Travel diaries; Namibia.
I would stand in the messy desert landscape of Gaberone, Botswana, in 1995/6, watching the jets heading west towards Windhoek, Namibia and wish I was on one. I had heard so much about this desert country and it's Skeleton Coast that I could only dream......well that dream came true and it all started in Melbourne, Australia, on June 26th 1997, when upon entering an Opportunity shop here, I heard the words 'Ya' and some other Afrikaans language I recognised. The female voice uttering these is now my wife and I discovered she had a son in Namibia. Jump forward ten years and we are on a world trip to see him, plus two daughters, one in New York and the other in Capetown South Africa. I had also dreamed of visiting Capetown in 1995/6 and we had just done that and seen the magnificent mountain and coastline scenery around the Cape. Now almost unbelievably my love and I were flying over the Kalahari Desert where I had worked on our way to Windhoek the capital of Namibia. Windhoek means(and I've just asked my wife this as she had been here before and speaks Afrikaans very fluently) Windy Corner. Wind is wind and Hoek is corner.
Windhoek is a pleasant little town and the government has been stable for quite a few years so services are good as well as roads. There are a few hills which make it attractive but our destination was Swakopmund, some 370 kilometres away to the west on the Atlantic coast, where our son Adam lives and is a senior reporter with the Namibian Times. The trip out of Windhoek arrives at Brakvater, some 10 or so kilometres away and this was of special significance to us as this is where my wife had been on her last trip here and it was the mountain range which stood out and was a forerunner of things to come. Quite spectacular in it's own right, my wife had written a story about this place and her journey into these mountains. I did not have any film left but made a quick sketch of their shape and later turned it into a painting. Travelling further on you leave the greenery and the landscape is of a unique desert with all sorts of colours emanating from its dunes as the sun moved across the sky. We had shied away from any innoculations, due to cost, before we left but unbelievably we ran into an outbreak of polio which the government had taken seriously. At the halfway stop we were greeted by a group of ladies who dispensed the oral vaccine. From here to the coast is a piece of scenery that is unique and I say this because there are 5000ft + rocky peaks jutting out of the flat, yellow desert and they are jagged and splendid pieces of rock sculpture. The one that is the most famous is the Spitzekopje and its peak has been an ultimate challenge for world rock climbers for years. The desert actually flows right down to the coast and ends in some parts in those famous sand dunes you see in aerial views of the Skeleton Coast, so named because so many ships have come to grief here. I think it is the only place in the world where the sand dunes are the cliffs of the Atlantic.
We arrived at sunset and there was a small mist forming the water vapour rising from the sea up the dunes and then forming moisture which flows back over the land. They have developed a system of water collection in the sand mountains whereby huge sheets of plastic catch the condensation and it is trickled into catchments via pipelines. Of course it goes without saying that our family reunion was wonderful and the next day our son showed us around the town of Swakopmund. We were in Vineta, a beachside area just a few kilometres north of the town centre and our access to the beach was a ten minute walk. Our son had a large house with a flat at the back where we stayed. Swakopmund is a delightful town right on the shores of the Atlantic and it has an old world charm with a light house and broadwalk and a jetty and lawns right down to the beach. It is a happy mix of all races and cultures on the beach and it is quite sheltered here due to the jetty. It has an old fashioned wall round the top of the beach and we witnessed the most spectacular red African sunset over the Atlantic in the west. My wife snapped the moment brilliantly on our camera whilst I was braving the cold waters of the ocean. There are many houses and shops which are simply built and very colourful and the roads are made of salt.
We were taken in an old land rover out into the desert and heading north about 8 kilometres, we literally drove along the coast where the desert runs into the sea. Our son is a keen fisherman and he had prepared well by collecting mussels from the rocks where there were many to be taken at low tide. These he used as bait and we cast our surf rods out beyond the breakers and you realised why it was called the Skeleton Coast. The waves were roaring in and crashing on the shore which was rocks mainly, though we found one sandy patch. Four blacktail were caught and barbequed that night; nothing like fresh fish! It was so open and rugged that it had an appeal all of it's own and we would recommend it to any keen fishermen. See my article under Testimonies: "Surf Fishing in Namibia" for a fuller description.
About ten kilometres out on the road going back to Windhoek there is a turn off heading south and we followed this with our guide, Mick, a friend of our sons, who packed us into his V/W Campervan and followed the dry river bed of the Swakop River for nearly all day. It is a desert rock formation extroadinaire and has to be seen to be believed. The makers of the film 10,000 B.C. thought it good enough to use this area for much of the film shoot, for we met the crew coming in at Windhoek airport. Boulders tossed to small rock hilltops were everywhere and the patterns of geological formation were horizontal and vertical. There is also history here as the remnants of the old sandstone police station and lockup stand as ghostly reminders of a wild past. We saw wild goats, a klipspringer or rock gazelle, and an African cobra. Fred Flintstones cave is a novelty and a good place for lunch. We got bogged in the sand at one stage, but Mick knew the old trick of deflating the tyres a bit and driving out and through the quite thick patch of green bushes. It felt like bush bashing for a while. To cap this journey off he drove us out to the Namibian sand dunes which we climbed and where our son used to take quad bike tours. It is really like being in a yellow sand mountain range and a must to visit. When you drive into Swakopmund if you look south just before this you can make out the structure of the world's largest uranium mine which not many people know. For the tourist who wants to see something different Namibia and more especially Swakopmund, then this trip is for you; certainly a different part of Africa.