Days 481-492: Namibia
Sesriem/Sossusvlei, Swakopmund, Etosha NP, Windhoek, Fish River Canyon NP
Lots of desert in Namibia, which makes it nice to visit in the winter. Of course, everyone else has the same idea. Dunes, animals, canyons, and !//.
One thing that we need to mention about southern Africa is the killer click languages. We had seen signs with ‘/’ and ‘!’ in their names and thought that they were bad versions of web addresses. Turns out that symbols like !,:,/, and // are equivalent to different click sounds and are used as regular letters in words. Awesome to hear them spoken or sung. Now Kelly calls Marc by his adopted click name of cork-pop followed by double ‘tsk’, like encouraging a horse.
You know what’s great? Having your own car. We rented the smallest, most fuel-efficient, and cheapest manual car available for a good month of southern Africa touring. We’ll cover South Africa in the next post and just cover Namibia here. The tarred roads are great. And even the dirt roads are – according to the Namibian tourist authority – the best in the world. Not having much dirt road experience, we can’t disagree. They are certainly better than a lot of paved roads we’ve been on in other countries.
But watch out for Pumba.
Our first order of business for getting into Namibia was leaving South Africa with the car. We crossed the border at a remote outpost and we’re pretty sure they were really bored. They put the car and our luggage through a intensive search for “firearms”. They flipped through every page of a Tom Clancy novel, questioned Marc’s earplugs, and gave a roll of toilet paper a thurough once over. At this point Marc suggests: “Surely you’re looking for something other than firearms…?” The response changed to “diamonds, drugs, or anything illegal.” So we knew this was going to take a while and were pretty sure it was a half hearted attempt to get a bribe. But since we had all day, we just waited them out. Eventually they moved on to the fluids, going so far as to smell a bottle of liquor. Then the guy decided to check out the bottle that Marc had labelled as U-bottle. He had used this bottle in the tent at night to avoid having to deal with the lions. The police officer ignored Marc’s first warning about the previous contents of the U-bottle and opened it anyway. As his nose got close and Marc insisted “I really did take a piss in that”, he decided it didn’t need a smell test and the search ended shortly thereafter.
Lots of really cool flora in Namibia, including the ‘quiver tree’. It’s not really a tree but is related to the aloe plant.
Our next stop were the colorful red sand dunes at Sesreim.
We didn’t know it at the time, but August is the high season for most of Namibia and a lot of the budget accomodation was booked out for the month. So to see the dunes early in the morning, we had to camp about 100km away. Since we didn’t have a tent we slept in our tiny rental car and actually got some decent sleep. To get good light on the dunes, everyone tries to get in when they open the gates at sunrise and make a mad dash the last 65km to the dunes. But different countries have different definitions of sunrise. We expected the gate to open at first light, but when they say sunrise they mean the sun actually rises over the mountains – a good hour later.
Lots of long shadows when the angle of the sun was about the same as the slope of the dune. There are some folks on the dune for scale.
The “Dead Vlei” was particularly desolate with a white pan, dead camel thorn trees, and surrounded by red dunes. We get thirsty just looking at it.
There was a remarkable amount of life in the dunes. Loads of colorful plants have managed to figure out how to store water to live; even melons.
Red dune bug(gy).
We headed to the coast to Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. The latter is home to a colony of beautiful flamingos that really put on a show when they flapped their pink wings. The flamingos do a funny dance while they are eating to churn up the muck at their feet and filter it with their heads upside down in the water.
Can I borrow a teaspoon of salt? Even Marc couldn’t use all this.
Walvis Bay was home to the so-called Bird Paradise at the Municipal Liquid Waste Treatment Facility. We’re not sure who got this in the guidebook since it was short on birds and big on stench! We’re pretty sure this was a joke.
To clear out our lungs we headed to “Dune 7”. Well, Dune 7 was crawling with folks on quad bikes. So we went one more dune over and called it Dune 8.
The only thing leaving tracks on Dune 8 were the local dune bugs.
Well, and us too.
We had to cross a small fence to get to these pristine dunes. We thought the fence was just too keep the quad bikes off. But as we left, we saw a sign saying that they had closed the whole dune zone for filming a movie. Oops. We drove by the enormous movie set and found out it was to be called “10,000 BC”. Given the enormity of the production (full-sized triremes, huge blue screens, fortresses) we were sure this was going to be the next Hollywood blockbuster. But when we looked it up on IMDB, we didn’t recognize a single name. We’ll still rent it when we get back and look for some footprints on the dunes in the distance.
On one section of the next-day’s drive, a bunch of enterprising local women had dressed up in traditional clothes to lure tourists into their roadside craft stalls. While most had cool Herero outfits, the one that really caught us off guard was “dressed” in a Himba outfit and sporting dreadlocks, goat-leather miniskirt, no top, and covered in red ochre body powder. How can the fully-clad Herero gal’s compete with that?
Neat geometric dolerite rocks called the Organpipes. All of Namibia had fascinating geology.
When we’re out driving, Marc sometimes pulls over to take a picture of something interesting. One time he spotted a neat tree and climbed up to it to get a pic. The next thing Kelly knew, Marc was running frantically and yelling at her to “Drive! Drive!” (it’s pretty tough to drive a stick from the passenger seat). Marc had stumbled too close to a bee hive and they took offense. Since we were in Africa – home to killer bees – he made a run for it, but the bees followed him. We still don’t know if Kelly is allergic to bees or not and it was a tough decision whether to keep on running and possibly get stung to death or to jump in the car and risk Kelly getting stung. Fortunately, we both escaped with Marc only getting stung once. Given the amount of swelling, it is possible that Marc is more allergic to bees than Kelly!
The north of Namibia is dominated by the Etosha National Park. Like Kruger, this place has loads of animals and you get to drive yourself around to see them.
The enormous curved horns of the kudu made it quite an intimidating ungulate.
One of the bigger birds is the kori bustard with its frilly neck feathers.
The camelthorn was in bloom with its bright yellow pompoms. It seemed like every plant in Africa had huge thorns, but that didn’t seem to stop animals from eating them.
This oryx was able to levitate. Amazing!
One of the most colorful birds we’ve ever seen is the lilac-breasted roller. It’s a stunning blur of turquoise when it flies.
Don’t make me pull this car over! These young springbok did battle for a short time, and then shared a snack on a patch of grass to show there was no hard feelings. Probably brothers.
This was great. As the day ended, a group of elephants took over a water hole for a mud bath followed by a dust bath. The young elephants took it upon themselves to scare off all the thirsty zebras that just wanted a drink.
The next day we went back to the same water hole and the elephants weren’t around. So everybody was there having a drink. We have never seen a more awkward critter than a giraffe drinking.
The wildlife has the right of way in the national parks. You’ll note this guy’s reverse lights.
While perhaps the least interesting critter we saw, the crows here have an interesting white vest. We coined them “wifebeater” crows. Look it up on wikipedia if you’re not familiar with the term.
This has to be one of our favorite pictures so far. We really like zebras now. In addition to being beautiful, they are incredibly affectionate. We saw lots of zebra couples snuggling and watching out for their kidlets.
We happened to be in the neighborhood of the largest known meteorite on the planet and had the thing to ourselves. The Hoba meteorite near Groofontein weighs over 100,000 pounds.
After surviving a brief visit to the capitol Windhoek (not good to be a pedestrian here), we went to Fish River Canyon in the far south. Although smaller than the Grand Canyon, it was still very impressive.
Marc (aka Ansel) preparing to take a picture of a cactus on the canyon edge. Just in case you didn’t know, Marc’s not too big on heights, but he’ll make an extra effort to get good pictures for the blog.
…and his handiwork: an orange cactus on the Fish River Canyon edge.
There were other cool spiney cactus at the canyon.
Amazing gourd-like woven birdnests hanging off the ends of thorny tree limbs.
We weren’t allowed to day hike into the canyon, so we had to settle for a rough day of lounging in the hot springs fed pool. Nice.
We headed back to South Africa to finish up our Southern Africa touring. Luckily, this border crossing had a collie to sniff out all the “illegal items”. So nobody had to sniff the U-bottle.
Tags: Namibia
Kelly & Marcus
September 6th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Totally fantastic – what a great way to start the day. I’ll print this out and share it with Gm P – at least read the text and describe the pics…
Love you xoxox
September 6th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Really cool pictures…
(Sorry, I’m tired of using ‘awesome’ so many times.)
😉
September 16th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
thanks to Marcus and Kelly for introducing the term “U-bottle” to the English language. We’ll definitely be taking one with us to the hospital when Deirdre’s ready to pop the little poop-machine out. Any day now….
btw, i liked the red dune bug. looks like one of those masks from the continent you are on.
pete