Animals spotted and identified...

Antelope:

·         Blue wildebeest

·         Dik dik (we think)

·         Gemsbok/Oryx

·         Impala

·         Klipsringer

·         Kudu

·         Red lechwe

·         Red hartebeest

·         Roan

·         Sable

·         Springbok

·         Tsessebe

·         Waterbuck

Birds:

·         African grey hornbill

·         African fish eagle

·         African open-billed stork

·         Blacksmith plover

·         Cappet faced vulture

·         Comb duck

·         Crested francolin

·         Egyptian goose

·         Flamingo

·         Hammerkop

·         Helmeted guinea fowl

·         Hooded vulture

·         Kori bustard?

·         Ostrich

·         Red-billed hornbill

·         Red-billed spur fowl

·         Saddle-billed stork

·         Secretary bird

·         Southern carmine bee eater

·         Spur wing goose

·         Swanson’s spur fowl

·         Yellow-billed egret

·         Yellow-billed hornbill

·         Yellow-billed stork

·         Weaver birds

·         Wooly necked stork

Bugs:

·         Baboon spider

·         Butterflies (white, yellow, African monarch)

·         Dung beetle

·         Scorpion

·         Termite (mounds – huge)

·         Tshongololo (steam train millipede)

Other Animals:

·         Black-backed jackal (+baby)

·         Banded Mongoose

·         Bush squirrel

·         Cape buffalo

·         Chatma baboon

·         Cow

·         Crocodile

·         Donkey

·         Elephant (+babies!)

·         Hippopotamus

·         Giraffe (+young)

·         Goat

·         Monitor lizard

·         Black Rhinoceros

·         White Rhinoceros

·         Spotted hyena

·         Vervet monkey

·         Warthog

·         Wild dog

·         Burchill's Zebra (+young)

·         Hartman's Mountain Zebra

Long drive to Cape Town

We reluctantly left the desert (again, reluctantly) to start the long 3-day journey toward Cape Town and our flights home. Things are much less interesting from tarred roads than from sand and gravel. We are still on vacation, but the melancholy of it coming to an end started as we moved closer to highways, cities, and airports.

Day 1: 670km from Sesriem to the Fish River Canyon
We camped at a gorgeous spot at the park entrance, narrowly escaped loosing our coffee to a resident baboon, and drove out to look over the edge. (Fish River Canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon. It didn't have the depth the colour or the size, but it was huge. The river was only a trickle and dry in many places, so the really amazing thing here was how it could have carved out such a deep, wide canyon.) The big perk of Fish River was getting to see quiver trees at close range.

Day 2: 720km from Fish River Canyon to Cistrusdal

It took 2 hours to cross the border back into South Africa, and we didn't even have any problems. That was normal bureaucracy about moving cars over the border and not taking food into South Africa. We kept driving for too long, and ended up arriving in a town at dark. I neglected to read that the campsite I picked was another 20km+ down some dirt road. We didn't have a print guidebook for the Cape, so we went to the first inn we found a sign for at the main road in town. Fortunately, it was clean, affordable, and had space - a kooky old place that felt like being in someone's grandmother's house.

Day 3: To Cape Town without a proper map or GPS
We headed off to the city, hoping we would find our hotel. Our GPS had conked out about a week ago, so we weren't sure how this would go. We were lucky. We checked into our nice (if not particularly African) hotel with a rooftop bar overlooking Table Mountain and reluctantly handed the truck back to the Bushlore rep.

With a day to kill in Cape Town, we decided to mark the end of our trip with a visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was kept for 18 years as a political prisoner. We had to go as part of a guided tour, with all the drawbacks of guided tours (such as being stuck on a bus with too many people wearing too much perfume, spending too much time on things we're not interested in and not enough time exploring what we really want to see). Still, it was moving to see the conditions these men worked in for so many years, for the sole crime of wanting to be treated as human beings.

We're now on our long way back to Canada. 2h from Cape Town to Jo'berg. 8h in Jo'berg airport. 17h45m from Jo'berg to Atlanta. 21/2h in Atlanta on account of missed flight. 2h to Toronto. 1 day in Tillsonburg. 5h from Toronto to Vancouver. Only 3 1/2 days.....

It had to happen eventually

We had planned to move further south from Lüderitz, but we were still missing the dunes of Sesriem and decided to head back instead of taking a slow route back to Cape Town.

I guess it wouldn’t be a road trip in Africa without at least one flat tire.

Africa’s roads are not kind to tires, which is why we were carrying two spares on the truck. About halfway back to Sesriem, we were going through a livestock gate and a little kid pointed out that our back tire was flat. Totally flat, and clearly had been driven on for a while. The road was so squishy that we hadn’t even felt the change in the tire. Two more boys appeared and quickly jumped in to get that tire changed. B had a hard time keeping them out from under the car while he was jacking it up. They had clearly seen a few flats in their short lives. Apparently they worked at the farm we were passing, and unfortunately they also looked malnourished and very poor. They only looked about 5, 7, and 12 years old, and it seemed impossible that they were going to school. These kids were super helpful and polite. We left them with a tip for their help, wishing we had done more. Here’s B supporting child labour.

Namibia and Botswana are among those African countries that have had effective shifts from colonizers to independent democratic governance, but there is a pretty obvious gap between white and black. As in Botswana, there always seems to be a white person in an office somewhere and blacks doing most of the work. It’s a bit tough to reconcile.

Our first spare was flat – we’re hoping it’s a slow leak and can be pumped up in case we need it – but we got the tire changed and were on our way.

We were noticeably less blown away by the views on the drive back to Sesriem. It’s sad how easily we can start to take magic for granted. We made it back just in time for a sunset visit out to the dunes.

On a road to nowhere

And we thought the drive from Etosha to Swakopmund and Walvis Bay was impressive! After reluctantly driving away from Sesriem – and after a wrong turn we very nearly turned back entirely – we headed further south toward Lüderitz.

The drive didn’t disappoint. It was long and slow going, but once again filled with amazing landscapes. As we left Sesriem, there was desert sand to the west and the rocky Naukluft Mountains to the east. Even better, there were zebra and giraffe crossing signs on the gravel highway and we spotted some Hartman’s Mountain Zebra. 

The mountains and dunes turned to huge desert plains. The road seemed to go nowhere forever. It felt a little like being inside a David Lynch film. In over 125km of the D707 road we saw only one car.

As we got closer to Lüderitz and back on paved highway for a bit, we entered the Sperrgebiet (Forbidden Zone). This is a national park formed out of part of Diamond Area No. 1 where Namibia’s diamond mining industry began. It was like driving over the moon. The winds were crazy, and shifting barchan dunes were driving onto the highway. Suddenly the German village of Lüderitz appeared out of the sand, and it was like we had gone from Namibia to the moon and landed back in Germany. There was no visible evidence that this town was actually in Africa. We stayed out on a point called Shark Island. It partly reminded me of home, but the winds put even the best nor’easters to shame. Thoughts of camping were quickly tossed to the wind and we rented a cute little cottage overlooking the ocean.

The next morning we headed back to Sperrgebiet to visit the ghost mining town of Kolmanskop. By this time sand dunes are forming in the truck! This place seemed like it could never have been habitable. It was a small cluster of houses and dorms on a hill in the middle of this windy shifting desert where the air was filled with sand and dust. Kolmanskop had been deserted when mining shut down in the mid 1900s. The old buildings had the windows blown out, and some had lost roofs or parts of walls. They were partly filled with sand dunes coming in through the window and door openings. Some of the floors and ceilings had collapsed with the weight of sand piled up. We went back to this place at sunset to take more photos. We were the only people there late in the day – quite an eery feeling in these empty buildings half filled with sand as the sun was dropping behind the dunes. 

Hot desert winds

We said goodbye to the zebras and giraffes of Etosha and headed off toward the coast and, ironically, the desert. The landscape shifted from forest and hills to the bleak moonscapes of diamond mining territory to dunes before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. (It seems so strange to me to think of this ocean as the Atlantic, so far from the part of it where I grew up.)

We spent a night in a coastal town called Walvis Bay, mostly to do some overdue errands and spot flamingos on the beach. Then we made haste for the Namib Desert. The drive through rocky desert, dry plains, and mountains on the gravel highway made the trip worthwhile before we even reached our destination. It was hard to get anywhere because we kept stopping to take pictures!

We camped for 3 nights at a place called Sesriem, in Namib-Naukluft National Park. The park is a combination of the rocky Naukluft Mountains and the sandy Namib Desert – the rocky outcrops from tectonic shifts are to the east and colourful sand dunes go west all the way to the ocean. There is nothing in Sesriem except the campsite, a lodge, and – oddly – the best internet connection we found yet.

It is crazy hot here in the Namib. Today was 42 degrees Celsius in the shade. The winds are so hot they burn and it feels like being inside a convection oven. They also stir up wild dust storms that fill the sky with haze (and even a dust rainbow). We didn’t expect to see animals in such a place, but there are loads of ostrich (improbable creatures themselves), oryx, and springbok, and a few jackals.

We’ve been driving out to see the dunes morning and afternoon to catch them in the nice light of dawn and dusk. The sunset on the dunes is hard to believe. They turn colours of red, orange, purple, blue, pink, and yellow. The sand on the high dunes is very red in general, and the lower plains in between are yellow. We climbed up on some dunes to look at views of more, as well as a few mineral pans in the valley below. It is amazing to stand on the crest of a giant sand dune with nothing to see but sand in all directions. Also amazing to run down the steep sandy sides and run through the dune valley as the sun goes down.*

The park gates close an hour after sunset and the best dunes are 60km away, so we can’t stay out on the dunes as long as we would like or we’ll be stuck out there. (Actually, we have everything we need, so that wouldn’t be so back and we seriously considered getting “stuck” overnight.)

Once again, we will be sad to leave this place.

*Actually, even just running for 5 minutes felt amazing after so much car time. With no predators here, despite shocking numbers of antelope, so we can get out and walk around – when it’s not too hot.