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After finding a lack of local transport heading north to Namibia from Springbok I decided to hitchhike along the N7 to the border crossing point of Vioolsdrif. My last lift dropped me at the border gate and I thanked him before walking to the South African border post to have my passport stamped. From the SA border post I walked through no-mans land, crossing the Orange River, which brought a splash of green along its banks in this arid region as the river carved its way tortuously through the desert. This border crossing was very quiet, except for the men repairing the bridge, I found myself the only person walking through no-mans land. A handful of South African registered 4WD were crossing back south; the white occupants stared at me as they drove past. I continued walking through the dust beside the highway until I reached the Namibian border post, about a kilometre along the road. The heat of the midday sun baked the ground. As well as crossing a border I also crossed a time zone and gained an hour. Despite this, the eleven o' clock sun was just as fierce as the midday sun.
After completing the immigration formalities I walked a short distance to the road leading onwards into Namibia and the desert. The border post is in the middle of nowhere surrounded by rocky hills and desert; there was no shade and I waited patiently sitting on a barrier beside the road for some traffic. Occasionally a vehicle would pass through the barrier but they didn't stop and pick me up, mostly they were already crammed full of people or luggage or both. I continued waiting in the relentless sun until a large semi-trailer pulled up and the driver offered me a ride. He was a white man and had driven from Cape Town on his way to Windhoek with a truckload of fruit and vegetables. He was happy to give me a lift to Keetmanshoop, to which I was very grateful. I climbed into the spacious cab and enjoyed a grandstand view of the desert. We stopped at a small town a few kilometres from the border where the driver bought me a much-needed drink and a few supplies for the journey north.
I settled into the cab, feeling refreshed and happy to be once again on my way through this semi-arid desert following Namibia's main highway, the B1. The road was in very good condition and there were no noticeable differences from the southern side of the border, a reminder of when the country was administered by South Africa. The drive soon became monotonous, the drone of the engine and the shifting through the gearbox drowning out the radio and our conversation. The scenery seemed endless stretching for kilometres, the road running straight to the horizon; I soon found myself dozing off in the heat. I quickly became conscious again when the driver offered me something to eat. He reached into his icebox and apart from a bottle of cherry cola there seemed to be nothing else in there. Rattling around at the bottom of the icebox though were a few sticks of biltong. Biltong, for those of you who have not been to South Africa, is dried meat, very much like beef jerky in the US. Nearly every animal, including game is converted into biltong and is used in such imaginative ways such as pizza topping. I have to confess I am not a biltong fan and had spent my whole time in South Africa avoiding this 'tasty' little snack.
Now here I was sitting in a cab of a truck, the driver offering me a stick; I accepted it, refusal would have offended. I spent the next half an hour chewing excruciatingly on this rock hard, dried up piece of meat. I soon found there was a knack to eating biltong. You could not bite it, without fear of breaking your teeth. The technique was to rip shreds of the meaty fibres off and swallow as quickly as possible. The driver was a pro at this and soon demolished a stick twice the size of mine and offered me more. I declined the offer holding up the stick I was still chewing on. I never did finish it and managed to hide the rest of it in my pocket, the meaty, bloody taste remaining in my mouth for hours afterward.
The only settlement of any size we passed through in this endless landscape was Grunau; if you blinked you would miss the place. After over four hours of driving we reached Keetmanshoop, the largest town along the B1 from the border with South Africa, with a population of 15,000. The driver dropped me in the centre of the town from where I walked to the Burgersentrum Backpackers, near the railway station. Keetmanshoop is at the main crossroads of southern Namibia. This is where the road to Luderitz on the coast branches off from and would be the road I would be travelling tomorrow. It was about 15.00 when I arrived in Keetmanshoop and it was too late to try and hitch the 340km across the desert to Luderitz at that time.
I spent the afternoon looking around this small town. The town was very quiet, there was hardly any traffic on the roads and most shops appeared to be shut; it was Saturday afternoon. I made my way across town and had a rather odd run in with the local police at the Central Park. As I walked through the park a young man approached me and we began chatting. I wanted to find out what public transport options there were on a Sunday to reach Luderitz. The answer was none, maybe a minibus if there were enough people wanting to travel. I thanked him and walked on down the road until he shouted after me to come back as the police wanted to talk to me. I ignored him until a policeman appeared at the top of the road. I walked back to where a group of policemen waited. They wanted to know why I was talking with the young man; I explained and then received a lecture about why I should not trust these kinds of people or hang around the taxi park. Apparently they were all thugs and crooks. This all came as news to me and I thanked them for there advice. The whole conversation with the police was very odd and I left with the impression that the police thought they had a major crime problem on their hands. The reality was very different in this very small town.
I walked down to the town museum, which is housed in the Rhenish Mission Church built in 1895; it was closed. This small town still boasted an impressive heritage of buildings from the German colonial period, the finest example being the Imperial Post Office, built in 1910. Because of the inhospitable coastline where deserts stretched for hundreds of kilometres the country was largely ignored during the colonisation period and only annexed by Germany towards the end of the 19th century. The German colony didn't last long and at the start of World War One in 1914 the German forces surrendered to South Africa, who were fighting on the side of the allies. At the end of the war South Africa was given a mandate by the League of Nations to rule the country, then known as South West Africa. This mandate was later renewed by the United Nations at the end of the Second World War and South Africa continued to rule the country until 1990 when, after many previous failed attempts, independence was granted and today's Namibia came into existence.
I woke early the next morning so that I could walk out on to the B4, which runs parallel to the railway line the 340km to Luderitz. From talking with people over the last few days everyone had told me that it takes a long time to hitch a ride. The earlier I started, the better. I walked past the taxi park, which in reality was only the forecourt of a petrol station, where a handful of people were waiting. There were no vehicles in sight; this Sunday morning the town was dead. I continued walking as the first warm rays of sun began to shine on the surrounding rocky hills. I aimed to walk as far as the junction of the B1 and B4 to the south of town. As I walked out of town I tried to hitch when the occasional vehicle drove past. By 07.00 my luck changed. The third car to pass suddenly stopped and backed up; I hadn't reached the main highway but had found a lift all the way to Luderitz.
The car was a blue Volkswagen Golf, the driver a young, local white man who lived in Luderitz. He was in a hurry, as he had to be back at work at midday, he was a barman in Luderitz. He had just had a new CD player fitted into his car a couple of weeks ago and we cruised out of town and onto the B4 with the music thumping loudly. He only drove at one speed and that was fast, ranging between 160-180kmh, just over the limit of what most people would consider safe. There were large 1.5 litre bottles of coca-cola lying around the floor of the car. One he held between his legs, which he drunk from between chain-smoking cigarettes. After a while we began talking, the usual questions directed at me you get when hitching; what are you doing, where are you from, do you like this country? After a while the conversation drifted onto his weekend in Keetmanshoop.
He had driven up from Luderitz on Friday night after he had finished work at the bar and had been at a party at an old girlfriends house. It appeared to be the kind of party that kept on going day and night. I soon found out that this young guy had a serious drug problem and had been taking a cocktail of every conceivable drug for the whole weekend and hadn't slept since Thursday night. I began to worry as we hurtled through the desert at speeds easily exceeding 160kmh, especially when he told me how tired he felt and that he felt a downer coming on. To combat the after effects of the drugs he continued drinking the cola and smoking the cigarettes. It didn't help that his CD player kept jumping tracks and that he seemed to spend more time fiddling with the controls of the stereo than looking at the road, which was passing by in a blur.
I did my best to enjoy the journey, the desert landscapes where absolutely stunning. The wide, empty expanse of the desert was quite breathtaking. Meanwhile my driver began to slow down and apologised for stopping but he had to roll a joint. We were stopped beside the highway in the absolute middle of nowhere while he levered the centre of his steering wheel off. Behind the plastic trim covering the nut that secured the steering wheel was a small bag of grass. Once he had rolled the joint and he began smoking we continued down the highway. The joint had an immediate effect and his speed gradually decreased to an almost pedestrian 100km. The effect lasted a good forty-five minutes but as the drug began to wear off his speed began to increase again. Soon we were back up to over 160kmh. As we drove he told me stories about the times he had smuggled drugs into South Africa. He had taken pills down across the border by road; apparently it was quiet profitable. He had also flown into Johannesburg airport with a couple of kilos of cocaine in his bag; it was easy, no one stopped him.
We continued chatting, I thought it was a good way of ensuring he didn't fall asleep at the wheel. It turned out he was well educated and had been to university. When our conversations hit a lull we continued driving through the desert with the stereo system playing. I always became suspicious when he didn't move for a while, when he stopped pressing buttons on the CD player, or stopped smoking cigarettes or drinking cola. Suddenly he braked sharply and swerved off onto the verge of the road. We sat there for a moment until he explained that he had almost fallen asleep. He reached into the back of the car and grabbed his bag. Inside he had a pack of pills, 100mg caffeine tablets; he swallowed two and washed them down with some more cola. We took to the road again and shortly stopped at the tiny settlement of Aus to buy some breakfast. I had some fruit, my driver a couple of microwave pies.
The final 100km of our journey took us through an almost lunar, desert landscape of white rocks and drifting sand dunes. The wind blows relentlessly across this desert and the dunes have a habit of creeping across the road and at times blocking the road. Today the road was clear and by 10.00 we had arrived in Luderitz.
Luderitz sits on a natural harbour, surrounded by desert. The harbour is considered to be one of the finest natural harbours along the whole southwestern coast of Africa. The early Portuguese explorers first used this natural harbour while searching for a sea route to India. The Portuguese did not later use the harbour as a stopover and for nearly three centuries the harbour only existed on maritime charts under the name of Angra das Voltas. In 1883 a German merchant, Adolf Luderitz from Bremen sent Heinrich Vogelsang to Angra das Voltas to establish a trading post. On the 1 May he concluded an agreement with the local chief, Chief Joseph Fredericks, to buy the Bay of Angra Pequena and all the land extending five miles in each direction. In August of the same year a second agreement was made with Chief Fredericks for the Luderitz Company to buy all the coastal territory north of the Orange River to 26 degrees south latitude; the territory stretched 137km inland.
Chief Fredericks later disputed this agreement about how far the territory reached inland so the Luderitz Company sent a request to the German government for protection. In April 1884 the area around Luderitz was declared a German protectorate. Adolf Luderitz sold the land and rights in 1885 to the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft fur Sudwest Africa (DKG) and died a year later while sailing north from the Orange River. The town was renamed Luderitzbucht in his memory. Luderitzbucht continued as a quiet trading post, mainly because of the lack of fresh water, which had to be shipped in from Cape Town. In 1904 the Nama people rose up against German colonial rule. This uprising fuelled the development of Luderitzbucht, as it became a major port for German military supplies. An 80m long jetty was built in Robert Harbour and the construction of a railway line from Luderitz to Aus, 125km east, was approved in December 1905.
In May 1907 August Stauch arrived in Luderitz as the new Bahnmeister of the Luderitz to Aus railway line. He instructed his labourers to look out for unusual stones while working on the line. In May 1908 a labourer, Zacharias Lewala, was clearing sand from the line near Kolmanskop when he discovered a glittering stone. He handed it to Stauch; it turned out to be a diamond. As news of the discovery reached the outside world a diamond rush gripped the desert. By September of 1908 the sole right to prospect and mine minerals in the Forbidden Territory was granted to the DKG. The forbidden territory stretched from the Orange River in the south to the 26 degrees south latitude in the north and from the coast, inland east for 100km. This area is still today a prohibited area known as Diamond Area 1.
Arriving in Luderitz is a surreal experience. After travelling hundreds of kilometres through endless desert, past rock-strewn plateaus and seas of sand I found myself in what appeared to be a Bavarian town beside the sea. It was quiet on this Sunday morning and I was dropped off outside the Luderitz Backpackers on Schinz Strasse. The door was open but there was no one at home. A note on the reception desk gave a number to phone to let the owner know if anyone arrived; a phone card was under the note. I phoned before making myself at home sitting in the lounge contemplating the journey I had just hitchhiked and promising myself that I would never hitch again. I knew that this would be a promise I wouldn't keep for long. I soon met another guest staying there, Paul from France. We played table tennis for a while until the owner arrived. The hostel was very quiet and laid back, within keeping with the rest of the town.
I asked the owner what people do for fun in Luderitz on a Sunday. Apparently the Sunday, eat all you can buffet, at the Nest Hotel was the main Sunday activity. At midday, Paul and myself walked along the dusty streets along the bay to the Nest Hotel. The bright green lawn stood out like a beacon along the rocky shore, a rare sight along this stretch of desert coast. The buffet was excellent and it appeared that every white resident in town was there. After Paul and I had finished lunch we walked slowly back to the Backpackers, unable to do anything more energetic after eating a huge, three course lunch. Later in the afternoon I went for a walk around the town. The town centre is very small and compact stretching around Robert Harbour to the north, Radford Bay to the west and surrounded by desert hills on the other sides. It is the kind of town where you would never find a traffic jam; there are just not enough cars here. This had the advantage of making the town a quiet and peaceful place, apart from the howling of the wind. The wind is one major feature of the weather here, which can blow relentlessly for days at a time, as well as the sea mist rolling in from the cold ocean. You could not escape from the sand and dust, which blew everywhere through the town from the surrounding desert.
The town is packed with architectural gems from the German colonial period, a hybrid mix of Imperial German and Art Nouveau styles. Despite the relatively short colonial occupation by the Germans their legacy remains in the architecture of the towns and cities. Luderitz is the jewel of this architectural heritage. On the corner of Bismarck and Bahnhof Strasse is the colonial railway station, a grand and impressive building. During my visit the railway line from Keetmanshoop was closed so that the line could be upgraded to carry heavier loads from the port. This left the station looking abandoned, sand and litter covering the tracks. Nearly every street revealed something of interest, some reminder of Luderitz's colonial past. Many of the houses were painted in bright colours, blue, red and orange being just some, which added some jollity to the town in the absence of any natural vegetation.
The most striking and visible building from most of the town is the Goerke Haus, perched on a rock overlooking the harbour. It really looked like it had been transplanted from Bavaria and rebuilt here in the desert. Near to the Goerke Haus on Diamond Hill is the Evangelical Lutheran church, the Felsenkirche, built in 1911. It dominates Luderitz from its position on this rocky hill. The church is opened to the public for an hour each evening. I waited outside with a small group of German tourists, trying to shelter from the wind, which blew off the ocean as the sun slowly sank towards the horizon. The church is famous for it's stained glass windows including the window above the alter, which was donated by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The windows looked spectacular as the glow of the setting sun shone through, illuminating the church in a myriad of colours.
When I returned to the Backpackers in the evening I found some more guests had arrived, two girls from Holland together with a hire car, a valuable asset in this vast, sparsely populated country. Together with Paul, the four of us agreed to go and visit the ghost town of Kolmanskop the following morning.
The diamonds lying in the desert along the coast north of the Orange River are alluvial diamonds. They originally came from the rich diamond seam at Kimberley, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Through erosion they were washed into the Orange River and then washed by the river down into the ocean. There is a very strong cold-water ocean current known as the Benguela Current that flows north along the coast of South Africa and Namibia from the southern ocean towards the tropics. This current washed the diamonds along the seabed and north along the coast of Namibia until they were deposited on the beach. From the beach the wind then blew them inland and across the desert for distances of up to 100km. The boundary of the forbidden Diamond Area 1 encompasses this area where the diamonds have been washed up and blown in the wind. The further north along the coast from the Orange River the smaller the diamonds become, hence the largest diamond found in Namibia was discovered at the mouth of the Orange River. When diamonds were first discovered they were literally picked up from the surface of the desert. Early miners used to crawl on their bellies in the night, looking for diamonds glinting in the moonlight.
Kolmanskop was built as a mining centre after the discovery of diamonds in the desert around Luderitz in 1908. It is 8km along the main road out of Luderitz near the airport and just south across the railway line. The town was named after Jani Kolman, an Afrikaner trekker whose ox-wagon became bogged in the sand here. The town is built on the eastern side of the low rocky hills that divide Luderitz and the coast from the shifting sand dunes inland; it is a very desolate and isolated location. During the height of the diamond rush, money was no objective and mine workers built elaborate houses out here in the desert. The town also boasted a theatre with a skittle alley, a hospital and a row of shops providing groceries, bread and meat. The most elaborate commercial premises were the ice works. Each household was given a block of ice each morning, which served a dual purpose. It was placed in a cold store in the kitchen to provide refrigeration and as it melted the fresh water was collected for drinking and cooking with. The power to drive this town in the desert and all the modern comforts provided came from a large power station built on the shores of Radford Bay in Luderitz. Coal was shipped from Germany to fuel it and it provided enough power for both Luderitz and Kolmanskop. Nearly everything was imported from Germany, from mining equipment, building materials, the latest hospital equipment to fuel, food and clothes. At the theatre the latest stage shows from Germany would be preformed with the original cast. Despite the isolation and the harsh terrain for hundreds of kilometres around Kolmanskop, it must have felt like a home away from home. Diamonds made anything possible.
In 1928 rich diamond deposits were found on the northern banks of the Orange River. The focus of the diamond industry headed south and by 1938 most of the equipment and workers at Kolmanskop had relocated to the new, richer deposits at Oranjemund. By 1956 the last residents had left Kolmanskop and the desert began to reclaim what man had built.
Today Kolmanskop is a deserted ghost town. As you approach the town it looks almost like an illusion, the once grand buildings rising out of the sand dunes. It is a popular tourist site with two guided tours a morning around the town; we arrived in time for the first tour. Some of the buildings have been restored to their former glory, including the theatre and skittle alley, which can be hired for special occasions. Inside the restored houses you could appreciate the standard of living here during the towns hey day. The houses were large, two floors, balconies, high ceilings, wooden floors and large sash windows. Once inside the house you could almost forget that there was a desert on your doorstep. Most of the buildings though had not weathered the harsh conditions here over almost half a century very well. The wind had taken its toll, sandblasting the brickwork, blowing off roofs and driving sand dunes through the doors and windows. There was always an eerie creak or groan from the buildings as the wind gusted, blowing through the broken windows, or under the roof. Some houses were so full of sand that you had to crawl through the door to get inside; others had collapsed walls where the sheer weight of sand had eventually won against mans construction.
Diamond mining still continues in the area and there is strict security at the checkpoint by Kolmanskop to enter the forbidden area. Every vehicle is searched and you can only enter with a permit, which is not easy to obtain unless you are a mine employee or on official business. The wind is still blowing and the sand is still shifting, so it is only time before the desert gives up some more of it's treasures. With today's modern technology mining has moved out into the ocean, looking for the channels in the seabed that the Benguela current washes the diamonds along. The Elizabeth Bay mine 24km south of Luderitz is still producing diamonds, as are beach and shallow marine contractors.
By lunchtime I returned to Luderitz and spent the rest of the day relaxing. I ate lunch at a local restaurant along Kratzplatz Strasse and dinner at the Kapps Hotel. During the afternoon I did some research on where to go and what to do with the last few days of my trip. I hadn't yet bought a flight home to London but I had pencilled in the last week of July as a return date. When I reached the capital, Windhoek I would make my final arrangements. The clock was against me and as much as I would of liked to spend some more time in Luderitz I decided that the following day I would try and hitchhike to Windhoek. Somehow the memory of the ride I had hitched a few days earlier had faded and I felt confident once again to go and stand beside the highway taking my chances.
I set my alarm for early in the morning, determined to be up before the sun rose and walking along Bay Road into the desert to try and hitch a ride with the first traffic to leave Luderitz. As I left the Luderitz Backpackers all the other guests were still asleep. The same seemed true for the town as I walked out of the hostel and along Schinz Strasse before turning left and along the main road out of town. In the early morning twilight the town was still and quiet, apart from the wind blowing off the ocean; nobody was about. I walked for maybe half an hour until I reached the edge of town and could only see sand dunes in front of me. A couple of cars passed me, but didn't stop. From their frantic looking sign language I gathered that they were only driving locally and were not heading out far into the desert. I must have looked like I was planning to travel a long way today, with my backpack on, a daypack in my hand and my dusty, road-weary hat on my head; my looks were not deceptive. I waited beside the road just past a gas station as the early morning rays of sun finally broke through. The nights were cold in Luderitz at this time of year, especially when compared to other countries I had travelled through a couple of months ago; I welcomed the warmth the morning sun brought.
Standing near the gas station seemed like a good idea. Anyone travelling a long distance today would have to stop here for fuel and would have plenty of time to see me standing beside the highway. My plan worked and shortly a car, a four-door saloon, pulled out of the gas station and stopped alongside me offering me a ride to Keetmanshoop. I couldn't believe my luck (again) and accepted the lift; the time had just gone seven 'o clock. The driver was a local black man dressed smartly in a suit, his wife sat in the front passenger seat so I clambered onto the back seat with my luggage and thanked them for stopping to pick me up. I immediately felt safer in this car than in my previous, hair-raising ride into Luderitz a few days ago. We talked briefly as we began our journey into the desert, introducing ourselves and finding out a little about each other. The driver worked for the government and had a meeting to attend in Keetmanshoop later that day. Our conversations didn't last too long, we both had trouble understanding each other's accents, and so I sat back and enjoyed the desert scenery on the way back to Keetmanshoop.
The wind blew far stronger today; the dunes outside of Luderitz were swiftly marching across the road. At times we could not see the surface of the road as the sand blew from the desert like a heavy mist only a metre or so deep. The sand blasted against the side of the car, scraping across the metal work, I'm glad it wasn't my car receiving this battering from the desert. When we later stopped for a break at a small roadhouse and opened the car's doors, a pile of sand fell out of the door seals. On this journey I could relax, not having to worry if the driver was about to fall asleep, or loose control at over 160kmh; it made the journey a lot more enjoyable. The desert looked stunning on this bright morning. The flat-topped hills were cloaked in a heavy shroud of mist. We could see the mist tumbling down the side of the rocky hills and evaporate into thin air on it's decent to the desert floor. The driver slowed down to watch these clouds and the three of us were mesmerized by the way they cloaked the hills like a thick blanket and gracefully swept down the hillsides.
At the more sedate speeds we were travelling at, keeping fairly close to the speed limit, we didn't arrive in Keetmanshoop until about eleven o' clock. I asked the driver to drop me on the B1, the main north, and south road in the country, which bypasses the town. He dropped me at the southern junction and we said goodbye and I thanked him once again for the lift. I walked along the B1 to reach the northern junction with Keetmanshoop, so that I could catch the traffic from Keetmanshoop heading north, as well as the through traffic. It took me about half an hour to walk to this next junction, in which time not a single vehicle passed me; as far as I could see, which was quite a long way in this flat desert, there were no vehicles. My journey to Windhoek looked like it may suddenly take longer than planned after such a good start leaving Luderitz. Just passed the junction, where some locals were selling crafts and souvenirs beside the road, I dropped my backpack in the dust and began to wait patiently.
The walk from my last lift had made me hot, especially under the bright sun, which was now hot as the time approached mid-day. The road looked as empty as the surrounding desert, not a vehicle to be seen. I could see some cars driving around the outskirts of Keetmanshoop, but only a few of them made their way to the B1 and the junction where I now found myself standing. Maybe every five minutes or so a car or truck would pass by, none of them stopped. I waited for over an hour, gradually becoming more aware of the time slipping by and the 500km journey still in front of me. As each vehicle disappeared north into the distance I became more anxious that this dusty junction would be the end of the road for me today. Eventually a minibus approached from Keetmanshoop, I flagged it down and found that it was going to Windhoek. I put my backpack on top of the trailer, which was heavily overloaded and squeezed myself into the minibus. After standing in the sun for the past couple of hours and now staring out of the window at the endless flat central plateau covered in scrub, I soon fell asleep.
I woke up as the bus slowed and turned right off the main highway into the small town of Mariental. This is the largest town between Keetmanshoop and Windhoek and serves as a small commercial and administrative centre. We stopped to refuel at a petrol station along the wide main street where we all took the opportunity to get out and stretch our legs or buy snacks and drinks from the small shop on the forecourt. In the meantime the driver finished fuelling the minibus and then drove off along the main street, leaving all us passengers hanging around the forecourt. At first I wasn't too worried, I had become used to local minibuses in Africa suddenly disappearing to collect spare wheels, more passengers or just visiting friends and family. After about twenty or so minutes I became anxious as to the whereabouts of the minibus and especially my backpack on top of the trailer. It didn't help me either that the local passengers where becoming concerned as well. I stood on the side of the road looking in the direction I had seen the minibus disappear. Once or twice I caught sight of it in the distance crossing the main street before disappearing again down a side street. This raised my hopes slightly but I still could not get rid of the anxiety of being parted from my backpack.
Well over half an hour after we stopped at the petrol station the minibus reappeared in the distance and came towards us along the main street. The driver had been away driving around this small town colleting a handful of passengers. I felt relief at seeing my backpack again on top of the trailer and at last to be travelling north to Windhoek. By late afternoon we approached Windhoek, the capital and largest city in Namibia with a population of 160,000. The driver didn't go through the centre of the city as I expected him to do so, but drove around the Western Bypass instead before finally dropping me a kilometre or so north of where the bypass crosses Independence Avenue.
As soon as the bus stopped we were almost surrounded by taxi drivers, like bees attracted to a honey pot. I was not exactly sure where I was and after an exhausting 850km journey from Luderitz I decided to take a taxi into the city centre and to the Cardboard Box Backpackers. The driver had never heard of the place so I offered to navigate and ten minutes later we were outside the Cardboard Box on Johann Albrecht Strasse, the end of a long days travelling. After checking into a dorm room I headed out to the bar at the back for a cold, refreshing beer. It felt odd to have finally made it to Windhoek. I planned to end my African adventure here in a couple of weeks time; this city would be my last view of this beautiful continent before returning to London, I had reached the end of the road. However, before that day there were two things I still wanted to do, a desert safari to Sossusvlei before spending my last few days relaxing in Swakopmund on the coast.
The beer hardly touched the sides; the day travelling across the desert had really made me thirsty. There is a travel agent based at the Cardboard Box so I went to have a chat about two things; one-way flights from Windhoek to London and safaris to Sossusvlei. The news on the flights did not seem encouraging, there are not many options from this small city and the Lufthansa flight I was hoping to take had been cancelled. I decided to worry about all this after the safari, which just happened to be leaving the next morning. There were two main companies operating here, Crazy Kudu and Wild Dog; I was booked on the Wild Dog tour, although I kept getting their names mixed up and soon began telling everyone that I was going to Sossusvlei with Crazy Dog.
I returned to the bar for another beer and ordered some dinner. As I sat there at the bar I heard a familiar voice talking behind me. I turned around and saw Julian standing behind me. I had met Julian about a month ago at the Inkosana Lodge, by the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. We spent the evening catching up on where we had been and what are plans were over the next few days and weeks. Julian had hired a car and planned to drive to Etosha National Park in the north tomorrow, we would probably both be back in Windhoek again in a few days time.
I didn't have to get up early to go on my safari to Sossusvlei. The Wild Dog office was next door to the Cardboard Box Hostel and the tour wasn't due to leave until 09.30. After a good breakfast and a pot of tea at the bar by the swimming pool, I wandered next door to find the minibus almost ready for departure, our luggage being loaded into the trailer before being hitched up to the minibus. The minibus was your standard, two-wheel drive white Toyota, common all across Africa. There were six other tourists on this three day trip to the desert, an older Swiss man, who had travelled extensively and now lived in Thailand; a mother and her son from South Africa, two of the sons friends from Scotland who were cousins, a boy and a girl and the girl's boyfriend, also from Scotland. Our guide and driver, cum cook and mechanic was a young Czech immigrant who had moved to Namibia a few years earlier, where he already had family living.
We didn't have to hang about long before we promptly departed on time at around 09.30. We made one more stop on our way out of Windhoek at a supermarket to buy any personal supplies we might need for the trip to Sossusvlei and the three days in the desert; I came back to the minibus with a bottle of red wine. It does not take long to drive out of the small city of Windhoek and into the vastness of the Central Plateau. Shortly we turned off the main tarred road south of the city and stopped at a police checkpoint before disappearing in a cloud of dust along the gravel road towards the desert. The road was in good condition with hardly any potholes; we were able to make good progress as we drove in a generally southerly direction. The surrounding semi-arid landscape we drove through looked barren and inhospitable, there were few settlements, just every now and again some ranch buildings just off the side of the road. In the few trees that there were out here social weaverbirds had built their huge nests. One nest had become so big and heavy that the tree's branches had finally given way and the nest had crashed to the ground, bringing half the tree with it.
We stopped for lunch at the Spreetshoogte Pass where the plateau dropped away steeply to the Namib Desert, which stretched out into the distance as far as we could see, eventually reaching the coast. From this high vantage point the views were truly breathtaking. I could really appreciate the beauty and the huge expanse of this desert. As we stepped out of the minibus we were hit by the strong, gusting cold wind blowing in from the west. It made a picnic at this exposed point challenging to say the least. The road wound extremely steeply down this escarpment and to the desert floor below. We would not be returning through this pass, our minibus would not be able to make it up such a gradient.
We soon stopped again at the small settlement of Solitaire, an outpost of civilisation in this huge, empty land. This settlement is located at a junction of the C14 and it appears that Solitaire's main reason for existing is the petrol station; it was a welcome sight and the local people were warm and friendly. We had seen hardly any traffic on the road from Windhoek all day, but suddenly as we were stopped at the petrol station vehicles appeared from all directions, all of them to refuel like ourselves. On a blackboard hanging outside the small shop and cafe at the petrol station the latest news had been chalked up, the results of the Wimbledon tennis finals (although by now this news was fairly old). After a drink, a taste of the famous apple strudel and the chance to stretch our legs we continued on the final leg of our journey to the campsite at Sesriem.
After about another 65km we turned off the C14 and onto a road heading west to Sesriem where a sign at the junction caught my eye. Someone had scratched, 'Welcome to hitchhiking hell' on the sign. My heart sunk as I read those words and could only imagine what psychological torture someone went through waiting here, literally in the middle of nowhere for a lift. It must be a difficult place to hitch from, as the majority of the vehicles that come this way are either tour busses, such as us, or tourists in their own vehicles. I had found that neither of these two groups of people stopped often for a hitchhiker standing beside the highway. Mostly local residents had picked me up while I had been hitchhiking around the south of this country but out here they were few and far between. Finally at just after 15.00 we arrived at the Sesriem campsite, our home for the next two nights and were shown to our pitch.
Each campsite is under an old and tortured looking camel thorn tree, a type of acacia that grows well in this part of the desert, providing a large canopy of shade for both tourists and animals. The camel thorn is easily identified from its large, grey, kidney shaped seedpods. The campsite is situated on a semi-arid plain. Only a few kilometres to the west we could see the huge red sand dunes spilling down on to the plain. To our east the horizon was dominated by the distant rocky mountains of the Naukluft Massif. The wind had not abated at all and still blew at almost gale force blowing sand and dust everywhere; we were setting up camp in the middle of a sandstorm. I had visited many deserts over the past few years but had never had the misfortune to experience a sandstorm, up until now. As well as sand finding its way into everything, the sand and dust created a heavy haze creating rather flat light that would ruin any chances of taking good photographs. We struggled with the tents against the wind and after half an hour or so our campsite was set up as best we could, the tents precariously pitched in the soft sand.
This is the only campsite at Sossusvlei and it gets very busy. The facilities here included a shop selling basic supplies; I indulged in an ice cream, a petrol station, a small campsite bar with a small swimming pool next door and a block of showers and toilets with running cold and occasionally hot water. The site was full with safari tours, overland trucks and tourists in their own vehicles, mostly South Africans, turning this patch of desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest sizable town into a small tented city. In stark contrast, at the gates to the campsite, a luxury, modern looking Movenpick Lodge provided facilities for those with the money who could not face camping in a sandstorm. At well over US$100 a night I remained in my tent, which I shared with the Swiss man.
Once our campsite had been established and we had made ourselves at home in our tents we prepared for our first trip out into the dunes. We drove the short distance into the Namib-Naukluft Park to the Elim dune, where we planned to watch the sunset. The Elim dune is the closest dune to Sesriem, about 4km away, and is clearly visible from the campsite, the red sand spilling onto the plateau. The dune rises to a height of 137m above the surrounding plain, about a 2.5km walk from the car park, which is situated around a shady camel thorn tree at the base of the dune. The dune is a good vantage point to watch the sunrise and set and see the colours of the sand change with intensity of the light. The dune is named after a former farm, Elim, a name that derives from the bible and refers to an oasis. Hiking up the dune was hard work; at times the dune would be so steep that you would take two steps up and one down; it wasn't long until I had broken out into a sweat, my heart pounding.
The amount of vegetation growing on the dune surprised me; I had only expected to see an endless sea of desolate sand. In the hollows between the crests of the dunes grew a few types of desert grass, mainly the Namib dune grass, a reed like grass that can grow up to 2m in height and the spiky ostrich grass. The further and higher we climbed into the dune field the shorter the grasses became, reflecting the precarious nature of life on a dune. Small animal tracks criss-crossed the sand; mostly left by birds, lizards and beetles. The more I looked the more life I could see out here in this desert. After thirty or forty minutes of hiking we reached a high point on the dune with stunning views all around us. The most impressive view was to the west. From here the dunes marched away from us as far as the eye could see, eventually reaching the coast over 100km away. Suspended just above the horizon, the setting sun glowed orange. Unfortunately, with the strength of the wind, sand blew everywhere. We were sandblasted by the wind as it whipped up and over the dunes. With all the sand and dust in the air the sunset was not as spectacular as we had hoped, the haze in the sky ruined the light and any chances for some quality photography. Despite the relentless wind the dune was a very peaceful place to spend some time relaxing, enjoying the serenity and beauty of the dunes. Once the sun dipped below the horizon we walked back to the car park. Running down sand dunes is a joy, especially when compared to the hard work involved in climbing up. It made the physical effort all worthwhile.
The Namib Desert stretches along the south west coast of Africa from the Olifants River in South Africa to the Carunjamba River in Angola, a distance of approximately 2,000km. It is a narrow desert varying in width between 100km and 150km and is only about 1/30 the size of the Sahara. The coastal fringes are the driest with an average 8mm of rainfall a year, compared with 100mm in the east of the desert towards the central plateau. In comparison, the annual evaporation rate is somewhere near 3,500mm a year. Two factors have combined to create the Namib Desert. The main one is the high pressure zone created at roughly 30' s latitude by the heat of the sun at the equator being at it's hottest creating a low air pressure zone as the warm air rises. As air is sucked towards the equator on the trade winds and rises, it losses it's moisture as rainfall before moving back towards the poles on the antitrade winds. This air is now dry and sinks back down at roughly 30's causing high pressure and no rainfall. This high-pressure zone also prevents moist air flowing across this region. The other factor creating this desert is the cold Benguela Current, which flows north along the coast from the Antarctic. This current cools the sea temperature preventing evaporation from the seas surface and dramatically reducing any moisture in the air. The Namib Desert has extensive sand seas, mountains and rocky plains. There are oases too but unlike the oases in the Sahara the ones in the Namib Desert are linear oases. These linear oases are in fact dry rivers, which flood during the wet season, the rainwater flowing through the desert as it tries to reach the coast.
Sossusvlei is part of a linear oasis and is a huge pan at the end of the Tsauchab River where the rivers course to the sea is finally blocked by the dunes. From the pan it is another 55km west to the coast. The name Sossusvlei is derived from two words in two different languages. Sossus is a Nama word meaning, a place where water gathers; vlei is a South African term meaning, a hollow that floods during the wet season. The Tsauchab River flows from the Naukluft Mountains and forms a large valley as it flows through the sand dunes.
In the early hours of the next morning we prepared ourselves for our trip to Sossusvlei, stopping at the famous Dune 45 on the way to watch the sunrise. A tarred road follows this valley through the dunes from the campsite. We waited in the dark in our minibus at the park gates waiting for them to open, a queue of traffic behind us. The gates were late in opening so we all had a rush against the clock to reach Dune 45 and our vantage point to watch the sunrise. Huge star dunes rise up either side of the flat valley floor, which is remarkably free of any dunes. It has been found that the dunes here hardly move, the crests move but the bases remain in the same position. This is mostly due to the winds; for six months of the year the wind blows east off from the ocean, for the other six months it blows west from inland. When the river flows it washes any sand in the valley away. The water doesn't flow every year, sometimes it remains dry for years at a time; other years Sossusvlei and even the campsite at Sesriem can be under up to two meters of water.
The wind had not abated overnight and a gale still blew across the desert. During the night I had hoped to see a beautiful display of stars but the sky remained hazy and only the very brightest stars were visible. As we travelled through this valley the sky slowly lightened, the black turning to a deep blue, the few stars shining quickly disappearing with the fast approach of dawn. We reached Dune 45 and turned off the road to the car park, behind us a convoy of vehicle headlights stretched into the distance, the eastern horizon now a light shade of blue as the sun edged nearer. This dune is probably one of the most famous dunes in the world and features on many postcards, calendars and other publications; the red, orange sand, the size and the beautiful curves of this dune make it a photographers dream. It is only a coincidence that Dune 45 is about 45km from Sesriem and is not why it was named such. All the dunes are numbered by the park staff for reference, which is how this dune was named. We were the first group to reach the dune and the first to start the tough climb up to watch the sunrise. It was a hard slog, especially at this hour in the morning; my heart was pounding as my legs pumped my way up the dune. Soon the car park was some distance below us, quickly filling up with 4WD's and minibuses. In our wake other tourists followed us snaking up the steep slope of the dune. After a while the worst of the climb was over as we made our way along the crest of the dune, which swept away into the distance in beautifully crafted curves.
The wind still howled incessantly, blasting sand up the face of the dune and off the crest. We sat or stood on the crest waiting for the sun to appear, sand blowing everywhere around us. As the first rays of sun shone onto the dunes, the colour in the sand came to life, first a deep red before turning orange as the sun became stronger and stronger. By now a crowd had gathered, strung along the crest of the dune watching this spectacle, others were still struggling up the slope, fighting against the sandstorm. By the time we had returned to the car park, in only a fraction of the time it took to climb the dune, our guide had breakfast ready; I needed a cup of tea after the mornings climb.
After breakfast we continued driving along the valley to the 2x4 car park at Sossusvlei, effectively the end of the road. From here we hiked into the desert. The strength of the wind had increased dramatically to almost storm force. The sand and dust created a fog; visibility became severely restricted as we began our hike. Camel thorn trees loomed out of this fog, their branches almost bending to breaking point in the wind; small plants and weeds tumbled past us. The wind blew from behind us; it would have been almost impossible to walk into the wind with the amount of sand that blew about. Even though it wasn't long until any exposed skin soon hurt as the sand continuously blasted at it. I was glad I wasn't wearing shorts like some others in our group. In the midst of this sandstorm it felt like we were on some strange alien planet. Soon we crossed a number of dunes which began to act as windbreaks, in the hollows between the dunes conditions improved considerably.
Our guide pointed out the various plants that struggled for existence out here in this hostile environment. The most interesting was the Nara (pronounced with a preceding click of the tongue). It is sometimes referred to as the desert melon and is in fact related to the curcubit (cucumber) family of plants. It is a low growing plant with spiky green leaves and grows in clumps, which gathers sand around it creating a sand dune with the plant covering the surface. Once a year the Nara produces a round, spiky fruit, the size of a large orange. This fruit is edible to desert dwellers such as mice, jackals, gemsbok and birds and also humans. It was the end of the season and most of the fruit we found had already been eaten, just the carefully hollowed out spiky skin of the fruit was left in the sand. Eventually our guide found a fresh fruit and carefully plucked it from the thorns and proceeded to cut it open with a small knife. I tried a piece; it was extremely bitter and definitely not a delicacy although if it was a choice between starving and eating this bitter fruit I would as it is highly nutritious and about as good as it gets in a desert. We left the partly eaten fruit under a camel thorn tree where it was soon devoured by a flock of ravenous small birds.
We reached the large, flat Cessna Pan, the mud dry and cracked like crazy paving. Huge orange dunes provided a backdrop to this pan, which we crossed to reach Deadvlei. The wind had begun to drop as we climbed over and around more dunes. Finally we climbed one more dune from where there was a stunning view of Deadvlei below us. Deadvlei is an old pan that has been cut off from the rivers floodwater by a sand dune, which we were now standing on. We walked down onto the pan, the mud again baked by the sun and cracked, ancient dead camel thorn trees standing starkly against the backdrop of huge orange dunes. It was like walking into an amphitheatre, the dune behind the pan must have spilled down a few hundred metres onto the pan; it was an awe-inspiring sight. We spent some time strolling across the pan and soaking up the unique atmosphere of the place, the now only occasional gust of wind blowing a small cloud of dust across the pan. In the distance we could see a line of people climbing a ridge to the top of a dune; the people looked tiny and really gave a sense of scale to these massive sand dunes surrounding us.
Finally from here we walked to Sossusvlei, a distance of approximately 2km along easier tracks than the route we had taken across the dunes to reach Deadvlei. I sat under a large camel thorn tree at the edge of the Sossus pan to take in the dramatic scenery around the pan. We were in a more exposed location and the wind had picked up again creating very hazy conditions. We decided to turn back to the minibus and return to the campsite. We all managed to hitch a ride on a 4WD back to the 2x4 car park. Compared to the conditions when we arrived at the height of the sandstorm, it now appeared fairly calm at the car park. When we returned to Sesriem for a late lunch we found our campsite had taken a battering in the storm while we had been away. Half the tents had blown over, mine had been blown into the thorns of the acacia tree; inside the tent a sand dune had appeared; everything was covered in red sand.
We had some time during the afternoon to relax at the campsite, a lot of this time was taken up in straightening out the campsite and clearing sand out of the tents; it would definitely be a laundry day when I returned to Windhoek. In the late afternoon we went on one more trip into the desert. This time we drove the short distance, about 4km to the Sesriem Canyon. The canyon is part of the course of the Tsauchab River as it flows from the Naukluft Mountains to Sossusvlei and provides an important water source, which was vital to the early inhabitants of the area. The canyon is between 25-30m deep and is very narrow at its start, which helps to reduce evaporation from the small pools at the bottom. It derived its name, Sesriem, from two Afrikaan words. Ses, meaning six and riem, meaning thong. As cattle and horses could not get to the water at the bottom of the canyon, a bucket was tied to six leather thongs; part of the tackle used with horses, and hauled up. About 250m downstream from the start of the canyon a set of steps leads down to the canyon floor. We climbed down and walked up the canyon and sure enough, near the start between the narrow walls of the canyon there was a small pool of stagnant water. Stuck behind rocks and in ledges and cracks of the canyon walls was debris washed down by the floodwater. It gave some idea of the power of the floodwater surge through this canyon. We walked downstream along the canyon floor. It soon opened up into a much wider canyon, about 300m past the steps, with grasses and acacia trees growing along the dry riverbed. We climbed back out of the canyon, now a fairly easy climb up the rock and shingle wall to watch the setting sun before returning to the campsite.
This would be our last night in the desert, tomorrow morning we would drive back to Windhoek. After dinner I wandered the short distance over to the bar for a few cold beers. It wasn't long until I saw a couple of familiar faces standing at the bar, it was Ben and Vicky, who I had previously met a few weeks ago at St Lucia in South Africa. We spent the evening catching up with travelling gossip and what our plans were for the next few days and weeks. My plans were nearly at an end but I told them I would be returning to Windhoek tomorrow where I would book a flight back to London before spending my remaining days in Swakopmund on the coast. They were also heading to Swakopmund and said they would look out for me when they got there.
I was the last one to retire that night at our campsite; everything was quiet when I returned, except for the snoring coming from my tent, which seemed to reverberate across the desert. I had a sleepless night and at one point abandoned the tent to take my chances out in the sandstorm. Neither the snoring or the sandstorm was conducive to sleep so I eventually returned to the tent and put up with the noise; it was better than having sand blowing up my nose and into my ears.
The following morning I was the first to rise and sat in the acacia tree above our campsite to watch the sun rise. It was surprisingly cold in the morning, the wind of course, still blowing. After breakfast we packed up camp and retraced our route back to Windhoek except for taking the Remhoogte Pass back up to the Central Plateau rather than the extremely steep Spreetshoogte Pass. By mid afternoon I was back at the Cardboard Box in Windhoek and began the task of getting rid of all the sand that had covered absolutely everything.
Now I had returned to the capital city I had one important job to do before I went anywhere else; I had to book a one-way flight back home to London. I had almost come to the end of the road for this trip, time and money had run out and my mind had begun to seriously think about plans back home. The thought of returning home to Dorset excited me, I had missed the place over the past six months. In addition, the thought of leaving this life on the road behind, that I had become so used to, saddened me. Going home would really be a mix of emotions. By the time I had returned from my desert safari on Friday it was too late in the afternoon to start wandering about the airline offices and travel agents down town. I asked around at the Cardboard Box for advice about flights to Europe. I was given the phone number of an agent in Johannesburg. A German girl I was chatting with recommended Post Street Mall, downtown, where there were a number of travel agencies, which would probably provide a cheaper deal than the airline offices.
On Saturday morning I made an early start and walked downtown, on a mission to find a flight home. I really didn't expect to find any bargains, but as I could not get hold of the company in Johannesburg, I thought it would make a good start. I walked into the first travel agent I found in Post Street Mall and sat down at the desk. Ten minutes later I was booked on a British Airways flight on the 29th July flying back to London via Johannesburg; total cost of the flight was GB£276. I walked back out onto the street and returned to the Cardboard Box, clutching my ticket the whole way, a tear in the corner of my eye at the thought that this trip would now definitely end in nine days time. Back at the Box I drew up plans for my final few days in Africa. I would spend this weekend in Windhoek and explore the city; something that I had not had the chance to do yet, even though this was my second time in the city. On Sunday night I would take the overnight train to Swakopmund on the coast and spend the week there relaxing before returning to Windhoek in time to catch my flight.
Windhoek is in the geographical centre of the country and is a major road and rail crossroads. The city sits high on the Central Plateau at an altitude of 1,660m surrounded by low rocky hills. This gives the city a pleasant climate for it's diverse population of 160,000 made up of many different tribes as well as Europeans. The city has only been in existence for just over a century. During the German colonial period it served as the capital of German South-West Africa. This only lasted for about ten years until the outbreak of the First World War when the German colony surrendered to South African forces fighting on the side of the allies. Despite the passage of time the city still maintains a German flavour with many historic buildings and churches from the colonial period around the city. Even the modern buildings have been built in a hybrid neo-Bavarian style, drawing inspiration from the German colonial architecture.
I decided to take myself on a walking tour of the city, to orientate myself and to see some of the sites. I scribbled down directions of a walking tour on my map of the city from another guidebook and set off. The main commercial street is Independence Avenue, which runs north to south through the centre of the city. Off this avenue, to the west, is Post Street Mall, the commercial heart of the city. This pedestrian street is packed with shops, where you can buy almost anything. Outside, street vendors selling souvenirs and curios to tourists, had set up their stalls, or carefully laid out their goods on the pavement. About half way along the street is an interesting display of thirty-three meteorites from the Gibeon meteor shower, which dropped about 21 tonnes of material around Gibeon in the south of the country. The meteors had been mounted on steel poles giving the impression that they were still hurtling through space. These alien boulders are made of mostly ferrous material; they were icy cold to touch. Running parallel about two blocks to the west of Independence Avenue is the railway line. This central area of the city lies in a shallow valley, the low hills rising from the west of the railway line and the east of Independence Avenue.
I walked from the Cardboard Box along John Meinert Strasse over the railway line turning south on Independence Avenue and past Post Street Mall to Peter Muller Strasse, where I turned east and walked up the hill to Christuskirche. This distinctive looking church has to be one of the most famous buildings in Namibia. Gottlieb Redecker built it in 1907 out of local sandstone in an unusual neogothic, art nouveau style. A couple of hundred yards east of Christuskirche is the Tintenpalast, which serves as the country's Parliament building. This building was also designed by Gottlieb Redecker and built between 1912-1913; it served as the administrative headquarters of German South-West Africa. From here I walked north along Robert Mugabe Avenue, past the State House. The residence of the German colonial governor once occupied the site of the State House, until it was razed in 1958 to make way for the present day building. After independence this building became the Namibian president's official residence. From here I continued to Sinclair Street from where there is a good viewpoint looking west over the city.
I sat down for a while and rested, enjoying the view. The weather in Windhoek was perfect, deep blue skies and warm temperatures; the walk had made me quite hot, sweat dripping from my brow. It was good to feel the warmth of the sun again after spending the past few weeks in South Africa in the middle of their winter. After resting a while, I walked down to the railway station, a Cape Dutch style building dating back to 1912, to enquire about trains to Swakopmund. An overnight train left on Sunday, but I would have to return to purchase a ticket on Sunday afternoon, which I did.
On the Sunday evening the owners of the Cardboard Box had arranged a BBQ for all of the guests who were staying. A selection of meats were put on a spit down by the bar outside and roasted. It all took longer than expected to cook. I had to quickly eat my dinner and finish off my beer before walking briskly down to the station to catch my train, which was due to depart at 20.00. I said farewell to everyone at the bar and told them I would be back next weekend. The walk to the station only took ten minutes where I found my train waiting at the platform. It was not quite what I was expecting; my train was only one carriage long. I had a business class seat booked, which were the seats at the front of the carriage; there appeared to be little difference between the business and economy seats. This small carriage was fairly packed, a television hung from the ceiling and showed a rather worn out video of an eighties film I had so far managed to avoid watching. I settled into my seat next to a window and soon our little carriage was being shunted around the station sidings. After quarter of an hour or so we finally rolled out of Windhoek, now attached to a long goods train for our ride through the night across the desert to the coast.
I soon fell asleep as the train slowly bumped and rattled its way down the tracks. Later during the night I became aware that the train had stopped and that people were moving about; I was too tired to open my eyes and stayed curled up in my seat. Soon it became quiet; that is when I suddenly remembered that this train was due to arrive in Swakopmund in the early hours of the morning. I opened my eyes and looked around, the carriage was almost empty. I looked out of the window; in the darkness and gloom a sign stared back at me saying, Swakopmund. Panic ensued; I had arrived at my destination. I grabbed my luggage and stumbled off the train and into the night. I stood on the short platform staring out at the darkness, I couldn't see far; the town, wherever it was, was cloaked in fog. Most of the passengers had disappeared along the road, which ran parallel to the railway line, the orange streetlights soon disappearing as they marched off onto the fog. I couldn't see any sign of buildings, just what looked like a salt depot across the road. I checked the time; it was just coming up to 05.00. I decided to wait at the station until daybreak before walking into town and finding the Alternative Space guesthouse, where I planned to stay.
There was a tiny waiting room building on the platform, not much bigger than a garden shed. The door was open, inside one other passenger had made himself at home waiting for daybreak. I lay down on one of the benches and fell asleep for a couple of hours. I woke around 07.00 to the sound of traffic on the road beside the station. I peered out of the window and saw that the darkness had now turned to gloom as the thick fog continued to shroud the town. The other passenger was also preparing to walk into town. I asked him which way the town was, he pointed down the road in the direction the train had been travelling last night. I said goodbye and walked off into the fog, armed with my street map of Swakopmund in my guidebook. It soon became apparent roughly where I was, as I picked up a street name at a junction a short distance from the station. I could now see buildings looming out of the fog as I walked south looking for Brucken Strasse. It didn't help my confidence much that some of the street names on my map didn't match what was on the ground; it appeared that someone had embarked on a renaming exercise in this town.
I found Brucken Strasse and turned left, walking east away from the downtown area for almost a kilometre to the Alternative Space, which was located, literally on the edge of town; beyond it was only sand and dunes. It was 07.30 when I rang the doorbell; I hoped I wasn't too early. The door soon opened and the owner welcomed me. Even though I had just arrived I was shown to the kitchen where a help yourself breakfast was laid out for the guests. I quickly made myself at home with a large pot of tea. It wasn't long until the other guests began to stir and come down to the kitchen. One of the faces looked familiar, it was Katherine, the German girl I had been chatting to at the Cardboard Box in Windhoek about flights to Europe a few days ago. It had turned out she had hired a car and driven down from Windhoek yesterday; I told her about my adventures on the train arriving here in the middle of the night.
Later that morning the two of us decided to go for a drive to Walvis Bay, 30km south of Swakopmund. I had hardly arrived after my journey from Windhoek when I was on the move again. Walvis Bay has long been a strategically important port and during the South African mandate over Namibia, Walvis Bay was administered as part of the Cape Province. Even after Namibian independence in 1990, South Africa still held on to this enclave on the coast. Only after further negotiations between the two governments did Walvis Bay finally become part of Namibia on the 28th February 1994. The road from Swakopmund followed the coast, the dunes from the desert almost spilling across the road and into the sea. It didn't take long to reach Walvis Bay from where we decided to drive down to the Walvis Bay Lagoon, just to the south of the town.
The lagoon covers an area of 45,000 hectares and together with the adjoining salt works and their saltpans and the artificial pools at the nearby Bird Paradise form the most important coastal wetland in Southern Africa for migratory birds. The star attractions at the lagoon are the flamingos. The lagoon attracts half the flamingo population of Southern Africa as well as other birds like chestnut banded plovers, pelicans and many more waders and migratory birds. We drove past the salt works where a mountain of salt was being loaded onto trucks; these saltpans supply about 90% of South Africa's salt. We continued driving out towards the coast, the saltpans to our south and the lagoon to our north. The lagoon stretched as far as the eye could see and dotted across it where pink flamingos, thousands of them. Some were standing in the water next to the road; others were in large flocks in the distance forming a pink haze on the surface of the water.
We stopped along the way to take some photos. Once out of the car the lagoon felt like a very desolate place; all around us we could see nothing but the calm lagoon and the saltpans, the water reflecting the grey, misty sky. Of course the flamingos near the road didn't hang around long and either flew away or marched through the water to a safer distance from us before we could take any good photos. One flamingo I carefully approached, trying not to frighten it, stood fairly close to the road. Just as I double-checked my exposure and focusing it saw me and took flight; I cursed my luck and panned the camera around trying to catch the flamingo in flight. I doubted it would be a good photo, considering I was using a manual camera; I was pleasantly surprised though a few weeks later when I developed the film and saw that I had taken one of my best wildlife shots on this whole African trip. Eventually we reached the beach and the ocean, a stark contrast to the calm lagoon. The wind still blew strongly and the ocean looked angry as the waves crashed onto the sandy beach. We turned around and drove back towards Walvis Bay.
It was nearing lunchtime and we decided to look for a bar/restaurant for a bite to eat and a cold beer. We didn't find much in Walvis Bay and Katherine suggested we return to Swakopmund and go to the Lighthouse Pub & Cafe. A short drive later we were sitting in the bar, a cold beer in hand and a wonderful view looking out across the ocean where dolphins were playing in the surf. Our 'lunch' went on well into the afternoon, the beer kept on flowing and time just seemed to slip by unnoticed. Katherine was due to meet a friend here at 17.00; it had now gone 15.00 and it seemed pointless returning to the Alternative Space, just to come back here in two hours time. We ordered some more beer instead and spent the rest of the afternoon in the bar, eventually watching the sun set over the ocean. In the late afternoon Katherine's friend arrived to find us a little worse for wear after we had lost count how many beers we had drunk. When her friend finally managed to drag us away from the bar we stopped for dinner at a local pizza place and eventually returned to the Alternative Space around 22.00; a very long lunch indeed.
The next day Katherine drove back to Windhoek; she had a flight to catch back to Germany in a couple of days. Meanwhile I went off to explore Swakopmund; I had been in the town for over a day now and had only seen the inside of a bar. The town had a holiday feel to it, being set on the coast with palm lined streets and many bars and restaurants dotted around the centre. The desert surrounded the town, the dunes just a short walk from the Alternative Space. Just out in the desert to the east of town is the strangest national monument I had ever seen, The Martin Luther. It is a steam tractor engine weighing 14,000 kg, which was imported from Germany in 1896. It was designed to replace the ox-wagons, which until then had been used to transport goods inland from Swakopmund. Unfortunately it consumed vast amounts of water to create steam, a commodity in very short supply in the middle of a desert. It only made a couple of short trips before breaking down at its present spot in the desert and then abandoned. It was named The Martin Luther after the reformer who made a speech to the Diet of Reichstag in 1521 saying, 'Here I stand. May God help me, I cannot do otherwise'. Like many other Namibian towns, Swakopmund too reflected the countries German heritage in its architecture. There are many impressive buildings dating from the early part of the 20th century. One of the most ornate is the railway station built in 1901. It no longer serves as a station and now houses the Swakopmund Hotel, the smartest hotel in town. This is where I expected to arrive on the train from Windhoek in the early hours of the previous morning, rather than a tiny concrete platform on the edge of the desert; my map still showed the railway line going into the centre of town.
The weather at this time of year followed a predictable pattern. Each morning the town would be shrouded in fog, rolling off the cold ocean and up to 30km inland. This fog provides essential moisture for the plants and animals, which battle to survive in this harsh environment. Usually between midday and 14.00 the fog would lift and the temperature would rise as the town basked in the bright sunshine under a clear, deep blue sky. Once the sun had set the whole pattern would repeat itself again as the bank of fog once again rolled in off the ocean.
My remaining few days of this trip drifted by as I relaxed and unwound in the pleasant and friendly surroundings of the Alternative Space Backpackers. Each day people I had met over the past few weeks arrived in town. Firstly two Israeli girls who were at the Box in Windhoek arrived and stayed at the Space. One morning Julian popped in who I had last met in Windhoek before he drove to Etosha and I left on a desert safari, he stayed at Karen's Attic nearer the centre of the town. Ben and Vicky turned up at the Space too and stayed for a few nights; I had last seen them in the bar at Sossusvlei while on my desert safari. We all got together one evening in the middle of the week for dinner and quite a few beers at the Lighthouse Pub and Cafe; this pub began to feel like my local.
As Ben and Vicky had a 4WD I took the opportunity to join them on a day out driving north along the salt road, following the coast to Cape Cross, 115km from Swakopmund. Along the way we passed the ecologically sensitive lichen fields; the gravel plains in this desert support the world's most extensive fields of foliose lichens. The lichens create a carpet of grey and black, punctuated with splashes of orange across the plains and help provide stability for the loose soil. They grow extremely slowly, gathering the moisture that they need from the fog that rolls in off the ocean. Once damaged it can take up to fifty years for any regeneration to become apparent. These basic life forms, which are neither a plant nor an animal but in fact an alga and a fungus growing together, just added to the alien feel of this desert environment. Along the road north we also passed a couple of small settlements, Wlotzkasbaken and Henties Bay, the buildings in these settlements painted bright colours in stark contrast to the surrounding desert.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land at Cape Cross in 1486. They erected a cross on this barren, rocky cape in honour of John I of Portugal, which was used as a navigational aid. No settlement was ever established here. Cape Cross is also home to a huge breeding colony of Cape fur seals numbering in there thousands; the population fluctuates between 80,000 and 100,000. We arrived at the small visitors centre and purchased a permit before continuing along a track to the cape. We had heard stories before we had arrived here of the stench created by all these seals, but nothing could of prepared ourselves for the smell that hit us as we stepped out of the 4WD. The smell was strong enough to literally make you gag.
We walked to the low stonewall, which divides the seals from the humans, and gazed out across the rocks, covered with seals and pups. The sea was full of seals playing in the surf as the huge waves of the ocean crashed onto the rocks. It looked like a precarious business trying to get back on the rocks from the rough swell, but the seals managed it with ease, true masters in their aquatic world. On dry land though, the seals moved about laboriously, almost dragging their bodies over the rocks. The females, or cows, weigh on average 75kg and make up all of this colony together with their pups. The males, or bulls, only visit once a year during the breeding season and seldom visit the colony during the rest of the year. At the start of the breeding season the bulls can weigh up to 360kg, after spending months at sea accumulating food reserves in the form of blubber. A lot of this weight is lost by the end of the breeding season as the bulls expend energy establishing and defending their territory and herding cows. The main predators of the young seal pups are the black-backed jackal and the brown hyena. Many well worn animal trails lead away from the cape and into the desert; keeping at a safe distant away from the visitors we could see the jackals.
The last week flew by in Swakopmund and I soon found myself making plans to return to Windhoek in time to catch my flight back to London on Sunday. I decided to travel back to the city on Saturday morning because on Friday nights the owners of the Space cook a fabulous fish BBQ for all the guests; an occasion I didn't want to miss after staying there for almost a week.
The day had finally arrived, the day I made my final journey of this trip across Africa. I got up early for breakfast on Saturday morning; it was still dark and foggy outside. I had decided that as this was my last journey I would hitchhike back to Windhoek along the trans-Kalahari Highway. After my previous experiences hitchhiking across the Namib Desert I planned to make an early start, soon after dawn. After saying goodbye to everyone I finally left the Space far later than intended. The two Israeli girls were also returning to Windhoek today, but had decided to take the bus instead; we agreed to meet again later in the day at the Cardboard Box.
The Alternative Space Backpackers is in an ideal location near to the highway. For once I didn't have to walk for kilometres to get to the edge of town and away from local traffic, I woke up already there. I left the Space and headed off into the desert and the fog, crossing the railway line and soon arriving at the highway just east of the bridge over the railway. I walked for a short distance east until I passed the forlorn looking Martin Luther. There I waited for some traffic, the fog now lifting, I could see as far as the bridge in the distance. Traffic heading east out of Swakopmund and into the desert was light, as I expected. The odd vehicle passing me didn't stop and continued off into the distance. I waited for almost an hour until a pickup truck pulled over and offered me a ride all the way to Windhoek.
I threw my pack in the back and climbed in, eager to get going back to Windhoek. Standing beside a highway going nowhere does get demoralising after a while and I was only too happy to at last be on the move again. The pickup truck was old and had seen better days, the interior a mess as though it had never been cleaned; I must admit that living in a desert environment it cannot be easy to keep a vehicle clean. The driver was middle aged, I would of guessed he was in his forties; he had an unkempt appearance, unshaven, long black hair, which looked as though it hadn't been washed for some time. I couldn't place his ethnic background; he seemed to be from some Mediterranean descent. Both the driver and the vehicle appeared well suited to each other, as though they had spent many, many days travelling together and had started to take on each other's personality.
After some small talk, the general where, why, who etc I settled back for the ride through the desert. While we were talking a familiar smell hit my nose, alcohol. I dismissed the smell, after all it was still early in the morning and all the bars had been shut for some time back in Swakopmund. As I made myself comfortable and stretched my legs out I kicked some of the rubbish in the floor well to one side; there was an unmistakeable clink of bottles. I looked on the floor to see some empty Smirnoff Ice bottles by my feet. My nose was right; I could smell alcohol.
I sat back thinking to myself, oh dear, as we hurtled through the desert. I caught a glimpse of the speedo; we were doing 170kmh. I soon came to a predicament when the driver asked me to grab a bag behind my seat. Inside the bag were another four bottles of Smirnoff Ice. He offered me a bottle and I had to make a quick decision whether to accept it or not; I preferred to stay sober at this hour of the morning, but if I didn't drink it he would. I eventually decided to abstain and popped a bottle open and passed it to him. I sat back and worried as we continued at high speed across the desert; there only seems to be one speed out in the desert, and that is very fast.
While doing 170kmh he began fumbling with his jacket, which was stuffed behind his seat, the bottle of Smirnoff Ice between his legs. This caused him to drift across the road so I asked if I could help. He was after his cigarettes in his jacket pocket. I took them out for him and for the rest of the journey either lit his cigarettes, or passed him bottles of Smirnoff Ice. We stopped at the small town of Karibib, not to refuel but to buy more Smirnoff Ice; I am glad I hadn't decided to help drink his supplies earlier; it would have been a wasted effort.
Soon we were back on the highway, tearing through the now semi-arid landscape. I began to wish for this journey to be over and found comfort in watching the signs indicating the number of kilometres to Windhoek fly past at regular 10km intervals. It was not long until we reached Okahandja where the B2 road from Swakopmund joins the countries main north-south road, the B1. Soon we came across a drunk driver weaving along the road at high speed, travelling in the same direction as us towards Windhoek. This drunk driver was suicidal as he weaved across the road into the oncoming traffic. Cars were swerving off the road trying to avoid a collision; we eased up and followed a couple of hundred metres behind. I managed to persuade my driver that trying to overtake this car would be madness. I began a conversation about drink driving in Namibia and the penalties involved if caught. My driver agreed with me and frowned on people who drove while drunk; meanwhile he sipped another bottle of Smirnoff Ice. The drunk driver in front of us went around a corner at high speed, by the time we had made it around the same corner and could see the long straight road in front of us the drunk driver had disappeared. There was no wreckage on or beside the road so we guessed he must have careered off the road and into the desert.
After this incident we travelled slightly slower and my hopes began to rise as we neared Windhoek. My driver was returning home to his family in Mariental and dropped me in the centre of Windhoek on John Meinert Strasse, a short walk from the Cardboard Box Backpackers. I paid him a few dollars as agreed when he picked me up and walked back to the Box. I hope he made it safely back home to Mariental, especially as he no longer had anyone in the car lighting his cigarettes and opening his Smirnoff Ice bottles.
My journey, which started twenty-seven weeks ago in Kampala, Uganda and took me through ten countries and many thousands of kilometres was finally at an end. All that was left to do was a taxi ride on Monday morning to the international airport. This whole trip had exceeded my expectations and had gone far more smoothly than I could of ever hoped for. I had achieved everything and more that I wanted from this trip. I had met some wonderful people, both locals and other travellers and had learnt a lot about the history and the people of Africa and the current problems they face. I had banished some of the myths I had about Africa and was going home with a far better understanding of this continent than I had six months ago. The memories of this trip will last a lifetime.
It felt right to return home now. I would miss the life I had had over the last six months but looked forward to spending some time in a stable routine back home in Dorset. During the taxi ride the 42km to the airport I gazed out at Africa one last time and began mentally planning my next trip to this continent.
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