Lonely Planet Namibia
Travel Report
Hitchhiking to Luderitz
Luderitz & Kolmanskop
Journeying to Windhoek
Safari to Sossusvlei
Windhoek & Swakopmund
End of a long journey
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Travel Notes
Windhoek
Windhoek 2
Photos
Luderitz
Swakopmund
Windhoek & the Desert
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Travel notes from Windhoek
Hi Everyone,
On Friday morning I left Cape Town on the InterCape bus and headed north to Springbok. The bus was expensive and cost ZAR240 for the trip. It was due to arrive in Springbok at 18.15 that evening where I planned to stay for the night before hitchhiking to the Namibian border. As we journeyed north in the comfort of this big bus the scenery gradually became drier and drier until when I arrived at Springbok I was in a semiarid desert, this small town nestled between small, harsh rocky hills. I left the bus here and it continued its journey overnight all the way to Windhoek, the only public transport crossing the border. Springbok definitely surprised me; it was not the kind of town I was expecting to find in South Africa. It was mainly a mining town, the first European copper mine opened on the outskirts of town in 1862, and it still had a frontier town feel. The guesthouse I planned to stay at had closed so I wandered about the streets that evening until I found a cheap room for the night.
I woke the next morning while it was still dark and walked through town as the sun was rising and about 4km back onto the main highway. I stood here for an hour trying to hitch a ride to the border, about 115km north. There was very little traffic and the road was long and straight, I could see cars approaching for five minutes. Eventually a pickup truck stopped and I rode in the back to the next town, Steinkopf, about halfway to the border. Here the landscape was even more inhospitable and I could sense that I was getting very near to the great Namibian deserts. I didn't wait too long here, there was even less traffic but after about half a dozen cars past me (about twenty minutes) I got a ride in the back of another pickup truck and was dropped off at the border post. I walked across the bridge over the Orange River that forms the border between the two countries and about 1km to the Namibian immigration post.
After I had my passport stamped I went and sat down by the border gate to wait for a ride the approx. 325km to Keetmanshoop. After a while sitting in the warm sunshine a truck pulled over who was going all the way to Windhoek and gave me a lift. It made a change to actually be sitting in the cab, rather than on the back with the cargo. The road travelled through endless semi-desert occasionally punctuated by a dry riverbed with rocky mountains in the distance. We only passed through two settlements, Grunau and Narubis, if you blinked you missed them; this was a sparsely populated land. By the middle of the afternoon we had arrived in Keetmanshoop. I spent the afternoon looking around town and then woke early the next day to hitch down to Luderitz on the coast. As it was a Sunday there were no busses travelling. As I walked out of town the third car to pass me stopped and gave me a ride the approx. 350km. The nearer we reached the coast the more the landscape turned to desert and by the time we approached Luderitz there were sand dunes blowing across the highway.
Luderitz is a relic from the German colonial days and looks like a small Bavarian town transplanted to the Namibian desert coast; it felt very surreal. While staying in town I went to visit the ghost town of Kolmanskop, 8km out in the desert on the edge of the Prohibited Diamond Area 1. This was a diamond-mining town that was finally abandoned in 1956 and is now slowly being blown apart by the raging winds and swamped by sand dunes. Money was no object here and everything they needed was shipped from Germany; even fresh water at the time was shipped from Cape Town.
I spent a couple of nights in Luderitz before hitching to the capital Windhoek. It was about 850km and I made it in two rides and arrived in the capital late in the afternoon. As soon as I arrived I found out that a tour was leaving the next day to Sossusvlei, so I booked myself a place and the following day headed back out into the desert. Sossusvlei is the main tourist attraction in the country and is a sea of sand stretching for 300km along the coast and 150km inland. The red sand dunes here are said to be the highest and most picturesque in the world. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, a sand storm blowing that had been blowing for the last four days, dust and sand gusted everywhere. We watched the setting sun that evening from a nearby dune and the next morning woke at 05.00 and drove about 70km into the heart of this desert, stopping at the worlds most famous sand dune, Dune 45, which we climbed to watch the sun rise. The morning light in this desert with the red sand was incredible. At Sossusvlei we hiked about 8km across pans and through a raging sand storm and up and over the dunes. Once we were out in the dunes the wind abated and we were no longer being sand blasted. This was some of the best desert scenery I had seen and I made a mental note to, some time in the future, go on a camel trek again through a desert.
There was a small bar at the campsite, the only bar for over 250km and on the second evening I bumped into a couple I had previously met about a month ago in St Lucia, South Africa. There was also a girl there all the way from Bournemouth and we reminisced about how beautiful Dorset is over a few beers. By the time we packed up camp there was a sand dune inside my tent, and everyone else's tent. Sand was everywhere and for three days all we ate was sand. I was looking forward to getting out of the desert just to get away from this sand storm. We returned to Windhoek by the middle of the afternoon and two days later sand was still coming out of my ears.
Regards,
Geoff
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