In my opinion, once we left Windhoek, Namibia really got good. We saw a bunch of rock art, some great scenery, did a bit of free camping (more than I wanted, less than Thomas wanted) and hung out with the Himba people up north.
A lot of these places were happily off of the tourist track and we had a great time bumbling around and stressing about our car breaking down in a place where it would be several days before someone would find us. No jokes: a common conversation between us proceeded along the following lines:
Me: How far is it to the next town.
Thomas: Well this route is only 100km.
Me: But there will be no other cars and the terrain is rough.
Thomas: Yes. But it is only 100km so, if we have a problem, 50km is the furthest we would have to walk to get help.
Me: And probably less really as what are the chances we would breakdown exactly in the middle?
Thomas: Yea, okay, that seems manageable. Let’s do it.
The wisdom of this is probably quite questionable, but it made us feel better anyway, and we did have a 70 liter tank of water if we get stuck.
The rock art at the Erongo Mountains, Brandberg and Twyfelfontein was really very cool and worth going to see, but the scenery was even more spectacular throughout these areas. One of my favourite days was spent driving up the Skeleton Coast, floating in a dead sea equivalent quarry that we found and spending the night free camping in the dunes and sipping Thomas’s Boston sours while watching the sunset. Amazing.
From the Skeleton Coast we drove inland across the Messum Crater, which was fantastic and completely desolate. There were giant welwitschias everywhere, which are a plant that looks a bit scabby but only has two leaves that grow their entire lives and they are very, very old. The ones in this area were probably over 1000 years – so on that front, they were pretty cool. It was also pretty off-road at points and English Emily (our friend on our Garmin GPS device) took us on the most ridiculous course through the crater. Suffice to say, we have a very real relationship with English Emily at this point in our trip and descriptions vary wildly between something along the lines of “This is bulls*#t, you b*&ch” to “We love you English Emily, you are a lifesaver”. To be fair, Tracks4Africa is not really assisted in choosing nice easy routes when all of the places are a 4WD fiend’s playground and they often intentionally take the awful roads.
The Brandberg means “Burnt Mountain” and while one goes there for the rock art, it was just spectacular as is. The big deal in these parts in terms of rock art is the “White Lady” who has now been proved not to be a lady at all by a very sophisticated discovery: she has a penis! The main thing to note about the Brandberg is that it was the location of our second real 4WD experience in Southern Africa. Once again, something I can do without. We decided to try and take a back road through to Twyfelfontein and ended up driving 20km up a sandy river bed (thanks English Emily) – this alone was okay – and then taking another rocky river bed road up past a restricted mining area for about 10km that took us about two hours. We ended up having to get out of the car a lot to plot new routes and found ourselves up the river bed as it was getting dark. While this resulted in a lot of stress on my part, the free camping spot was totally epic. My nerves could not hack more of that drive though, so the next morning we turned around and drove back.
On a side note, one of the fun things in this area of Namibia is all the weirdo small claims miners one comes across. Driving through areas that are quite literally in the middle of nowhere all of a sudden a shack pops up which one is certain must be deserted. On driving closer, one sees dogs and goats, a car and – surprise – people! The first people that we saw we asked somewhat incredulously what they were doing out there only to receive a somewhat offended response – “I live here”. Oookay then.
From Twyfelfontein we did a fair bit of free camping. First we stopped at a very friendly Herero goat farm on the side of the road where they let us pitch our tent for the night. From there we headed to our favourite part of the drive in Northern Namibia. For anyone interested in the geography of it, we hit Palmwag, Sesfontein, Purros, Orepembe and then Opuwo. This loop was completely epic. The roads were awful, the cars were few, the people were friendly and we had a great time (also, Blue survived like a champion – Yay!). The Kaokoaveld is completely inhospitable and populated by semi-nomadic Himba people who still wander around in skins and smear themselves with animal fat and red ochre. The first night in the area we camped on the side of a river bed in an area where the Himba had left their villages because, apparently, there was a lion around. Obviously we had a pretty sweet campfire happening that night.
As we headed through to Orepembe and onwards towards Opuwo, we found a campsite looking over the river and hung out with some local Himba who were also camping there. Lucky for us, the one man spoke some self-taught English and assured us that it was “very okay” for us to stay there. The whole population of the area decided to visit with us for a few hours which was exhausting, but actually pretty fun. The women were astounded by the fact that I could call Thomas by his name (apparently this is akin to being able to instruct him to do stuff and therefore a big no-no) and that he did not beat me with a stick. They were also blown away by the fire coming from our gas bottles – which was explained to them as a fast way to cook things and not very nice compared to the fire cooking that they did – and our rooftop tent. We offered for them to look inside it, but only one guy could get up the courage to climb the ladder and take a peek. Our favourite moment though was when they got to explaining their names to us in English. Our translator’s name apparently meant “my mother forgot the month in which I was born” and the little baby we were cooing over was called something akin to “average baby” (apparently the name meant “this is not such a good baby, but also not such a bad baby”). Amazing.
Opuwo seemed something of a metropolis in comparison to this and it is the centre of the tourist trade that goes to see Himba villages. As a result, the people were not as friendly and much more grabby generally. We headed up to Epupa Falls which was nice and through to Ruacana, which resulted in a lot of driving through water and us getting the car almost stuck once again – not good for my heart rate.
Finally we ended up in Oshakati in order to make an attempt to get Angola visas. This is notoriously the most difficult visa to get in Africa, however, we had heard that if one was going to do it anywhere, Oshakati was the place to try it on. Given that we had to do some amount of waiting around, it was a pity the town was a total hole. In the meantime though, we did get our aircon fixed and a new windscreen put into the cab, which were both plusses. We spent Easter sitting around a very large stagnant pond, with a crazy German cyclist (love you Johannes), three very scabby dogs and two very irritating ducks. We have subsequently moved into a very strange backpackers recommended by an very cool American girl we met at the Angolan embassy over here who is working of the JC Flowers foundation for malaria and seems to be going somewhat stir crazy after spending a couple of years in Oshakati (no surprises there).
Before heading onwards from Namibia, we hit Namibia’s premier wildlife park – Etosha. Etosha was good, but not as great as the East African parks. That said, It was also a whole lot cheaper and we had Johannes with us who was interesting to watch (Johannes – do not try and yell hello to the elephants, they will charge at us!), so things evened out.
After Etosha, we headed out to Tsumkwe, on the border with Botswana, to visit the San people. These guys were the original inhabitants of most of Southern Africa and are now a massively marginalized group in pretty much every society they are left in. They are granted a concession by the Namibian government to hunt game and they do so with arrows that are poisoned with the insides of some crazy caterpillar. Very cool. The people were lovely, very little and very Asiatic in features. They seemed to spend most of their time sitting around in the bush having long discussions about all of our questions in their click language – most likely about how absolutely idiotic said questions were.
We finally smashed getting the Angola visas. Only eight days! Yes, your expectations totally change in Africa – we never for a second believed Mr. Daniels when he told us that we would get it the same day, the next day, or the day after that. That said, we did eventually end up with shiny new Angola visas in our possession – so Mr. Daniels was not entirely having us on.
March 2014
Love your website!