Skeleton Coast

Happily the tyre incident is easily resolved and at no great expense, I suspect the same damage in Canada would have been a lot more of a costly affair. Note that due to the international mix of my readers I am using the English spelling for ‘tyre’, (always wanted to write something like that). The guy at the tyre fitment place is friendly, young, white and Afrikaans and assures me that there is no need to replace the rim, they will bash it out with a hammer. I notice that the people actually doing the work are black, it strikes me that not all that much has changed, Apartheid is alive and well and living in Namibia.  While the workers do, the ‘boss’ and I chat and I find out that the old Walvis Bay army barracks has been demolished and is now a golf course, complete with swanky golf housing estate - a pretty good use for any military base in my view. Anyway, in about forty five minutes and for just over US$70, the spare wheel is back in its hidey-hole, and we have a new tyre, wheel is balanced, rim repaired, and the plastic hubcap is held in place with two new cable ties. I feel confident that the trip north, up the Skeleton Coast is within the gifts of the VW Polo, I have been led to believe that the road is mostly a salt road and not nearly as bad as the road to Solitaire…I guess time will tell, the folks around here have much lower standards when it comes to road conditions than I am used to.

First stop is Swakopmund. This is a pretty little town, more genteel and touristy than Walvis Bay. Walvis Bay is grittier, the ugly sister, but I find that I like it better, it’s less crowded and has more variety to offer. We have already spent some time in Swakopmund, I have written about our Christmas Eve meal in the Chinese restaurant at the Mermaid Casino. We have also walked on the pier and beach and failed to find a place to eat lunch as it is so full of tourists, in the end we found somewhere that served the smallest croissant I have ever seen and if my sister is to be believed, one of the best slices of cheese cake ever. Today we are going to stop in at the museum. The museum is privately funded and privately run, the brainchild of a local dentist, opened in 1951. My sister wants to see the place, I am not expecting much, ten minutes to review a few desultory exhibits and we’ll be on our way.

Swakopmund

 The world's smallest croissant

We park a few blocks away and immediately get harassed by a ‘car guard’ cum purveyor of kitsch leather and palm nut bead necklaces. Now I know that the guy is just trying to make a very modest living in very difficult circumstances, but this car guard thing is just a scam. You cannot park your car in any free parking lot in Southern Africa without being obligated to pay some money to a guy who will supposedly look after your car. That’s ok you may say, it’s your choice to pay or not, but it’s a protection racket of sorts, the hidden message is that if you don’t pay, the car guard may turn car vandal or perhaps thief. This particular car guard has an additional angle. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks innocently, when informed he whips out a little blade and starts to carve my name onto the palm nut bead of one of his necklacey things, so attempting to obligate me to buy the piece of crap.  But I am not a real overseas tourist, I grew up in Africa and am wise to the ways of car guards. I give him NAM$ 5.00 to pretend to look after the car, but firmly (and politely) advise him that even if he carves my name onto the nut, I will not be parting with any brass for the object, and then he will have a hell-of-a-job selling it to some other sucker with my name on it. There is, sadly, no market for palm nut beads and leather necklaces with my name carved, perhaps sometime in the future, but nothing right now.

The museum, however, is no scam, what a totally stunning little place! It is of course not the V & A in London, but it has a superb collection of all sorts of stuff from taxidermy, to military, to currency, to geology, dentistry (in honour of the founder), demographics, vehicles, farm implements and so on all relevant to Nambia, well exhibited, intelligently documented and very informative. There is a nice section on WW 1, when South African under Jan Smuts invaded Namibia (then known as German West Africa) in support of Great Britain. There is much bleating about how a 60,000 strong South African Army defeated the gallant German garrison that numbered a mere 6,000. I guess that this must have rankled especially as Germany was the chief supported of the Boers in the Anglo Boer war a mere twelve years before, and General Jan Smuts had been one of the Boer generals that fought the British with German supplied Mauser rifles and ammunition.

Inside Swakopmund Museum

Another exhibit I particularly enjoyed was about the population of Namibia.  About half of the 2 odd million population are Ovambo, the rest are Kavango, Damara, Herero, White (mostly German and Afrikaans), Nama, Coloured, Caprivian, San, Basters and Tswana and now a smattering of Chinese.  The Chinese are a recent arrival, the Walvis Bay harbour expansion project was awarded to a Chinese company so as a result both Swakopmond and Walvis Bay have a quite a number of Chinese. The Ovambo people, although of the Bantu group, tend to have a different look, they are very dark, really ebony, finer features often thin and wiry, a little like the Maasai of Kenya, very attractive people. Of course I have not been here long enough to pick up any underlying tensions but it seems to me that this diverse group get along fairly well, probably because the Ovambo are a significant majority. There is still the great divide between whites and blacks (you could almost say between haves and have-nots), as mentioned earlier, apartheid is not dead over here. The Basters are an interesting group, the word itself means hybrid or mixed breed, actually also mean bastards. These people were descendants of slaves and Dutch masters from the Cape Colony that trekked to the Rehoboth area in ox wagons in 1868, hoping to establish a free republic for themselves, apparently a popular thing to do at that time and who could blame them, colonial repression and naked racism were the order of the day.  

The San or ‘Bushmen’ people are also an interesting bunch, though I cannot say that I have actually met one. My knowledge of them is confined to Laurence van der Post books and Jamie Uys movies ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’ I and II, which is probably as far from the truth as is possible. I have a romanticized idea in my mind that they are the absolute epitome of the noble savage.  Nonetheless they are a real example of hunter gatherers, perhaps what all humanity looked like seventy thousand years ago. They have a tragic recent history, I guess they lived in peace and prosperity for many thousands of years in Southern Africa until the Bantu people started to move down from central Africa three thousand years ago. This was the clash between herders/agriculturists and hunter gatherers in Africa and it probably was not very nice. By the time that the ultimate bastards arrived on the scene, the white people, the San were already marginalized. Of course the white people industrialized the process and hunted San people as if they were vermin, actually offering a reward for each one killed. Today less than 100 000 of them remain, living mostly in the Namib and Kalahari deserts that cover parts of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, many of them still live in immediate return hunter gatherer societies, a magnet for anthropologists.

After the museum excursion, we head north towards Henties Bay, legendary fishing town. If you live in Southern Africa and like to stand on the shore with a pole in your hands (I mean a fishing pole!) then Henties is the Mecca that you dream of, the pilgrimage that must be made.  Actually as soon as we have left the municipal area of Swakopmund there are signposts for ‘Mile 14 Fishing Area’, ‘Mile 15 Fishing Area’ or ‘Hobom’s Gat Fishing area’ and so on. If you follow these exits to the coast you will find a few trucks parked and guys standing on the beach (which stretches as far as the eye can see north and south) with fishing poles in their hands. On the road, which so far isn’t bad at all, we see many vehicles with fishing poles stuck into brackets attached to the front bumper, giving them the appearance of an insect with long feelers.

Wreck Fishing Area with actual shipwreck

See some of these around, looks like a good way to tour here

I am not entirely sure why this is called the Skeleton coat, there are a few theories, perhaps the most correct one is that it is a treacherous coast line that enticed many ships to run aground resulting in many skeletons of men and ships littering the shore. We see only one ship wreck at what is now called “Wreck Fishing Area” so I am not sure that the theory is correct.

About half way to Henties Bay we encounter a very odd looking village, Wlotzkasbaken, ‘baken’ means ‘beacon’, and the rest is named after a surveyor called Paul Wlotzka. It is a weirdly, wonderful, surreal place, it does not resemble anything I have ever encountered before, actually makes Solitaire look completely normal. It is a settlement of holiday homes (apartheid is also alive and well here, there are no non-white owners of homes in Wlotzkasbaken). Still it is a very colourful place, each of these buildings is individualistic designed, some very eccentric, they all fly a flag of some sort, generate their own electricity or use some other energy source and all water is trucked in so each house has a mini water tower. In the holiday season several hundred people inhabit the place, no doubt avid anglers, out of season there are only a few retirees… it looks like a good life. I am reminded a little of Advocate Harbour on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, without the fucking freezing winters, and Germans instead of Scots.

Some houses from Wlotzkasbaken, see flags and water towers 

Henties Bay disappoints a little, but as none us know the difference between a hook and sinker, this is not really surprising. Okay I admit, I know that hooks are made of steel and sinkers of lead, but I have no clue when it comes to the real lore of this sport. My grandfather was seeped in it, and had handmade rods, hand-tied flies, made his own lures, sinkers and god knows what else, all in the pursuit of silvery scaly creatures. In this respect I am an ignoramus, I admit that I just don’t get it, you either are a fisherman, or you are not. I am not, period.  There is some festival on the go on the beach, we avoid it but mange to walk a bit on the beach, actually it seems that the Skeleton Coast is one very long beach, miles and miles of yellow sand, and apparently miles and miles of blokes with poles in their hands. The water is very cold, this would surprise you if you hadn’t studied Grade 4 geography as a child in South Africa (and Grade 5 and Grade 6), where we learned, ad-nauseam, about the cold Benguela Current that flows up the West coast of Africa from the Antarctic. The bit they didn’t teach us is that this is part of the great system of currents that distributes the warmth from the equator to the north and south, making our planet habitable, currently in danger of collapse thanks to the effects of global warming. Henties Bay itself is full, and my aversion for crowded places kicks in. The interesting looking little fish and seafood restaurant we wanted to have lunch in is overflowing and there is queue (line-up), but a little driving around yields an establishment that has a few open tables…hamburgers instead of seafood. Service is slow, but the final result is at least edible, if somewhat boring.

 Beach at Henties Bay 

Without a firm idea of how far we are going to go, but with the idea that we will at least reach Cape Cross before turning around, we follow the road north. So far the road has indeed been in good nick, salt not tar, but we are able to go a decent speed. It is quite busy and the 4x4s and pickup trucks that dwarf the Polo, have little respect for speed limits. There are no towns to the north, so it seems that the majority of the traffic is generated by sport anglers and some tourists.

I am guessing, but I would imagine that this area must be fascinating from a geological point of view. There are yellow dunes, red dunes, rock formations, and even ranges of structures that look like dunes and black hills that have collided. We stop and spend some time walking and get to see the lichen on the rocks. From the road you can’t see them, but up close they are spectacularly beautiful. As I’ve said before about this desert, no matter how barren it looks there is always life. I believe that the lichen are sensitive to pollution and the effects of off-road driving. I have noticed many signs prohibiting off-road driving, but still the desert is covered with tracks made by thousands of vehicles, driven by thousands of idiots ignoring the rules. The day might yet come that we manage to destroy even this ecosystem, this oldest desert on earth.

One of the many species of lichen

When dune meets Black Hills 

Interesting geology, but notice all the car tracks 

We take the exit to Cape Cross. This is the site of one of the earliest European incursions to this area, the Portuguese looking for a sea route to the Spice Islands of the East. Diogo Cão, planted a carved stone cross here before high tailing it back to Portugal. The inscription on the cross reads, ‘In the year 6685 after the creation of the world and 1485 after the birth of Christ, the brilliant, far-sighted King John II of Portugal ordered Diogo Cão, knight of his court, to discover this land and to erect this padrão here.’  Wow, a major piece of brown-nosing if ever I saw one. The Germans, four centuries later, in the tradition of the age to pillage cultural and historical artifacts, uprooted the thing and took it to Berlin where I presume it can still be seen. There are two replicas of the cross on the site, neither of which I am terribly interested in actually seeing, for me it’s the real thing or nothing. Like the Elgin Marbles, this cross should be returned.

On the road to the Cape we pass many makeshift tables with lumps of white rock which turn out to be salt crystals. Apparently you can put some cash into a tin on the table and take a lump. Wow, I am impressed that such a system can still operate here, in Cape Town shortly before I left I had to replace the brass street numbers on the house with plastic ones as these had been stolen. Tula was telling me that they have the same issue in Walvis Bay, I guess there is a difference between isolated country districts and cities, here the same as anywhere else. Anyway, we shell out some cash to buy permits to enter the Cape Cross conservation area, which is less about fake Portuguese crosses and more about an enormous Cape Fur Seal colony. The Colony has inhabited this spot for thousands of years, despite a fair amount of baby seal clubbing that used to go on here.

Salt for Sale

This is an experience that takes your breath away and involves at least three of the senses. The first thing that gets you is the stench, even before you get close it is overwhelming, like a billion rotting sardines, it’s so bad you could cut it with a knife. We steel ourselves and approach, fortunately the olfactory sense adapts very quickly and a pervasive smell is quickly ignored by our brains (hence the ability to take a dump without being totally grossed out). An elevated and railed board-walk has been built so that visitors can walk, almost, amongst the seals. The noise is as overwhelming as the smell, a cacophony like I have not heard before. The males argue over territory with voices of Wookies (I guess it may actually be that Wookies copied male Cape fur seals) and there are tens of thousands of them. The liquid eyed pups bleat like lambs and there are tens of thousands of these too. I am not sure what sounds the adult females make, they are just totally drowned out by noisy demands of the men and children (sounds familiar?). Then there is the spectacle of literally wall-to-wall seals north and south and swimming in the ocean, as far as the eye can see, makes a Cape Town beach on Boxing Day look unoccupied. After the quiet of the desert this explosion of life is surprising, but there is death here too, no doubt adding to the stink are hundreds of dead pups, their corpses rotting and being scavenged by seagulls. I have no idea why this is place is the home to this colony, I assume there must be some inexhaustible supply of fish, or protection from predation. Anyway, definitely worth a visit, the price of the permit and enduring the smell.

Cape Fur Seals at Cape Cross

Cape Fur Seal pup

We don’t go very much further north, it’s getting late and we need to get back, our time in Walvis Bay is coming to an end, we will be heading back to Windhoek and a more traditional African experience.      

 Sunset over the Atlantic