only a few hundred metres up the track from the adventure
a mola mola
This has to be one of the weirdest creatures I have ever encountered. company’s headquarters and we were already surrounded by dunes, the only people apparent amongst the endless undulations of grey/golden sand. It felt amazing as you buzzed diagonally up a dune, turned the bike to face down the fall-line, and let gravity and a reasonable amount of pressure on the throttle do the rest. Mind you, the slopes weren’t actually that dramatic. Although it felt as if you were heading down a near-90 degree slope, if you turned to look back, it wasn’t a slope that would have bothered a novice skier on his/her second or third day on snow. Still, I won’t say that when I’m telling stories of our daring exploits! Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and all that!
But I must confess to time-watching from about three-quarters of the way through our allegedly two-hour slot (our guide over-ran, to the evident annoyance of his colleagues back at base who couldn’t leave until he’d returned as they needed to put away our equipment). I had desperately misjudged the likely weather and temperature for this outing. Goosebumps were nothing compared to the increasing rigidity and lack of feeling in my right thumb
- as many folks will know, this is THE most vital part of the anatomy for quadbiking as it controls the throttle - though I could try to reassure myself that it wasn’t as bad as the rain/hail/thunderstorm conditions in which I’d quadbiked in the Karoo a year before. At every pause, I put my hands on the engine cover to try and absorb some of its warmth. I egged myself on with thoughts of a large mug of Rooibos tea…. Sod that: do they have ginger wine in Namibia? A Whisky Mac would be what I’d need…. OK, OK, I’ll settle for just a whisky, provided I have the tea at the same time…. In the end, we had a Savannah back at the bungalow as it was quicker than boiling a kettle and we didn’t have any Scotch, but the large pot of spicy tuna pasta really did the trick. That and about six more layers of clothing!
The next day, after a short spell while Amanda continued to boost the Namibian economy, triggering the first of many speculatory discussions about what Air Namibia’s weight and cabin luggage limits might be, we set off for the next
destination which unequivocally involves sand: the scenic heart of the Namib Desert, the dunes of Sossusvlei.
When we turned east from Walvis Bay, we finally left behind the cold cloud and fog of the coast. Having enjoyed about 40 km of tarred road, we now, abruptly as ever, hit gravel. Once again, we had a lot of nothing around us, but it was nothing in the form of golden-tinged sand, morphing into golden grasses, with the gravel road a pale flush of pink in the middle. Gradually the mountains arose around us and we dipped into the Kuisib Pass which navigates around and down to the riverbed, before emerging from this set of hills only to dip down again a few kilometres further on. Ahead of us for most of the journey, we could see blackening clouds and the odd flash of lightening. As suddenly as if someone had switched the lights off, we crossed from sunshine into the dark just short of Solitaire, our refuelling stop: petrol for the car and apple pie, for which this kooky service station in the middle of nowhere is renowned, for us. Just as we emerged from the car, stretching legs and
breathing the warm, non-air-conditioned, damply fresh air, the heavens opened and we had to brave the downpour to scuttle even the short distance to our apple pie. But the downpour lasted only really the duration of our stop, although the clouds continued to make the scenery particularly dramatic as we navigated the last 80 km to Sesriem and the decadent comfort of the Sossusvlei Lodge.
Actually, I think it would take a lot for there to be “decadent comfort” at Sesriem. At the end of the day, you’re in a desert and a particularly hot bowl of desert at that. The tent-rooms are intelligently designed, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it gets VERY hot during the middle of the day in the summer. When we first entered our tent, the atmosphere was oppressive and we moved swiftly to un-velcro as many “windows” and “skylights” as possible. The electricity was on the blink, but a fan wouldn’t have helped anyway: it only circulates hot air, after all. The next afternoon, we gave up and relocated ourselves to the semi-open plan bar area with its more effective ceiling fans to read and write in greater comfort. The
first night, we slept badly. For the second, I rescued the remaining iceberg from the solid block of ice we’d bought in Swakopmund for the coolbox and put it behind the fan. This chilled the air which the fan then circulated, and we slept much better. Having warm drinks the next day was a price worth paying!
But, that said, Sossusvlei Lodge looked after us very well. Amanda eulogised at the sight of the buffet. Whereas I was happy to see the biggest and array of what my father would have called “rabbit food” that I’d seen in months if not years, Amanda’s carnivore tastes faced a baffling display of what even I could recognise as beautiful cuts of seven varieties of game (eland, kudu, red hartebeest, zebra, gemsbok, springbok and ostrich) as well as of the more mundane meats, beef, pork, chicken, etc. There were even a couple of types of fish and crocodile tail, the latter being displayed with the fish. (I’d always wondered where, as a piscitarian, I would stand in relation to crocodile and frog: if this was my answer, I decided to give it a miss. I had too much rabbit food to consume!)
Each of these meats could be cooked freshly in front of you, in whatever combination you chose (I’m told that kudu was the best out of the three tried by my Learned Friend), and then accompanied by a selection from a wide range of cooked vegetables or a made-to-order stir-fry with or without noodles. If she could, Amanda would happily have moved the entire catering arrangement, plus regular supplies, to south-west London: her own kitchen, to be exact!
The next morning involved an early start, but we weren’t helped by my alarm clock clearly balking at going off at 5.30 am. To our (very short-lived) chagrin, we were the last to board the vehicle at 6.15 am, Amanda slotting in between one of the three German couples who were to be our companions and me sitting next to our driver, Oscar. (Fair in all things, we swapped over for the way back.) Our destination was that place which, for many people, must epitomise Namibia: the burnished oranges, pinks, reds, and all colours in between for which there are only paint names, of Sossusvlei and the surrounding dunes.
This was one place that I was really delighted to have
the chance to revisit, having fallen for it when I was here in July. However, being taken by Sossusvlei Lodge was very different to my previous trip from the Sesriem campsite. In a delightful reversal of priorities, people “slumming it” at the campsite can get into the area an hour earlier and leave an hour later than “posh folks” at the neighbouring lodges. This meant that a return trip up Dune 45 for sunrise was not an option: the sun was well and truly up before we’d left the lodge in any event. Instead, Oscar stopped at a number of points en route, explaining in more detail the development and ecology of the dunes and allowing us plenty of photo opportunities. He then parked in the haphazardly disorganised car parking area at Deadvlei. From here, we walked over to Dune 29, a close neighbour of the local giant, Big Daddy, and then began its ascent. Dune-climbing is an odd activity. While I appreciate I’m reasonably fit, I will huff’n’puff if asked to run more than a couple of hundred yards, yet I can scale dunes - it appears - with some ease. Others, who are at least as fit as
I, struggle.
Deadvlei looked much as it had on my last trip, just hotter (and yes, a place can actually LOOK hot), but Sossusvlei had changed. Filled with water only once every five or more years, it had still had water from this year’s record-breaking rains during my last visit. Now, it was dry: baked dry, the footprints of the last visitors who must have crossed it when it was at the mud-stage still clearly outlined and reminiscent of those of Early Man… had Early Man had hiking boots, of course.
Sossusvlei Lodge clearly didn’t want us to starve, and we helped Oscar unpack an impressive banquet-ette of cornflakes, fresh fruit, cold meats, cheeses, bread, juice, coffee and tea… most of which quickly found a good home in one or other of the nine tummies seated around the table.
By the time we left the area, it was past 11 am and the day was heating up. The road through the dunes is, incongruously, tarred (to reduce the impact of alien dust on the dunes themselves), but heat-induced mirages, curiously close to the vehicle, mirrored the surrounding dunes, giving the impression that the road would turn to
sand only yards ahead. Curiouser still, mirages on the valley floor off to our left gave the strong impression of a lake, perhaps a hint of what the valley would look like after exceptional rains.
That wasn’t to be the end of our adventures. Intending to go to Sesriem campsite to buy stamps and postcards that afternoon, I was delayed by a flat tyre, somewhat miraculously only the second that I have ever encountered in all my travels in Africa, the first having only been a couple of months’ earlier at CCF. I drove the car back to its shady parking space and got the tools and the spare out of the boot, but the jack wouldn’t co-operate. I was in the middle of wrestling with it when a knight in shining armour - well, a long-haired South African in shorts and a T-shirt - stopped and offered to give me a hand. Feminine independence could be put on hold for another day: I accepted with alacrity… though I continued to help, even if, to my chagrin, I started putting a nut on the wrong way round - what a GIRL!
The next day, on our way back
to Windhoek, we had the Mystery Of The Disappearing Road. No, it hadn’t been affected by the country’s early rains: it just wasn’t where the map said it was. In fact - Amanda later researched the point more extensively - it wasn’t where ANY map said it was. There was a breakaway faction of maps that thought it should have been directly opposite the road from which we’d emerged, but that clearly wasn’t the case as we had faced a T-junction, not a crossroads. But it certainly wasn’t the few kilometres down the road that the majority of maps erroneously alleged. Still, with a little detour, we managed to join the road, just further north and east than we’d anticipated. Someday I will drive the other way down that road and find out just where the heck it thinks it emerges!
It had been the most tremendous trip. We’d had a complete blast. We’d giggled and sung and munched our way along 2,800 km of Namibia’s roads, and neither of us would have changed a thing. Even the unscheduled events became the subject of jokes and more giggles. After a Serious Night Out in Windhoek with friends on the
Friday night (I’m sure that Dylan’s in Klein Windhoek is still recovering from the experience…) and a final dose of warm sunshine for Amanda while she gathered her strength for the anticipated chill of a November London, we reluctantly headed for the airport late on the Saturday afternoon.
The only remaining question, of course, is Where Next?
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