Our first day in Swakop, as Swakopmund is affectionately known, was spent chilling out. We walked into town, surrounded by rolling dunes on three sides and rolling waves from the South Atlantic on the fourth. Swakop was once the main harbour for German south-west Africa, so it’s full of colonial German architecture, with dormers in steeply pitched shingle roofs, symmetrical facades and small casement windows. It seemed fitting our lunch was a wurst sandwich.
On the long walk back, a tiring Sam asked how far it was to the hostel. ‘Is it right?’ I broke out the video camera to record our conversation as we walked down the road, holding it out on an extended arm, selfie-style.
‘Say it properly,’ I replied.
‘Is it the next one right?’
‘No,’ I said again. ‘Slow down and say the whole thing. “Dad, do we turn right at the next intersection?’’’
He tried again. ‘Dad, do we go right at next section?’
I encouraged him to give it another go.
‘Dad, do we go right at the next insection?’
‘In-ter-sec-tion.’
He focused all his attention. ‘In-ter-sec-tion.’
I smiled and patted him on the back. ‘Good.’
After a pause, he looked up at me. ‘I’m trying hard, Dad.’
My heart welled up inside my chest. ‘I know you are. You really are.’ I was so proud of him.
I was trying hard to slow down, I really was, but when I discovered there was a day excursion to the Namib Desert from Swakop the temptation was just too great. It would be a good geography excursion. Well, that was my excuse and I was sticking to it. We joined two older English couples and a German fellow in a small four-wheel drive truck that pulled up outside our hostel. Our driver and guide, Burger, was an ex-waxhead from Namibia. In his misspent youth he had walked his red kudu leather shoes on every beach in South Africa and Namibia. Well, so he claimed, and who was I to doubt him?
Heading south, we passed through desert to Walvis Bay, an ex-British protectorate that had been subsumed into Namibia when apartheid collapsed. Now a playground for Namibia’s well-heeled, architect-designed houses and condos lined its boulevards. The large lagoon was home to vast flocks of flamingos, making all sorts of malarky. Two large males flared their tail feathers at each other in an elaborate dance to impress the females in the flock. A long line of pelicans, looking like beads on an invisible string, soared over the truck.
Burger clearly enjoyed his job. Without warning he yanked hard at the wheel and suddenly we were off-road, sliding on the narrow beach between the dunes and the surf. The coastline south was five hundred kilometres of sand, with nary a dwelling or even a tree. We were on the longest beach in the world, which was also home to the largest diamond field in the world—the backbone of the Namibian economy. The highly secret and secure mines were located somewhere in the great desert spreading below us.
The dunes towered above to our left before plunging steeply down to the waterline. Their mustard-cream hues were striped with lines of crimson where garnets remained, long broken into dust by the toiling winds, while the lighter crystals of other stones had blown away. The grey sand of the beach was new. As it aged, the iron-rich magnetite crystals would oxidise and become a richer, more vibrant colour. Blown over the ever-expanding and changing dunes, the sands darkened over the eons to yellow, orange and finally red.
The dunes of the Namib were living beasts. Our footprints would be swept away by the South Atlantic winds within minutes. They were being moulded before our eyes. It was relentless. If our truck was left for a day, its wheels would have to be dug out. It was a beautiful but unforgiving vortex, absorbing all and governing all.
‘We are in the desert!’ Sam chimed from the back seat. ‘It is the oldest desert in the world.’
Burger asked how old it was.
‘Fifty-five to eighty million years,’ Sam promptly replied. Burger raised his eyebrows, impressed. Our geography field excursion, coupled with our earlier Google searches, was proving a success.
Late in the morning, we climbed one of the larger beachside dunes. It took about half an hour to make the ascent. As I stood on the edge of the dune, exposed skin rasped by the flying sand, I experienced vertigo while looking into the shadowy valley below. The view from the top was dunes stretching north and south and inland as far as the eye could see. The dunes stretched over one hundred kilometres inland, in fact. Fifty thousand square kilometres of sand, sand, sand. I was reminded of the science-fiction movie Dune. I hoped there were no giant sandworms.
Sam pretended to be dying of thirst at the top, and rolled around on the sand. Unfortunately, the Vaseline we’d applied to his face to stop his rash returning collected a goatee of sand. Not a good look.
After lunch, our truck surfed the dunes, as Burger cut the engine and let it slide a hundred or so metres down the sixty-degree slopes. It was the best, and certainly the most natural, rollercoaster ride I’ve ever been on.
On our way back to Swakop, vegetation slowly started to reappear. Hardy animals came with it. A lone springbok, a pair of jackals protecting their hidden young in their lair, a dune lark watching over its nest. We were well satisfied after an exhilarating day. Sam was happy he’d been brave and made the difficult climb up the dune. Tomorrow we were heading to the largest and reddest dunes in the world, smack in the middle of the desert at Sossusvlei. This would be a new challenge.
Our driver for the next three days was Gabriel. Thin, bespectacled and congenial, his placid manner permeated the small truck. As a married Herero man, by custom he was obliged to always wear a hat and carry a walking stick. Gabriel’s tribal name was Veruanaije, which was also his father and grandfather’s name. If Gabriel were to have a son, it would continue to be passed on. His name translates to a question. When the Germans fought the Herero back in 1904, older women in the villages were told the Germans fought with guns and horses. ‘Veruanaije?’ was their reply, meaning ‘What do the Herero men fight with?’
Our small group contained only two other travellers: TJ, an effusive Dutch fellow in his fifties, and Corinna, an eighteen-year-old Londoner on a break from volunteer teaching in the north of Namibia. From Swakop we headed inland to skirt the Namib sands on their eastern border. At first, the road was salt, kept intact by the regular moisture of the coastal fogs. Once away from the coast, it became gravel corrugations.
The flat landscape, suffused with salt, was the faintest yellow. Mirage lines hovered on the horizon, and heat and glare reflected off the pale and flat rock-strewn terrain and still paler road. Salt lines streaked the dirty brown and black hills on the horizon, resembling nothing so much as giant mounds of tiramisu. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and then an ancient dry riverbed marked only by a line of deep-rooted trees.
The road wound down and through a deep gorge that wasn’t visible until you were almost on top of it. We descended to the dry, shaded, sandy riverbed below. During World War II, when Namibian-based Germans were recalled to the fatherland to fight, two young geologists went AWOL and hid in this gorge for two years, living off game and digging into the riverbed for water, before they were finally caught and imprisoned. It was a good place to hide from the heat, and from the world.
Sam completed his schoolwork in the truck and then read more of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I was so glad he was finally reading fiction. Now he had started it seemed like there was no stopping him. During the trip I asked Gabriel if there were lions about.
‘No, but there are leopards,’ Gabriel answered. ‘There are three big cats you need to be careful of, Sam: lions, cheetahs and leopards. When you come across any of these you need to know what to do. If you see a lion, you should look him in the eye, slowly walk backwards, and you should be okay. If you see a cheetah, make a lot of noise and rush towards it, and they will usually run away.’ Sam was looking worried. Gabriel continued. ‘But with a leopard, you are in big trouble. They are very aggressive and very strong and if they decide to attack you, you will be killed. You run up a tree, they climb after you. You cross a creek or river, they follow you.’
Sam wasn’t happy. ‘No! Not die! I will get away.’
I piped up. ‘Don’t worry, Sam, we won’t come across a leopard.’
After the gorge, we travelled through undulating plains leading up to red rock towers. Occasionally we spotted zebras, ostriches and oryxes grazing near the road. Large mountains appeared first as faint blue ridgelines in the distance before looming large and ominous either side of the road, which cannoned straight between them like a cathedral aisle. Cliffs, mesas—the lines of this landscape were either vertical or horizontal, with little deviation.
We reached our desert campsite at sunset after being delayed by a flat tyre sustained on the gravel. Sam was happy the ‘tents’ had power, en suite bathrooms and, incredibly, wi-fi (well, more or less). This was soft camping. Benison would have liked it: there was even somewhere to plug in her hair dryer. The only thing missing was a fence. Hmm.
Over dinner, Sam had more opportunities to experiment with new foods: pup, a cornmeal mash, and curry sauce and cucumber. I also encouraged him to practice his conversation skills with these relative strangers, and used the video camera to record some footage for the university study. We discovered that Corinna had taught Namibian children with the following Anglicised names: Precious, Big Boy, Silence (well, he’d be easy to teach), Marvellous, Surprise, Treasure, Rejoice, Promise, Given and Gift (twins, with a younger sister Bienvenue), Trust, Angel (a boy) and, my favourite, Brangelina. (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had a long association with Namibia. Their daughter Shiloh was born in Swakopmund in 2006.)
The morning reveille went off at 4.30 a.m., and we were ready at the nearby park gates before dawn. Cliffs and rocks slowly emerged in the low light while we waited. Sam had never been up before dawn before; at least, not in his conscious memory anyway. At dawn, the gates opened to admit a long line of tourist vehicles and four-wheel drives into the park.
As our truck passed through the park, red dunes started to appear around the sandy road, increasing in stature as though working towards the dramatic final act. A hot air balloon hovered nearby as the sun rose above the horizon. The road down the valley arced right and the main dune range was revealed: three-hundred-metre-high ancient monsters rendered in deep apricot, light and shadow, serpentine arcs. There was no Atlantic wind moulding the sands here. This was a graveyard of ancient rusted sand: spiritual, still and sombre.
Leaving the vehicle, we ventured over the sands to Deadvlei, a small pan long cut off from water by the encircling dunes. Here camel thorn trees had germinated nine hundred years ago and died six hundred years ago. They still stood, forlorn but proud, their dead limbs and branches reaching for the sky like men dying of thirst. It was an arboreal Pompeii, created not by super-heated ash but super dry and still conditions. Human footprints were visible in the cracked clay from the last time the pan was wet, six centuries ago.
Sam and I took the opportunity to have a quick game of chess. It was a good flat surface for the board. I let him win again, but he was definitely getting savvier. Sam asked questions about the footprints and why the trees died. He didn’t like the fact that there had been no water for hundreds of years, and worried we might ‘die’ from thirst, but fortunately was easily reassured. He asked what score he’d got the previous day.
I decided to give him some encouragement. ‘Eight.’
‘Yay!’ He was truly excited. The ethics spun in my head.
The temperature soared as we tramped up a dune ridgeline. Despite being encouraged and then harassed by me, Sam couldn’t make it all the way to the top, but that was okay, it was pretty tough going in the soft sand. Two-thirds of the way up we aborted the attempt and bounced down the steep face at a slow jog, sinking ankle deep with each step. We plonked onto the pan at the base and emptied our shoes of a kilogram of warm red sand apiece.
It had been a great day.
Back at camp, Sam splashed in the pool while I supervised. Gabriel, TJ and Corinna had gone off to visit a nearby gorge, but Sam had had enough. Some toddlers from a group of Germans nearby wandered over towards the pool. Sam wasn’t happy. He feels uncomfortable around toddlers, especially without his shirt on. Pointing awkwardly, with a crooked wrist, he said, ‘Go away, you.’
The German adults startled. ‘Sam, don’t,’ I cautioned from my chair nearby.
He continued to be bothered by the presence of the toddlers. I hovered carefully until they were whisked away by their parents, who seemed to have caught on that there were issues underlying Sam’s behaviour. They weren’t fussed, but I was. It was this type of behaviour, unsupervised in years to come, that could get Sam into some seriously troubling situations.
At dinner, Gabriel bailed up to me, excited. ‘You know, Sam asked me my middle name and where I came from!’ His enthusiasm and insight into Sam was touching.
And with another dinner on safari was another success with Sam trying new food: this time poike, a chicken and vegetable stew with rice. On the food front, Sam was kicking goals with both feet.
The next day I turned forty-nine. Sam gave me a tantrum for my birthday. I had told him when he woke up that he hadn’t received eight out of ten the previous day after all, but only seven, because of his behaviour at the pool. Sam wasn’t happy. ‘But they started it,’ he said, referring to the toddlers. His anger and frustration rose. Once again I was a bad father whom he variously wanted replaced, gone or dead.
‘No, they didn’t start it,’ I said, firmly but calmly. ‘They just wanted to go near the water.’
‘But I don’t like them doing that,’ Sam protested.
‘They’re allowed, Sam. You’re not allowed to order around other people, especially little children.’
Negotiations continued. Tempers rose, and voices. I eventually went to breakfast without him, to give him time to calm down. As I arrived at the breakfast table, Gabriel brought out a chocolate cake with HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAMES piped across the top in white icing, and a small present wrapped in foil and tied up with a ribbon. It turned out to be a box of camping matches. He must have realised it was my birthday when I filled out the forms for the tour, cobbled the cake and present together in Swakop before we left and kept them hidden somewhere in the truck. I was taken aback at the effort and kindness involved. This moment, the birthday cake in the Namib Desert, would stay with me forever.
I retrieved Sam from the room. He was calm now, but more withdrawn and autistic than usual. Knees up, gaze averted, licking his lips, not engaging. The tantrum had distressed him, and he was retreating. I let him have whatever breakfast he wanted, let him eat with his fingers. I just backed off.
At least I was starting to read my son better—getting to know when to push and when not to. I now knew that his previous meltdowns had been followed by long recovery periods in which he needed some downtime. Throughout the morning he remained withdrawn, even during a visit to a cheetah reserve. Sam liked seeing the cheetahs, especially on foot from only ten metres away, but he was still in his shell and bothered by the glare and flies.
By lunch his mood was improving. Copious amounts of Vaseline had kept his resurgent facial rash—as much a consequence of the harsh corrosive environment as his lip-licking—mostly in check. He asked whether he could still get a score of eight today, despite the tantrum. I avoided answering.
The truck swung north, up through the Naukluft Mountains, German for ‘small gorge’. Red rock faces hung over us, ominous and foreboding. The mountains had sheltered tribal guerrilla leaders who were subsequently crushed by von Trotha and his Schutztruppe, rebel chiefs and warriors who were now commemorated on banknotes.
Our vehicle tumbled up onto the central Namibian plains. Arid certainly, but verdant in comparison to the parched earth and air of the ancient desert at our backs. There was a bonding in the vehicle, and we were all pleased with the few days we had had together. The others had seen Sam presenting the challenges he does and had seen that he was hard work in an extreme environment, but Sam had also been the entertainer, reframing the world in his own unique way, which had led to wry grins and chuckles. It seemed everyone who met Sam would not forget him.