The morning of March 7th we picked up our 4×4 and camping equipment, finished our food shopping, and hit the road to the south of Windhoek. A long, boring drive from Windhoek to the Kalahari Desert, with only a few quiver trees and weaver bird “condos” to break the monotony of the drive. Spent our first night tenting on the desert’s edge. Such a treat to be in a campsite with running water and electricity, but with the first antelope strolling past our camp. There was even a pool but we didn’t have a chance to use it.
Next morning we headed southwest to the Namib Desert. Passed the top of the Fish River Canyon, but did not carry on the 100s of kilometres to the main canyon, but turned west to the tiny town of Aus. Stayed the next two nights in the Geisterschlucht Cabin just outside Aus in Ghost Valley. A very rustic log cabin with a small kitchen, a nice change from setting up our behemoth of a tent.
Aus was our jumping off point for a day trip out to the diamond mining ghost town of Kolmanskop, a short detour to the Atlantic coast at Luderitz, and a visit to the wild horses of the Namib.
Kolmanskop was the first stop mentioned in “the article that got us dreaming“, and another decade of drifting sand since that article was researched has only made this abandoned town even more interesting. After a couple of hours of exploring the slowly crumbling buildings being filled with blowing sand we wonder just how long they’ll be able to keep a few buildings clear of sand and safe enough to enter.
After leaving Kolmanskop, we carried on the 9 km or so to Luderitz, on the Atlantic coast, where a picnic lunch beside the harbour provided a brief respite from the desert heat. Luderitz wasn’t quite as charming as we had hoped, and all tourist attractions (and pretty much everything else!) were closed because it was a Sunday so we headed back. It was interesting to see all the heavy equipment needed to keep the road clear of “marching dunes” of sand; even by early afternoon, the sand covered half the highway since that morning’s clearing.
Back near Aus we turned off the road to visit a lone waterhole in the middle of the desert to see some of the wild horses of the Namib. For over 100 years, several herds of wild horse have roamed the desert somehow managing to survive the harsh conditions (over 40 degrees when we visited, and that was in autumn!). The horses that we saw had to share their watering hole with real desert animals: a flock of ostriches, and several oryxes, our first glimpse of Namibia’s national animal.
The following morning we headed north, leaving behind paved roads for most of the next couple of week. The roads through the desert were scorching hot and fairly monotonous with hours between seeing any other vehicles, and only a few sights along the way. We spotted a lone oryx huddling in the shade of a solitary tree at an abandoned farm, detoured over 40 km to see a castle built by an eccentric German and abandoned in 1915 (and abandoned again by NWR* since COVID), and saw a few zebra through the shimmering heat as we rolled into the sands of Sesriem.
* Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) manages sites and accommodation in Namibia’s National Parks.
See images from these days on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720315827459/
