Chapter 12: The Namib Naukluft
Sometimes you just have to love a word purely for the sound it makes, sliding out of your mouth: head-standing beetle; fairy circle; shepherd’s tree; sycamore fig; dusky sunbird; solifuge; camelthorn; ant lion; barking gecko; wedge-snouted desert lizard; striped mouse. And my personal favourite: Jennifer Lopez.
Next, you have to sit down in the shade and allow those very words to conjure up images in your mind. Have a drink, let the pictures really sink in, and then drive out here, to the Namib Naukluft National Park, to see them all in action. Well, you may not catch sight of the shapely Ms Lopez, but she was here once. Some of her charisma remains, perhaps in one of those sinuous dunes out at Sossusvlei.
The day had been a bit of a trek, really. Nearly 500 km of southern Namibia, from Lüderitz to the Sossusvlei Lodge at Sesriem. Lots of dirt road, dust and detours as we sped from the wild horses at Garub to the Duwisib Castle near Maltahöhe into the NamibRand Reserve and over moonscapes to this place.
For years, I’d wanted just one night at this particular lodge, which stands at the entrance to the park. Its units were a strange combination of tent and blockhouse. The central building and watchtower rose like a desert Impressionist’s citadel into the star-studded sky, where the celestial celebrations were reaching some form of climax (they were definitely having God’s Oscars up there). And here we were, Jules passed out on the bed inside, exhausted from the drive, and me on the porch with a cold Tafel in my grubby hands.
Barking geckos began having their way with the night. A coolth settled in over the Namib and washed away the intense heat of the day. I felt a streak of luck running through my bones, and rose to wake my wife.
“Jules,” I whispered into her face as she slept, “whaddabout some cards?”
I thought maybe I’d catch her groggy and, for once, beat her at gin rummy. So far, this trip had not yielded any winnings for me. Fish River Freddie was still waiting for his day in the rummy sun. Gamely, Jules surfaced and within the hour I was back on the porch, sipping a little morosely at my lager.
But not for long, because a gibbous moon rose over the lodge watchtower and I embarked on some rather ambitious night photography. Springbok ventured out of the moon shadows down to the waterhole in front of the lodge, looking like Namib ghosts on spindly legs.
“What, exactly, is a gibbous moon?” I asked Jules.
“It’s gibbous when it’s nearly full.” Not only lucky at cards, my wife, but smart with the facts as well. I slipped out to the bakkie, hunted down my Concise Oxford Dictionary and looked it up. There it was.
“’gibbous (g-) a. Convex, protuberant; (of moon or planet) having bright part greater than semi-circle and less than circle; humped, hunchbacked.”
(Author’s aside: And then there’s “gibbosity”, which, according to my Microsoft Spell Check buddy, is a totally bogus word.)
With that small matter cleared up, we hit the sack and rose before dawn so we could catch fresh morning light on the dunes of Sossusvlei.
The gate to the park opened at 6 am and we joined a queue of vehicles containing what sounded like the happy half of western Europe. Assertive Germans, excitable Italians, demure French and us, with our tickets and Sossusvlei Breakfast Specials (which, for the record, consisted of two mint ice creams). It sounds very wicked and weird, but being out there on Planet Dune was an off-world experience. And if there is no gravity, can there really be muesli? If you don’t make eye contact with yoghurt (especially the Fruits of the Forest variety), who’s to say it really exists?
So picture this. In the distance are higgledy-piggledy mountains, towering red dunes and a hot air balloon rising up into the sky. You’re in a diesel bakkie that is hoarsely crying out for a new air filter. The dust of a long trip has crept into its lungs and it now sounds like Darth Vader in crisis. Your right hand is totally occupied with a fast-melting ice cream and suddenly the road has turned malignant, throwing up evil, wheel-wrenching potholes all over the place.
That was 2004. They may well have repaired what we like to call The Ola Hell Run between Sesriem and Sossusvlei by now. Back then, however, our convoy looked like one of those drunk-driving controlled experiments you see on TV, with cars weaving wildly across the road to avoid the potholes.
And then it all went away, and we found ourselves in a Zen garden of sand: a plume of ostrich grass on a wind-combed red dune; the sensuous curve of a star dune, slipface lit red, flipside in shadow. Designed and sculpted by wind.
Along the road, people began pulling over to take photographs, unable to resist the contrast of trees, grass and dunes. At one spot, you could look through the frame of a dead tree and focus on a rising dune in the background. It was a Namib Kodak Moment, with point-and-shooters from all over the world lining up to get the shot.
Dune 45 is the most-photographed heap of sand in the world. This morning, a group of cheery Italians were climbing its flanks. Those who had already toiled up and giant-strided down the slipface were happily resting on the protruding roots of ancient camelthorn trees, shaking the sand out of their boots.
At the 2x4 Sossusvlei parking area we paid our N$80 for the 5-km shuttle ride through heavy sand. Our beloved Isuzu waited wheezing in the shade. We passed people who had chosen to walk into the vlei without headgear or water supplies. One couple, cheerfully stressed, looked ready for a cocktail party. He had on his pressed chinos and blazer. She was fully decked out in embassy frock and high heels.
“Remember the white water tuxedo types?” Jules reminded me. Some years previously, on a visit to the Zimbabwe side of the Victoria Falls, a river guide had told us this legend. Two Japanese tourists arrived at the morning white-water briefing one day, kitted out in evening dress. They donned lifejackets and took to the hectic rapids of the Zambezi, falling out of their rubber ducks at regular intervals, raising not a peep in complaint. When asked about their formal outfits later, they replied:
“We booked for the sunset cruise. They told us to come early for a good seat.”
Our shuttle into Sossusvlei was filled with burly, sing-along members of a German amateur photographic club, equipped with huge cameras and howitzers for lenses. Jules leant over and mopped up my drooling mouth. I was dying to grab me a Dieter or a Hans-Pieter, take him out behind a dune and mug him for all his “stuff”. But that’s no way to promote tourism to southern Africa, so I slumped back in my seat, feeling like a bit like an entry-level photographer.
From the drop-off point, we walked more than a kilometre over the dunescapes to the Dead Vlei, where Jennifer Lopez once played the part of, well, Jennifer Lopez, in a dreamy action movie. The title? Oh puh-leaze.
We stood at the lip of the Dead Vlei and looked down at the creamy floor of the pan, the stylised tree-skeletons and the ochre sand walls that surrounded it. Above the vlei, more Italians were climbing the highest dune in the neighbourhood and then sliding down its sides, playing in the world’s largest sandpit. At lunchtime, in the blaze of the day. No mad dogs or Englishmen in sight.
Like the last two soldiers of the Lost Patrol, Jules and I trudged through the sinking sands back to Sossusvlei and ate our breakfast bars in the shade of a camelthorn tree, with chirrupy sparrows, hopeful titbabblers and passing tractrac chats hitting on us for crumbs.
“I’m feeling a little gibbous,” I informed my wife, who blinked at me. “Maybe a beer back at the lodge will sort me out.”
On our previous visit to the area, we’d met a British couple in the middle of a windstorm at the Sesriem filling station. He, a frail, bespectacled 80-year-old (he nearly took off in the vicious updraft on his way to the Gents) and she, maternal, cooing and ten years younger, were on a road trip through the country. They were driving in a decidedly non-macho soft-shell Japanese vehicle around Namibia as if on an afternoon jaunt through the meadows of genteel England. We bumped into them later, on a game drive in the north, and he said:
“Yemm, good trip. Stayed over in Schwartzburg and had a fine time looking for the Southern Scrop. Great country, Nibia …” I finally worked out he wasn’t really speaking Gibbous, he was just describing Swakopmund, the Southern Cross and Namibia through dusty false teeth. It didn’t diminish my deep respect for this octogenarian who was madly and happily overlanding in a big wild country with a wife and a roadmap full of strange-sounding names. Owning a muscle car doesn’t make you a real adventurer. Hitting the road with National Health choppers does.
On that same trip we discovered the joys of the cuddle puddle on our porch at Sossusvlei Wilderness Camp. It was full moon (just in case you were asking) and the gravel plains down below were sporting magnificent hair extensions of lemon-coloured bushman grass.
That was where our guide, Isaiah Iiyambo, showed us the real stars of the Sossusvlei dunes: the little fellows that live beneath the sand. Like the head-stander beetle who goes fog-basking before first light. He’ll lurch up the highest dune, right to the crest, to catch the densest fog. Then he’ll lift his butt to the elements, in a kind of intimate moon salute. The fog hits his back and collectively turns into a drop of water, which then slides down into his waiting mouth. Which sorts him out for a good few days. Fog-basking.
That day, we’d been chased up a black stony hill by an apparently vicious yet doe-eyed ostrich. Breathless, we finally made it back to the lodge and recounted our near-death experience to the girl at the front desk.
“Oh, that would be Christine,” she laughed. “Christine gets lonely for human company sometimes. She’s totally harmless. A bit of scratching on the back of her head would have turned her all wobbly.”
Christine, we discovered, could do no wrong. A rich Italian guest had recently demanded a cooked ostrich egg for her birthday dinner. There was only Christine around, and no male in sight. And yet, wonder of wonders, she went out back to the car park and obligingly laid an egg behind one of the game drive vehicles. This incredible feat not only won her permanent mention in the Namib Book of Crazy Stuff, but she was also voted Wilderness Safaris Employee of the Month.
Down the road was the NamibRand Reserve and in it the Wolwedans Dunes Lodge, where the manager at the time was Herman Cloete, something of a desert poet:
“Here in the windy house of silence I can lose myself,
Here in this great crucible of dreams,
This vast and visible in-between,
Is the birthplace of peace.”
Herman used to sit out in the desert at sunset, penning his special homemade haikus to the land that enveloped him. The NamibRand is a collection of former karakul farms: Die Duine (The Dunes), Stellarine (Of The Stars), Wolwedans (Wolf Dance), Jagkop (Hunters’ Hill), Aandstêr (Evening Star) and Kwessiegat (Conflict Springs), where two brothers once fought an epic battle over a waterhole. When the anti-fur campaign helped to crash the karakul market in the 1980s, a Windhoek businessman bought up the farms and formed this now famous reserve.
During the first day or so at Wolwedans, you’re entranced by the grassy savannahs and mountain ranges, dunes and rocky valleys that change colour from hour to hour into the amber evening. Then your focus narrows onto the minutiae of the reserve: camelthorn trees with roots that plunge more than 50 metres into the ground, the beetles, the tsamma melons and the mate-for-life steenbok.
“Fairy circles?” I asked at dinner. I had noticed bald, round patches in the grasslands that day. I’d heard them called fairy circles.
“Yeah, that’s what they are. And you can have one named after you, for a small consideration,” someone told me.
“Who made them?” I wasn’t letting go of this one.
“Aliens,” said a French girl with conviction. “The afterburn of their craft as they fly off.”
“Harvester ants,” said the more practical German stockbroker.
“It’s a mystery,” said the Swiss chemist, and we left it at that.
Back to September 2004, and we were chortling over all these happy memories as we drove off to Solitaire to pick up some supplies. We also remembered Moose, aka Percy Cross, who had a face like thunder when we first met him.
On a drive through to Swakopmund one day, we’d stopped off for beer. His restaurant was packed with tourists, happily munching their lunch.
“Good business,” I mentioned to Moose.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he replied tersely. “Until you realise they’re sitting there eating their packed lunches from the bus. All I’ve sold them is a couple of strudels and some coffees.”
But here at Solitaire in those days it was impolite to turn anyone away. Of course, as the tourist tracks bit deeper and deeper, being hard-assed just came more naturally. Still, few pleasures in life matched a visit with Moose in the middle of nowhere and a slice of his fresh, homemade apple crumble.
Someone once caught Moose in talkative mode and asked him why he’d settled out here, so far from things. He said he liked the barking geckos and the stars.
“It’s like Nature switches on a Christmas tree here every night,” he said. He also mentioned “The Bathing Ghost of Solitaire” who splashed around in his house at night and the Japanese tourist who had decided to walk 200 km to the next town. Well, after you’ve done the Zambezi River in your tuxedo, it’s the Next Big Thing to do. Not so?