A Love Letter To Namibia
If you’re ever sitting stressed at your desk, surrounded by people that are annoying you, there’s one place in the world you should fly to, and that’s Namibia. It’s a land of open spaces, calm distant sand dunes and everything you’d want from an African adventure.
As we descend the steps from the plane in Windhoek in mid-September the dry heat immediately hits you. I’m transported back to getting off a plane as a child in Spain or Greece. It’s a comfortable dry heat with a welcome desert breeze. Once we get through the airport the first thing I notice is that pretty much every car is white, and most are large 4×4 vehicles, Toyota’s predominating. I’m assuming because any other colour will probably melt off the surface of the cars when the heat gets up, but I haven’t noticed that same thing in Arabia. Maybe it’s just an odd Namibian trend. Our rental car is no deviation from this norm, a Toyota Hilux double cab in white. The rental agents had emailed me beforehand to explain that the car handover could take up to 2 hours. I had interpreted this to mean that they were slow and inefficient, and that this was a fair forewarning. But that’s not the case here.
There’s an introductory video on to how to drive off-road, what tyre pressures we should use on different road surfaces, along with the various road rules of Namibia. It’s a far cry from the process in Uganda, which was akin to being thrown the keys and a piece of paper. Next is a tour of the car, and immediately you know you’re heading into somewhere inhospitable and remote. The car has two batteries, two fuel tanks and two spare wheels. It has a spare water container in case of overheating and we’re told how to jack the car up and change a wheel. There’s a spade bolted to the back door. We’re told to check the oil, water and wheel nuts often. It feels like an adventure already.
For this leg of the trip my wife, Jess, and I have been joined by Jess’ mother, Mary, and her partner, Jim. Their presence makes me pay more attention to the car than perhaps I normally would, conscious that breaking down with the in-laws half way across a barren desert is not entirely desirable. Once the car handover is complete, we pile in and head north for a 3 hour drive to Otjiwa Game Reserve. On the way we see a few animals, a mongoose, a giraffe, a few warthogs, ostrich and some antelope. I nickname it ‘Speed-Safari’ as we hurtle along the excellent tar roads.
We picked Otjiwa as a convenient base for the next three days. Whilst on the reserve we enjoy a horseback ride looking for game and spend a morning rhino tracking on foot. The former was made all the more entertaining because Mary had not ridden a horse since she was 16 and my father in law was kicked by Jess’ horse after trying an illegal overtake. My horse seemed content to hang at the back and watch the unfolding entertainment. Adjacent to Otjiwa Reserve is the AfriCats Foundation, a charity that works across Namibia to try and help the population of cheetahs from human persecution. They also have seven resident cheetahs that have been rescued from various farms around Namibia and can no longer be reintroduced into the wild. We drive in an open topped Land Cruiser into a small 40 hectare enclosure that allows you to get close to five of them.
(Three white rhino stare us down as we track them on foot, Otjiwa Game Reserve, Namibia)
When I see the first one I feel like I imagine people may have felt upon seeing Elvis towards the end of his career, they look slightly fatter and more shabby than a cheetah should. They are fed daily and are all quite old, around 10-12 years of age, which is rare in the wild. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to try and run across their enclosure, but I can’t shake the analogy, however ridiculous. It’s incredible to get so close to them, within 6-8 feet, as they munch through their daily dose of meat. Giraffe today by the look of it. At one point a mongoose makes the foolish decision to go for a short run. Before we realise it one of the cheetahs has silently picked up speed from zero in no time at all to chase it, it careens into some thick bushes as the mongoose dives into a hole. They may be old, but the instinct is still there. Perhaps prompted by this, our guide explains the rather sad story of the original AfriCats project. They intended to take cheetahs that would otherwise have been shot from different farms across Namibia and then release them into their own private reserve. However, after release they found that the local leopard population were quickly killing them. What’s more, cheetahs have evolved to chase their prey at high speed across open plains, and the vegetation here is too thick, making it hard for them to hunt effectively. After multiple cheetah deaths early in the project they had to stop the program, leaving our remaining seven senior citizens to age in peace.
(Two aging cheetahs clean each other at AfriCats Foundation, Namibia)
The plight of the cheetahs is a sad reflection of Namibian geography. It’s a sliced and diced country, comprising in its central section of around 6000 parcels of farmland, taking up around 40% of the total area. These segments are all delineated by wire fences of varying quality and height. The story of how this came to be is as sad as that of the cheetahs. After World War One, it was decided by the League of Nations that the former German colony, now known as Namibia, should be administered by South Africa. The consequences for local indigenous land ownership were terrible, with white settlers given the majority of the usable farmland. Local populations were ostracised to the remote northern regions where they had already started to be pushed following colonisation earlier in the 20th century. As a result, Namibia is an unjust place from a racial and ethnic perspective. I don’t say this to try to be provocative, the description unfortunately reflects reality. That reality is a consequence of an unjust past whose ripples have propagated into the present. Around 70% of the viable farmland is white owned. The white population of Namibia is, however, only around 4-7%. The countries non-farmland is either ‘communal land’ in the far north or government run national parks. The challenge is that any dramatic attempt to redistribute wealth would rapidly jeopardise one of the most stable and fastest growing economies in Africa. Its GDP has been growing at an impressive ~4% for nearly three decades. As such, there’s no easy solution here, and by all measures Namibia’s relatively recent independence (1990) has been very well managed. It’s an unmitigated success story. But with unemployment sitting stubbornly at around 22%, breaking the wheel of historical injustice is sadly taking longer than it should.
From Otjiwa Game Reserve we briefly visit the Waterberg Plateau, it’s worth a day visit to hike to the top and enjoy the spectacular views but we quickly move on north to Etosha National Park. We stay just outside the park entrance at the newly renovated Mokuti Lodge. To get here we’ve covered around 550km in the car. The driving has been easy, primarily on good quality tar roads with 120kph speed limits. It’s what cruise control was invented for. The scenery though is relatively consistent, a low-medium height dense bushland, interspersed with dry mud and sandy areas. It’s unbearably arid with hardly a river or stream in sight.
The day after our arrival at Etosha we go on a morning game drive. At this point in our travels we have had some great wildlife encounters in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, but this is my in-laws first ever safari, so I’m hoping for good things. The park delivers at the entrance gate, costing only $6 per person to get in, compared to close to $100 at the Serengeti, and that’s not including their additional ‘staying close to the Serengeti’ taxes. As soon as we enter Etosha the signs are all positive, there’s barely another car in sight. One of the benefits of visiting the park at this time of year is its aridity. All of the animals must make regular visits to the waterholes, exposing themselves to ever present predators. This makes the game drive much easier as you traverse the park from one waterhole to the next, whilst watching giraffe and elephant silhouetted against the expansive stark white salt pan. A white haze shimmers off its surface as the rippling heat merges with the sky. It’s beautiful, barren, hostile and intoxicating all at the same time.
(A lonely elephant wanders Etosha National Park with the salt pan in the distance behind)
We see a family of five cheetahs (slimmer this time) and our first white rhino in the wild. Elephants cross the road in front of the car and bat-eared foxes prick their obscenely large ears from grass islands in the open plains. It’s a great drive in a stunning setting, but importantly, it’s quiet. The number of visitors is low and the size of the park is huge, it makes it a much more pleasurable experience than many of the others we’ve visited. As a comparison, in the Serengeti we joined a collection of at least twenty other cars all jostling to view a tree where you could see a narrow slither of a leopards back leg and his surprisingly unspotted testicles. In Etosha, we see a leopard lazing in a tree in full view with only a few cars, right next to a major waterhole. The roads are also wider, so the stress to pass is minimal. It’s a delight to drive the park on well graded gravel roads.
(A leopard watches antelope in the distance in the shade of a barren tree, Etosha National Park, Namibia)
After two days at Mokuti Lodge, where mongoose and antelope mingle alongside you as you sip on a poolside Mojito cocktail, we traverse the Etosha park from east to west. As we move towards the exit of the park we stop at Reitfontain waterhole and find a female lion eating the remains of a small antelope. She’s nestled in a patch of green reeds in the centre of the water. She’s eating whilst standing, allowing her to watch some black faced impala that are slowly approaching. They are rightly hesitant and begin to slowly circle the waterhole, but their thirst begs them to continue. As they get halfway around they pause and then immediately dart in the opposite direction. In the distance, we see the heads of five other lions have just poked up inquisitively above a rocky mound. It’s in moments like this that you appreciate this is not a zoo, this is life or death. Watching the constant caution of the antelope you can see their finely tuned anxieties and fears. Adrenaline and cortisol pumping through their veins, a consequence of a delicate dance played out over millennia between predator and prey. Watching it I find myself relating more to my own anxieties and fears, or at least sense their biologically hardwired origins from nights around a campfire thousands of years ago. Sadly, mine now manifest themselves in slightly more mundane ways, such as when presenting in public or when my phone is running out of charge. I know, true live or die moments.
(A lioness holds her prey whilst watching Black Faced Impala, Etosha National Park, Namibia)
As we exit the southern Anderson gate of Etosha National Park we pull in to our next accommodation at Ongava Private Game Reserve. It’s been called the ‘surprise accommodation’ for the last two weeks because I’m the only one that knows about it. The Etosha National Park camping sites book up months in advance and we didn’t manage to get into the camp we originally wanted. It had a lit up watering hole in the evenings where animals congregate. To Jess’ delight, so does the Ongava reserve. Unbelievably, as we sit down to our evening meal, two endangered black rhino wander up to the waterhole. They’re notoriously territorial, so they keep their distance from each other at the waters edge. Apparently one of them killed another at this very spot just a few years before. The next day we relax by the pool, and throughout the day zebra, oryx, giraffe, kudu, impala and guineafowl regularly make their way to the water in the scorching heat. In the evening we go on a game drive and get within eight feet of two male and eight female lions. When we get back we head down to the viewing hide by the waterhole and watch more rhino, white and black, cautiously drinking in the amber light.
(A giraffe take a drink in the midday sun, Ongava Private Game Reserve, Namibia)
(Endangered Black Rhino takes a nighttime drink, Ongava Private Game Reserve, Namibia)
The next morning my mother in law comes to our room and hands me a leaflet. It explains about the research centre they’ve established at the other end of the Ongava reserve. I hadn’t seen anything about it and I’m intrigued because they are using genetics to study behaviour and animal movement across the various regions of Namibia. As a biologist myself, I’m keen to learn more. We head down and I enjoy an hour talking with one of their researchers about exciting subjects such as DNA storage and stability and the best ways to extract it. As we leave I’m already planning in my head when I’m coming back to carry on the conversation.
We then drive southwest to a petrified forest in the desert and then on to the ancient rock carvings at Twyfelfontain, some of the oldest and best preserved in Africa, believed to date back more than 6000 years. It’s interesting to see the drawings of giraffe, rhino, elephant and many others carved into the large stones, many of which have shifted place with the passage of time. They’re no Egyptian pyramids by any means, and it’s scorching hot in the desert, but it’s worth the stop.
(Rock carvings at Twyfelfontain, western Namibia)
Next, we move on west towards the Skeleton Coast National Park. We stop briefly when we see a family of eight desert adapted elephants grazing on a high ridge line. They look very similar to normal African elephants but their trunks are slightly longer and their ears are slightly smaller. Adaptations that enable greater access to water and reduced water loss through sweating, respectively. We finally arrive at the Skeleton Coast entrance gate at 3:30pm. The sign says the last entry is at 3pm. It’s somewhat bad planning given that we had to drive almost 200km from our last accommodation to get here. Damn those elephants. Turning back would be a disaster. Some sweet talking on Jess’ part and we manage to gain entry, provided that we agree not to stop on the drive through. That promise gets broken almost immediately as I mount the roof of the car to get a panoramic view of the utter desolation we’ve arrived in. Endless sand, pebbles and rocks as far as you can see, kilometre after kilometre.
(View of the Skeleton Coast National Park from the car roof, Namibia)
After about an hour of desolate driving there appears to be a lorry stopped in the middle of the road in front of us. When we get closer we see he’s stuck in fine soft sand that’s been windswept across the road. It’s at least 2-3 feet deep and he’s down to his axle and blocking the road in the centre. Another car has just managed to get through before we arrive, but the lady is cleaning sand off her spade as she tells us her woes. She says we will have to reduce the weight in the car and drive as fast as possible into the sand off the roadside to get through. Jess, Mary and Jim get out the car, I put the car into 4×4 and lock the differential. As I hit the soft sand the car skews sideward and slows immediately with a lurch, to keep it going forward I have to hold the wheel at an angle and saw it left and right to keep it biting into the powdery sand. After about 100-150m I manage to bounce back onto the road and they all pile back in. There’s no help for hours in either direction, getting stuck here would have been an utter nightmare.
After a further 100km of barren nothingness we make it to the coast just south of Torra Bay. We come across an abandoned oil rig rotting and rusting on the coastline, quickly followed by what’s left of the shipwreck of the fishing vessel the South West Seal. It beached here in 1976 after catching fire. The wind is strong and cold, not what I expected from somewhere so dry.
(The Zeila shipwreck, one of many on the Skeleton Coast)
We drive south for a further 200km on an unbelievably straight and empty road. We stay in Hentiesbaai for a night in an AirBnB that looks out over the rough Atlantic Ocean. The next day it’s Mary’s birthday, so we start by enjoying a morning stroll on the beautiful beach which runs north thousands of kilometres all the way up to Angola. In the afternoon, we drive an hour south to the town of Swakopmund. In the evening we have dinner looking out over the coast as a local a cappella band sing happy birthday to Mary as she claps along. It’s a special day celebrating with family.
The next morning we take a 4×4 tour to Sandwich Harbour, stopping briefly to watch the flamingos and pelicans feeding in the salt rich waters. We drive along the beach to where sand dunes hundreds of meters high tumble into the rough Atlantic Ocean. The scenery is utterly stunning, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Fine pale beige sand is whipped up and blown horizontally out towards the white frothing waves of the deep blue-green sea. The sand blasts your exposed skin and the wind howls when you open the car doors. You have to jump in and out as quickly as you can to stop the car interior getting coated. After a quick lunch in a small unexposed divot between sand dunes we enjoy the rollercoaster ride up and down the soft dunes back to Swakopmund.
(Pelicans and flamingoes in the salty waters south of Swakopmund, Namibia)
(Drifting sands and cold Atlantic Ocean of Sandwich Harbour, Skeleton Coast, Namibia)
The next day we travel back to the capital, Windhoek, so Mary and Jim can fly back to London. We, however, have a decision to make. Either leave Namibia and head east into Botswana or travel south to see more of Namibia. It takes us a few seconds to decide. Before we know it we’ve booked the next five one-night stops on a long loop around southern Namibia. Having said our goodbyes to Mary and Jim, we drive on towards our first stop at Dune Star Camp in the Namib desert, the oldest in the world (the desert, not the camp). Our accommodation is located on top of an ancient sand dune and has a bed that can be rolled out of the room on to a veranda, allowing you to sleep under the stars. The wind is chilly but with extra duvets we spend the night outside. I fall asleep looking for shooting stars with the Milky Way, the Scorpio constellation, and the Southern Cross all stretching brightly overhead.
(The sun setting over the dunes of the Namib desert)
(Sunrise in the open air in the Namib desert)
The next morning we drive further South, passing by the small village of Nauchas. As we drive down a barren road there’s a small sign advertising ‘drinks and apple pie’. It’s in the middle of nowhere (type this into Google for its location -23.6346269, 16.2867778). We decide to roll the dice and make the detour. My god what a fantastic decision. It was without doubt the best apple pie I have ever eaten. I honestly don’t even know how to describe it. A perfect thin pastry base, with mushed apple, but with the ingenious addition of some kind of sweet icing on the top. The lady refuses to tell us what the topping is made from. She says you can only get the icing ingredients in Namibia, and only when she dies will her secret recipe be revealed. After acquiring a second helping to take away, we drive on to Sossusvlei, pronounced something akin to saucer-fly, where huge intensely orange-red sand dunes rise up in waves either side of a 50km tar road. The last few kilometres of the road though are soft sand and we have to let the tyre pressures down to avoid getting stuck. At the end of this road to seemingly nowhere is a 1.1km walk through the sand to Deadvlei, a famous salt pan with the remnants of a forest which died around 1000 years ago when the water dried up. It apparently dried so quickly that the wood never had time to rot and has since been scorched black by the constant exposure to the intense sun. When we arrive it’s 27 degrees outside and we’ve managed to time it perfectly to start hiking at bang on noon. Genius. It just gets hotter and hotter from here. Stupidly, we’ve also decided to hike up to the highest dune called Big Daddy. It’s one of the tallest in the world at over 300m of soft fine orange sand. Climbing it as the temperature rises is utterly brutal. Each step up is followed by half a step down as the sand sinks backwards beneath your feet. It takes us just over an hour to ascend, with the occasional beetle and lizard running from nowhere to find respite in your shadow. The view from the top is incredible, looking down over the scorched Deadvlei pan with sand dunes as far as the eye can see. We only see a handful of other people from a distance as we hike, probably in part because no other idiot would try to do it at midday.
(Jess descends Big Daddy sand dune towards the Deadvlei salt pan, Namib desert, Namibia)
(The parched valley floor of the Deadvlei pan)
As we make our way back down we’re running low on water. Each breath makes you thirsty because the air is so dry. What took us over an hour to ascend takes us just 15 minutes to descend, running and jumping like children down the steep sand slopes. The sand is so hot that it’s painful on your ankles as it pours into your shoes. It genuinely feels like it’s burning your skin. At the bottom, Jess complains about sand stuck in her shoes, shaking them like a pair of maracas as we walk barefoot across the white salt pan back to the car. I have to hold my backpack on the top of my head just to get out of the sun. It’s 35 degrees when we get back to the car and we’re both dehydrated, exhausted and slightly burnt, but loved every minute of it.
(Barren tree in front of Dune 45, Sossusvlei, Namib desert)
Next up we’re travelling all the way down to Luderitz, but we stop overnight next to Duwisib castle on the way. The castle was built by Baron Hans Heinrich von Wolf in 1908-09. To be fair, if my surname was von Wolf I’d want a castle too. Unfortunately, he was killed shortly after its construction in the battle of the Somme and his wife never returned to Namibia after World War One. Now it stands as a relic of the colonial period, and when the security guard is hanging around you might get to visit inside. We had to make do with hanging from the metal bars and peering in through the partially broken windows.
(The imposing Duwisib Castle, Namibia)
As we continue the drive south to Luderitz the C14 highway bisects open plains of sand that change in colour like a kaleidoscope. As we’re approaching the rail crossroad town of Aus, a sea of wildflowers stretches out in front of us. The sand is covered with small buttercup-like yellow flowers, interspersed with smaller ones of white and purple. As we move past Aus, the plant life rapidly changes to small ankle height grasses that shimmer silver in the wind, then abruptly it becomes endless sand. A sandstorm starts to pick up, washing it in swirls across the road. By the time we hit Luderitz it’s a full blown gale of sand you can hardly see through. We do a brief driving tour of Luderitz town itself, admiring the early 20th century German architecture from the safety of the car.
(Wild flowers stretching into the distance on the drive to Luderitz)
The next morning we visit Kolmanskop, the main reason we’ve driven this far south in Namibia. It’s a village completely lost in time. The last resident left the town in 1954, but it died a long time before. It stands in the desert, abandoned, a testament to human ambition and the search for wealth. The town sprung into life when a railroad worker correctly identified a small stone he found along the tracks as a diamond. He told his boss, August Stauch, who then subsequently went on to acquire the mining rights for a huge tract of land surrounding the area. Nothing more is known of the railroad worker, but his boss became a household name. What followed was one of the fastest diamond rushes in history, with Kolmonskop rapidly rising from the sand dunes from 1909 until around 1920. It was the first town in the southern hemisphere to obtain an X-Ray machine, it had piped indoor plumbing, electric street lighting, an ice machine, a bowling alley and importantly, lots and lots of diamonds. There were so many that barmaids at the local hotels were sometimes paid in diamonds when the money ran out. But due to the geology of the place, fortunes rose and fell like the sand dunes themselves. Unappreciated at the time, the diamonds in Namibia had endured a long road to get there. Over millions of years they were washed down the Orange River from Botswana to the river delta that now defines the border between southern Namibia and South Africa. The diamonds were then carried into the Atlantic ocean and over many years were washed up on the sands of the Namib desert. The strong winds then blew them in land and north over the entire southern section of Namibia. Unfortunately, that meant the diamonds were only found in the upper sections of the sand, but those that were found were large, having endured this arduous journey, making 95% of them gemstone quality. In some places they were so abundant that miners could literally pick them out by eye in the moonlight on their hands and knees. Within seven years after the first discovery over 5.3 million carats of diamonds were removed, but with the realisation that their presence was only skin deep, the town shrivelled up and died a slow and painful death. As if in retaliation, a desert angry at the stripping of its jewels slowly reclaimed the town. Ornate European style houses now sit windowless, ruined and sandblasted, their rooms filled with fine orange sand, blown in drifts against partially opened oak doors. It’s an eerie place that reminds me that our lives are fleeting. Nature reclaims our attempts to bring order in the geological blink of an eye.
(The beautiful doorways of the abandoned town of Kolmanskop, Namibia)
(Jess climbs through a door way of a European style house, Kolmanskop, Namibia)
(Abandoned properties at the diamond mining town of Kolmanskop, Namibia)
(An abandoned train station between Aus and Luderitz in the Namib desert. Note the old water tank in the distance for old steam engines)
After Kolmanskop we have a long drive ahead of us. We travel 1500km over three days, first east and then north through the western section of the Kalahari. I’ll be honest, it’s a relatively boring few days with little to see but fences, dry bush and scrubland. The animal life consists of only goats, cattle and little else. But it gives me time to think about our last three weeks. There’s some aspects to Namibia that I have absolutely adored. The open spaces, the scenery, the pure desolation has been soothing to the soul. But the distances make community a difficult thing to come by in comparison to East Africa. In Uganda, you were never more than a few meters away from a family of people cooking, singing, working or chatting. It created a sense of community, allowing you to appreciate the subtleties of their national identity as you drove around. But it was densely populated and hard to find a tranquil place to sit and reflect. Namibia is very different, thought provoking scenery and natural wonders abound, but in the tour we chose to do, culture and community were relatively hard to come by. This is probably, in part, because we didn’t visit the far north, which was a shame. As such, our trip mainly routed through small towns and villages that were hundreds of kilometres apart. You were often left wondering how people could exist in some of the inhospitable landscapes we crossed. In the small town of Outjo we saw a few women that provided us a glimpse of what lays north if you’re able to venture there. In this small bustling town women walked bare breasted and with their hair matted with dark orange mud, forming dreadlock-like patterns. The northern provinces are termed ‘communal land’, with responsibility for land use resting in the hands of local chieftains. It’s a shame we couldn’t visit and maybe something for a future trip. Regardless, I’ve loved Namibia from start to finish. I can’t wait to visit again.
(Sunset over the Ongava Private Game Reserve, Namibia)
Top image: Scorched trees in the Deadvlei basin, Namib Desert