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

Solitaire

We leave the guesthouse early, after a slap-up breakfast served by Tula, it’s going to be a big day. As we set out for Solitaire we know nothing about it other than the name, which is, you must admit, rather intriguing. My sister has brought a deck of cards so that she can play solitaire in Solitaire. Actually it is not our intended end destination, merely a stop on the way to the Sossusvlei area, where I fancy to see the red dunes of the Namib Desert. But first I have a date with an old adversary, a score to settle, a mountain to climb. The road takes us past one of the most famous dunes in the world. Just a few kilometres from Walvis Bay, the first dune in the range of mountain sized dunes that runs parallel to the coast from Walvis Bay to Swakopmund, Dune 7.  Even now, though nearly four decades have passed since it was a factor in my life, a small shiver runs down my spine at the mere mention of its name. BTW the origin of the name is rather obtuse - apparently it's the seventh dune past some or other bone dry river.

Dune 7 is reputed to be the highest dune in the world, it is 1,256-foot high and rises from the desert floor at an angle of 45 degrees on the front end. It was the mother of all instruments of torture in the hands of a sadistically inclined warrant officer, a day spent on the dune was a day spent in hell. Those days started off with a ten kilometre on-the-double march from our base at Rooikop, wearing fatigues, boots, steel helmet, light webbing, rucksack filled with spare clothing and sleeping bag, three full water bottles and rifle (otherwise known as 'full kit'). Once at the dune we played a game called ‘whistle, whistle’. The sergeant blows a whistle and we would go up the dune, blows again and back down we go, blows again and up we go, and so on... all bloody day long. The most demoralizing thing is that you don’t get to reach the top, the bastard always whistles you down before you could get any sense of achievement.

I recall our last excursion to Dune 7, we were coming to the end of our period of conscription and had reached a point of defiance that allowed us to finally achieve mastery over the dune, well a pathetic sort of mastery anyway. When the Sergeant blew his whistle to call us down, we just carried on climbing, and the stuff in our rucksacks wasn’t all that regulation shit, this time we had packed beer, not cold beer I grant you, but beer nonetheless. We dug our rifles in the sand, an act of sacrilege, to help us climb. When we reached the top, we sat on the crown of the dune, drank beer and shouted obscenities at the sergeants below, steadily turning purple with impotent rage. They threatened to charge us with mutiny, but we knew that it was just bluff, we were ‘ou manne met min dae’ (old hands with few days left), fuck ‘em we were untouchable. From that point on our daily routine was to get loaded onto trucks after breakfast and dropped 30 km into the desert, if we made it  back in time for lunch, then we ate lunch, if not, we ate supper. I don’t think I ever managed to get to eat lunch, but that didn’t really bother me, I was totally okay with the whole thing, best few weeks of the entire two years of service.  

View from the top of Dune 7

Today I face a slightly different Dune 7, it is scarred by the virus of humanity, litter on the dune and at the base, planted palm trees and concrete picnic tables, more litter and overflowing rubbish bins where the sergeants had once stood. Still it remains a magnificent sight, there is something pure about it, clean like a mountain stream, a pillar of wisdom, despite our efforts we have not managed to befoul it... it is just too big. Barefoot, my daughter and I start to climb, no whistles to summon me down I move steadily up the dune, two steps up, slide down one-and-a-half. Though it’s still cool in the relatively early morning I am sweating profusely, this is hard work! But I am in the company of youth and failure is not an option, onwards and upwards, I arrive at the top well ahead of the youth, but only moments ahead of an elderly grandma that started to climb more or less at the same time I did. What a sight, I know how Lawrence (of Arabia fame) must have felt, marvelous. Getting down is a lot more fun and accomplished so much quicker than the ascent, you bound down with strides like a giant, comfortable in the knowledge that if you fall it’s merely into the soft yielding arms of the dune.

Agent Smith had it right, we humans are a virus, a disease, a cancer of this planet.

Youthful feet 'hanging' over the edge of the dune

Sand clings to my skin and occupies the more private creases of the nether regions a little more than I had expected, but this must be ignored and endured, we are not going back to the guesthouse for a shower. We bid Dune 7 a fond farewell and head for the famous red dunes of Sossusvlei a few hundred kilometres south of Solitaire. We take the C14, it is one of the main routes of Namibia, but only careful scrutiny of the map reveals the truth about this road, it is paved for a very short distance. We pass Walvis Bay Airport, which in my day was a military airport, the turnoff to Rooikop and then the pavement ends and its gravel. It’s not too bad, but the pace must by necessity slow. I don’t say anything, but I already have doubts about reaching Sossusvlei, such an expedition, I suspect, needs more vehicle than the VW Polo and probably an overnight stay. When you are used to travelling on good paved roads, maps can be misleading.

Sossusvlei didn't seem that far

Of course, I remind myself, this is not one iota about the destination and all about the journey. The conversation is great and the scenery is even better. The road to Perdition may well be paved with good intentions, but the road to Solitaire is unpaved and lined with the most incredible scenery imaginable. I suspect though, that walking this route would be pure hell. As the morning wears on it gets hotter and, if possible, dryer. I know that there is life a plenty here, now and again catch a glimpse of some green desert plant, when I stop to take a pee I spot a lizard and get harassed by a persistent fly, but how these creatures live and where they get any moisture from is beyond my imagination. Closer to the coast there is the fog that rolls in almost every night, but here it’s about as dry as it gets.

It's pretty darn dry here, but there is still life

We stop to view Vogelfederberg, it means Bird Feather Mountain in English, and with a bit of imagination I can indeed see it in this interesting rock formation, though it is not a mountain by any means. We’d like to get a bit closer, but there are signs telling us that we require a permit to do so. We hadn’t known that we would need permits, and this seems to be the case of many such attractions - we are actually in a nature reserve. Law abiding folk that we are, we turn around and head back towards the road. One can in any event not tarry at every point of interest along the way.

Bird Feather Mountain 

Kuiseb Pass is something to be seen, utterly out of this world, but somewhat treacherous, the road has deteriorated substantially by this point and doing much over 60 Km/h is not safe.  It is clear to us that reaching Sossusvlei is definitely not on the cards, even Solitaire is going to be a bit of a stretch. Normally on a trip I budget for about 100 Km progress every hour, which allows for coffee, brief meal and pee stops, today we are barely making 50 km for every hour, and there are no places to get coffee or take a pee in anything other than el fresco conditions, of course the entire desert is one huge lavatory if you are that way inclined. The C26 exists to the left, which would take you to Windhoek, indeed the shortest route between Walvis Bay and Windhoek, but the road is definitely not for the faint hearted. By now I am becoming concerned about getting my deposit back from Avis, horrible noises as rocks shoot up from the tyres and crash into the under carriage are no longer occasional occurrences. On the rare event of encountering a vehicle travelling from the opposite direction the hail of pebbles we go through is enough to make me shit myself.

Kuiseb Pass  

The topography is changing, now and then there are trees, though some of these are of the Naboom type, I guess this translates to ‘almost tree’, the Naboom is a cactus like plant that has the appearance of a tree.  There are also real trees, especially flanking dry river beds and more often than not these trees carry massive nests built by colonies of certain weaver birds. It is said that these nests are always built on the on the western side of the tree, giving a lost traveler the ability to take a bearing and so find the way home. Personally I think that if you are lost in this area, presumably without water, and taking bearings from nests in trees, you are pretty much fucked and might as well lie down and expire gracefully.

Weaver nests ...more or less on the western side 

We go through another pass as lovely as Kuiseb and cross the Gaub River, not a single drop of water flows of course, but otherwise utterly gorgeous. It is by now well past lunch time and hunger gnaws at the entrails. Solitaire seems to be elusively far away and a sign post invites us to stop at a guest farm and enjoy lunch and a beer, I am all for it, but my sister points ahead, Solitaire or bust…damn. The road is dreadful with lots of corrugated stretches that make your teeth chatter and by now I am convinced that my deposit is long expensed, but Solitaire finally arrives, or I guess more correctly stated, we arrive in Solitaire. Big surprise, this is not your usual one horse town.

 Baby Boom?

The place is actually not very old, in 1948 it was just a two room cottage on a newly established karakul sheep farm. Now it has a lodge, general dealer, bakery, gas station and restaurant, and a small settlement that houses the people that work in the afore mentioned. Solitaire gained some international fame through the book, Solitaire, written by Ton van der Lee. Ton described his experience of living there in 1996 with a character called ‘Moose McGregor’, whose real name was Peter Cross. Moose apparently was a master baker, and baked an apple crumble that supposedly attracted people to cross miles of desert to visit the place. I’m not sure if it’s the pie, the trip itself, the place or Moose himself that drew the visitors, though Moose now occupies a grave right in front of the lodge, he died in 2014. The restaurant serves a decent meal, and provides a reasonably cool retreat from the heat, though it is no more than a large thatched shelter, open on all sides. There are birds that run around on the floor seeking to grab any morsel that may fall from a table. I order an Onyx hamburger with salad, it’s really good and very filling so I don’t try the apple crumble, obviously not baked by Moose, but at least by Moose trained bakers. I do however order two slices of pie ‘to go’. This turns out to be two very generous portions, complete meals in themselves. Despite the isolation of the settlement, it is after all called Solitaire, the restaurant is quite full, and a tourist bus arrives in the middle of lunch to fill up the empty spaces. English is not the language of choice here, it is German.

Moose's bakery and confidence booster

There is a collection of these in Solitaire

These are the guys that run around on the floor in the restaurant

Namibia is infested with German tourists, which is great for Namibia, and I don’t mind them one little bit, they are well mannered, mind their own business and if you do open a conversation they are friendly and polite. I do just that now, there are a group of them at a nearby table that are obviously motorcyclists by the kit they have with them. I spotted their machines outside the restaurant, Austrian KTM 660s, I recognized these from one of the motorcycle rental places websites. I admit that I am GREEN with envy. It’s a mixed group of men and women, more or less my age. We chat for a bit, they are from somewhere in Bavaria and like me have to put their bikes away for nearly half of every year. We mutter a bit on that sad fact. I see that they have mesh jackets, gloves, mesh trousers, boots and motocross type helmets. ‘Hot?’ I ask and they affirm, the afternoons are 'difficult' they say in that peculiar, understated, German way. I can just imagine, it is 38 Celsius, windy and dusty, but wearing any less protective gear would be pretty stupid in this terrain. They are drinking large glasses of Coke – I presume that dehydration is a real danger, potentially lethal. It’s great to be with my sister and daughter out here in a VW Polo and I wouldn't swap this holiday for anything, but I think that I would also love to do a few days with these guys, heat, dust and all.

 KTM 660s

It’s almost 4 p.m. when we head on back to Walvis Bay. We did get to see a few red dunes on the way, small ones that will have to satisfy my red dune need. Soussevlei and Big Daddy, a 325 metre high dune, will have to wait for some other time, probably never I suppose. Oh well, you win some and you lose some, it was a pretty good day and Solitaire was worth the drive, actually to be truthful, the drive was worth the drive. We follow the same road home, my passengers do a fair amount of napping. It’s all uneventful until about 80 km from Walvis Bay when the duff, duff, duff of a flat tyre brings some additional excitement to our little lives. The rim has a decent dent in it and the tyre is completely toast. It looks like I hit something 30 or so Km back and the air has slowly been leaking out. Damn I am not covered for this. Happily the VW has a real spare and not an ‘emergency tyre’, this is not the terrain to be driving on a Maria biscuit. It takes no more than fifteen minutes to change the tyre, the trickiest part is cutting the cable ties that that keep the plastic hubcap in place. 

Changing the tyre

 We make it back to the guesthouse not too long after sunset, for a most welcome shower.  Supper is crackers, cheese and half a slice of Moose’s apple pie, washed down with a few large whiskeys and soda with lots of ice. 

Christmas In Nam

I have a complicated relationship with Christmas, I have long ceased to believe in Jesus, virgin birth, wise men (we’re all damn fools), or even that religion is necessarily a force for good, but despite myself the first time I hear the strains of ‘Silent Night’ in November, my heart lifts for a very brief moment.  It wears off pretty fast, there are very few Christmas carols that I actually like, Silent Night’ is the only one I can think of right now, and the extreme carols bombardment we are subjected to pisses me off so completely that I avoid shops as much as possible and leave the car radio switched off until January, when the horror of it has passed. I loathe the waste that Christmas insists on, the buying and giving of kitsch, useless things manufactured specifically to go into landfills. Now that I no longer have small children to share this festival with I am generally able to ignore it, nonetheless somewhere in my make-up there is a vestigial stump of Christmas spirit, a hankering for the magic and wonder I once felt, so many years ago.

Being a bit of a control freak, just a tiny bit, as people I live with will eventually admit if you pushed them hard enough, I had phoned ahead and made a booking for Christmas lunch. Not having a clue as to where would be good, I had initially tried the yacht club in the belief that all yacht clubs across the globe would be serving a passable Christmas lunch, but found that this particular yacht club was closed for Christmas. They referred me to The Raft, in the words of Sean Penn in I am Sam, ‘an excellent choice’. What a stunning place! It is instantly my favourite restaurant in the whole wide world. Built on stilts, close to the mouth of the Walvis Bay Lagoon, it has a bit of a Kevin Costner, Waterworld feel to it. The food is pretty good, but the attraction is the location, utterly awesome! Where else can you eat a meal watching the antics of pelicans, flamingos, busy little terns and graceful seagulls, not to mention the occasional dolphin and Cape fur seal? Today they offer a variation on the traditional Christmas fare with roast lamb and roast pork in addition to their standard menu. I opt for the trio of fish from the standard menu, ‘Fillets of Kingklip, Monkfish and Butterfish all simply coated in seasoned flour and flash-fried in palm nut oil’ they serve this with chips and crisply cooked fresh vegetables. Pretty damn good, way better than oily or bone dry turkey with cranberry jelly that half the rest of the world are stuffing themselves with today.

 The Raft Restaurant - new favorite... ever! 

My daughter, Therese, Christmas lunch at The Raft

Busy little tern, from the window of The Raft

There is an item on the menu that is a little beyond belief -‘BUSHMAN PLATTER; brochette of flame-grilled Oryx Sirloin, Beef Fillet, Kudu Sirloin, BBQ Pork Spare Ribs and Cajun Chicken Strips, served with mushroom sauce, pepper gravy and sweet & sour sauce, accompanied by your choice of Asian fried Rice, shoestring French fries, baked potato, vegetable couscous or basil mashed potato and a garnish salad.’ Holy smoke, if I ate all of that I think I would fall down next to the table and go into spasms for a few hours. We live in a world of excess, unless you happen to be one of the unlucky majority that can barely scrape enough calories to make it through the day. Oh well let’s leave this rant for another day, it’s Christmas, I’m with my sister and daughter and having a really great time.

I recall that Walvis Bay had exactly one restaurant way back when. Café something or other, typical of what was on offer in any small town in Southern Africa in the sixties and seventies, chrome and Formica tables and chairs, almost certainly owned and operated by a Cypriot, not licenced to serve alcohol, but would do a katemba (1 part cheap red wine and 1 part Coke, served in a pint beer glass with ice) at a price. The menu consisted of various pies with gravy and limp salad, tenderized steak and mash potato, and the pièce de résistance, ‘le mixed grill’, in some ways a little like the ‘BUSHMAN PLATTER’ I suppose, a piece of tenderized steak, grilled Russian sausage, fried onions, lamb chop, fried slice of calf’s liver, fried egg, fried tomato, toast and limp salad. For dessert you could tuck into a hefty slice of Madera cake with custard and/or ice cream. For your unwilling soldier that had been subsisting on the awfulness that was usual fare served at Rooikop, this was as close to heaven as it got. Things certainly have changed around here, there seems to be a restaurant of some description on every corner, though the café I once knew is nowhere to be found.

After lunch we take a walk, traditional attempt to walk off the Christmas lunch traditional excess, even though the wind is starting to pick up, vaguely I remember that afternoon wind is a feature of this area. We pass the public swimming pool and picnic area and peek over the fence, lots of people are having lots of fun in a non-Eurocentric way.

A peek over the fence at the 'other' half

Around the corner we discover the Walvis Bay Waterfront, more Kevin Costner Waterworld, utterly charming, but I predict will all too soon be bulldozed and replaced by some awful generic mall thing, maybe in fake Tuscan or Greek Isle motif. I know, I’m a cynical bastard, still I am going to enjoy this exactly the way it is with no thought for the future. Except for the very near future and make note of a few establishments that serve seafood or can take you on an excursion, a harbour cruise seems interesting and as far as I can tell relatively inexpensive.

 Walvis Bay Waterfront

We make it back to the car, having walked off a few of the lunch calories, actually as I had salad for a starter, fish and only a very small dessert, I’m feeling fine, virtuous almost. We decide on a drive rather than head to the guest house and lie down on our beds. We take a route south past a new and very swanky residential area, not really knowing where we are going, but destination does not matter. We go past a resort with chalets right on the beach, I remember the name, I’d tried to book in there, but they had been fully booked, pity it looks nice. Soon we leave the town behind, dunes to the left, bay to the right and salt pans ahead, this is a paradise for flamingos and artists, colours and contrasts are utterly amazing, whoever would have thought that salt pans were so interesting? Salt is apparently the most important export of the area, I thought it was uranium, or at least fish, well there you are, better than guano (bird shit) as it once was not that long ago.  Before the invention of the Ostwald and the Haber–Bosch processes, barely a hundred years ago, bird shit was the principle source of nitrogen for explosives and fertilizer, it was known as ‘white gold’ and the Skeleton Coast had many little islands that were covered in layers of the stuff, several metres thick. No guano to harvest here though there are birds aplenty, flamingos poop into the water, which is perhaps one reason that waters of Walvis Bay are so rich in marine life.

Colours and contrasts on the way to Pelican Point, salt making in progress

There are two species of Flamingos that inhabit the area, the Greater Flamingo and the Lesser Flamingo, apparently they are easy to tell apart, but my birding eyes are out of practice and I’m not exactly sure which are which, they often flock together. Both species wade in shallow water, the Greater eats shrimp and the Lesser eats blue-green algae, the Greater is less pink with solid red on the wing tips and the Lesser is pink over the whole body with some red speckles on the wings. The beaks are the easiest way to tell them apart, the Lesser flamingo has a darker beak whilst the Greaters’ beak has only a dark tip. When flamingos fly and especially when they land, is a study of skill and grace with the oddest of equipment, like a flying hockey stick, long neck stretched out in front and equally long legs behind, in the middle are the wings and a very slender body. We stop and watch them in the bay, they work their legs backwards and forwards as if in time to bebop, they do this to agitate the mud to get at the shrimp. It’s just a wonderful sight, made even more magical by the appearance of three pelicans that glide in and land on the water like 747’s  The wind is blowing strongly now, but the birds don’t seem to notice, neither in flight nor on the water.

Group of Lesser Flamingos

Mixed group... see if you can spot the difference. My photos don't do them justice, they flock in vast, and I mean vast numbers. 

Pelican in Flight 

I switch on roaming data on my phone and the GPS/map feature to figure out where we are heading. I have learned to do this very judiciously as the roaming package was outrageously expensive for the smallest amount of data imaginable. It turns out that we are on our way to Pelican Point, going along a narrow spit of land that forms the southern end of the bay. I believe there is a lodge at the end of it, but we don’t manage to get there, the condition of the road gets worse and less than half way to the point I turn back, the VW Polo is at the limit of its rough road ability. On the way back we stop to get some pictures of a strange green and purple grass that grows next to the road and discover, on closer inspection, it’s not a grass at all, but a succulent.

Purple and green 'grass'

I had some misgivings about selecting Nambia for this holiday, but it is turning out to be such a fascinating and very different place. My sister has spotted a town called Solitaire on the map, so our next excursion will be Solitaire by way of Dune Seven, a true mountain of shifting whispering sand – eat your heart out Johnny Cash.      

To Wallfish Bay

The Afrikaans word “walvis” (pronounced “vull” to rhyme with dull and “fis” almost like “fizz”, but more of an ‘s’ on the end), actually translates to “whale”, but many English speakers refer to Walvis Bay as “Wallfish Bay”, which sounds funny to my ear, so I have always used the Afrikaans. 

Apparently it got this name because of the large numbers of southern right whales that were drawn to the bay by the presence of a great deal of food, it was then, and still is, a place where marine life is rich, varied and abundant. Walvis Bay has a very interesting history thanks to its geography. It is the only natural deep water harbour for hundreds of miles north and south along the southwest African coast line. The Cape Colony, on behalf of Great Britain, annexed the bay together with a small arc of surrounding land, amounting to about 430 square miles, in 1878, shortly before Germany annexed the rest of what is now Namibia. The arrogance, greed and generally disgraceful behavior of our recent colonial ancestors is quite breathtaking when viewed from the zeitgeist prevailing today. Nonetheless it was a canny move to grab this enclave, Walvis Bay is the gateway to Namibia and remained part of South Africa until 1994, when the government of South Africa handed it back to Namibia, A very fair thing to do in my view as it had no business not being part of Namibia from the beginning. In any event this small port city (population 85,000) is where we are heading.  

Map - predates Namibian Independence

   

My own history with this city goes back to those dark days when I was stationed there as a conscripted lowly gunner in a field artillery regiment. Our unit was not actually stationed at the barracks in town, but right at the edge of the enclave, beyond the dunes, at the base of a great big lump of red sandstone known as "Rooikop"… Red Hill. Of all the postings that a conscript could get, this one was regarded as the shittiest, only marginally better than a stint in detention barracks. The accommodation was primitive, all 120 of us slept in a corrugated steel aeroplane hangar that we shared with eight 5.5 inch field guns. The hangar had no windows and massive doors on rails that had to be dragged open and closed, an effort that required at least three men pushing with all their might. The floor was rough concrete that sloped towards the doors. Although we had electric lights these were switched on or off from the duty officers’ room, there were no electric outlets, which was a blessing in disguise, we were at least not expected to iron our uniforms and nobody played loud radios deep into the night. When the wind blew off the desert in summer there was no relief from the heat and dust, and when the temperature dropped on winter nights to below zero, which it occasionally did, the temperature inside the hangar was the same as outside.

Rooikop - as close as we could get to it, it is still a military base and restricted

The bathroom facilities were even more primitive. We shared five showers and three wash basins and as water was brought in by truck, running out of water was a regular occurrence, sometimes in mid shower. I recall that I always shaved my downy cheeks, brushed teeth and washed my face using my steel helmet filled with water taken from an outside faucet rather than wait for a basin to come available. The shower block was constructed out of 44 gallon drums filled with sand and a flat tin roof, when the wind blew as it often did, it howled through the gaps between the drums like avenging angels. Toilets were the worst of all, you did it straight into a tank, no running water, just through a horrible bloody hole, sometimes in the company of three others, privacy in the army was not big on the priority list. The tank was emptied twice a week by a truck that we called ‘the honeysuckle’. It is funny that although I can easily recall the toilets, my memory of actually making use of the facility eludes me completely, it is as if those memories have been completely erased in the interest of self-preservation.

We had no kitchen at Rooikop so all of our meals were trucked in from the main base in Walvis Bay about 15 Km away, you can just imagine how yummy our food was.

Being far away from the scrutiny of any civilian authority, it was also a paradise for sadists, an animal that all military establishments seem to be well supplied with. I suffered under a particular bastard with the inappropriate name of Major Human, Major Inhumane would have been so much more accurate. However, Rooikop had four positives, the officers went home at 5 pm and left us mostly to our own devices until morning, it was in the desert proper, which I grew to love, the threat of denying weekend passes was utterly meaningless and we somehow tapped into a seemingly endless supply of good quality, inexpensive weed. Smoking weed is of course a thing of the past, but I am looking forward to seeing Walvis Bay again.

   

To get there I decide to take the longer route, the B2, which tracks an arc, north from Windhoek to Okahandja, west to Karabib and Usakos, south west to Swakopmund and then a final 30 Km directly south to Walvis Bay along the Skeleton Coast. It is 400 Km, a whole 50 Km longer than the C26, but it has the distinct advantage of being paved 100 % of the way. I have discovered that outside of the main towns and cities, Namibia has relatively few paved roads. The absence of touring motor cycle rentals makes sense now, my Suzuki Boulevard would be close to useless, if you want to ride a motorcycle here, you’d better get something that can handle gravel and loose sand, maybe next time I come here that’s what I should do. I am starting to realize that the only way to really get around here is with something a lot more robust than a VW Polo Vivo, a 4x4 would have been much better.

The trip passes very pleasantly with conversation, six and a half years catch-up… so much gossip, so little time, the Kardashians have got nothing on my family. Once we get beyond several miles of road works close to Windhoek the road settles down to a single lane highway, the blacktop is in reasonable nick, though the lane is quite narrow. I’d guess this is the most important artery in the country, linking the second most populous area and the only harbour, to the most important city, still it is not much more than a typical country road that you’d find anywhere in Ontario, such as between Zephyr and Mt Albert. The speed limit is 120 Km/h, but the traffic speed is mostly about 130. The VW Polo holds its own, provided that you work the gears. There are of course plenty of assholes that feel they really do need to go at 160 even though the road is not safe at that speed. The scenery is nothing short of magnificent. Close to Windhoek its hills and dales, but that does not last long and soon it is all flat plains with thorn bush and mountains in the distance. We cross many rivers, but not a single one has a drop of water, this is supposedly the rainy season, but it is as dry as dust, and it gets dryer as we go west. Next to the road we spot warthog (Pumba for those whose experience of African wildlife is restricted to the Lion King). It’s hot, it’s dry, it’s empty of people, it’s just wonderful.

Hills and dales near Windhoek 

Namibian River - bone dry!

Usakos - if I recall correctly, pretty anyway

As we get closer to the coast the bushes shrink and the length of the grass shortens until it disappears all together. We are in the Namib Desert, believed to be as old as 80 million years, the oldest desert on earth. This is moonscape, it is so different to what we are used to; conversation dries up as the awe of the scenery fills our minds. This is what I remember from my army days, walking out with a water bottle into the baking, empty and completely silent desert, paradise for an introvert that hated noise and constantly having people around. This was my weekend pass, where I got in touch with my sanity again, this was the iota of freedom I had. I now remember why I made that promise to return. To the right several miles away we spot Spitzkoppe, German for pointed peak. It is a group of bald granite peaks, like nine or ten really enormous boulders. The granite is more than 700 million years old and the highest peak rises about 5800 ft. above sea level, about half that much above the desert floor. I’d love to get closer, but note that the road to get there is marked as 4x4 only.

Spitzkoppe 

Emptiness, divine

Moonscape

Always life no matter how dry

 A few miles from Swakopmund fog rolls in from the ocean and the sun sets quietly obscured by it. We are by now pretty darn hungry, but it appears that Swakopmund is closed for Christmas Eve. I recall that this is a very German town and Christmas Eve is when Germans do the family get together, around the O Tannenbaum I suppose. We drive around in mounting despair, the packet of biltong we shared along the way is long gone. For those that are not in the know, biltong is sort of like jerky, only tastes really good, there is a butcher in Oakville, Ontario, that makes some pretty good biltong. We had envisaged a pleasant supper in a German style establishment, eisbein, sausages, steaming piles of cabbage, bratkartoffeln, perhaps an oompah band and serving wenches with large boobs carrying great fistfuls of beer tankards…well perhaps the last item was only on my list. Swakopmund is supposedly a bit of a party town, but it ain’t doing so tonight!

My sister mentions that she is sure that there is a casino here, which must surely be open, casinos never close (something about the work of the devil is never done) and at the casino there certainly will be some establishment that will serve us dinner. We are still wondering where the casino could be when we realize that we are actually passing it at that moment. The Mermaid Casino appears to be very quiet, but we decide to try it anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We find one of those ubiquitous Chinese restaurant all red and gold, dragons and temple lions, it’s open, not exactly pumping, but there are customers and it is serving dinner. The service is good, if light on the serving wenches and tankards, and the food is entirely passable. I settle for a bottle of Tafel Lager to accompany the rice, noodles and sizzling this and that, in the end it works out pretty well.

After dinner we follow the coast road south to Walvis Bay, we can just make out the ocean to the right, perhaps because of the lights of the many ships riding at anchor. On the left is a range of massive dunes, I know this from memory only as it is too dark to see anything. We pass the lights of a few beach village developments, the buildings are all new, sort of Middle Eastern style. They certainly did not exist the last time I came down this road, hitchhiking back from Swakopmund after a weekend of A.W.O.L. I remember that trip as if it were yesterday. A little fellow with a large wife picked me up in a small car, a Datsun, if memory serves me. The wife held a baby on her lap and the man had very greasy, dandruff ridden hair and chain smoked the entire trip. All the windows were shut so as to ensure that the baby did not catch a chill, as the wife explained. This was on a hot mid-afternoon driving through a bloody desert. At the time I smoked as heavily as my meagre army pay allowed, but I remember stepping out of the car in Walvis Bay gasping for air with my throat on fire, no doubt the poor child has since either made it as a jockey due to seriously stunted growth or is breathing through a little tube in its throat. No such problem tonight, my daughter has never smoked and both my sister and I are ex-smokers, as virtuous as prostitutes taken holy orders.

Walvis Bay is quieter than Swakopmund, but this suits us just fine, we are tired, well fed and seriously ready for bed. It has been an awfully long day. I know three things, the guest house is on Sam Nujoma Drive (every town in Nambia has a Sam Nujoma drive, street or avenue), which runs north/south and the place is called ‘The Shifting, Whispering Sands’. It takes me less than five minutes from entering the town to stopping in front of it. Tula and Tilla welcome us to their establishment, it is spotlessly clean and comfortable, but ever so slightly reminds me of Fawlty Towers. Tilla makes an older, but perfect Sybil and Tula is Basil down to his toenails, later we will meet a small black dude that is a dead ringer for Manual. As we unpack the car I realise that I cannot be happier.