The coast

To Walvisbay, 19 september
Today we are going to make acquaintance with Namibia's coastline. It is 185 miles to Walvis Bay but still it takes us five hours to get there.
In Namibia distances are nowhere indicated (at least not along the gravel roads). By this there is no hold of how far you still have to go. And also because of the dull landscape it seems to last forever. We drive by endless roads and do nothing but sand-biting. There is little traffic but if you have bad luck and drive behind another car, than you drive in his dust cloud the whole time.

We can see the ocean from far away. It is just like a fata morgana and in fact it is something like that. For we are much to far away to actually see the ocean, but the sky has a different shade by which it seems that we see water.

After arriving in Walvis Bay it's evident that all the hotels are full. There seems to be some kind of fish conference or something like that. A couple of times we draw a blank so we go to the tourist office. Last week in Clanwilliam we were served very well, when we encountered the same problem. We can always put up our tent later.

In the tourist office we meet Magnus, a young Norwegian. The girl who normally works there is out for lunch. He tries with great enthusiasm to help us out but soon has to admit that he doesn't know much about it. He advices us to go have a meal first and to come back later. We talk a little more and he tells us that at this moment he is opening a pizzeria with the name Harry Peppar. After some ramblings and a study in the USA he came to Namibia for a vacation and likes it so much that he is trying to make a living here. His dream is to create a Harry Peppar chain in Namibia and South Africa.

We take his advice and take our place on the terrace beyond the road, but as that waitress after half an hour still doesn't hold at our table, we make our way to the supermarket instead.
We enter the Pick 'n' Pay and are perplexed. What a luxury.... This sure is one of the few developed towns in Namibia. We do ourselves well and buy lovely salads at a salad bar, freshly bakes rolls, cheese and the best fruit-juices on earth: Nammilk.

We go sit on a bench outside and picnic, lovely. We attract a great deal of notice, but well.... From where we sit we see that the girl of the tourist office comes back from lunch, so we walk in again.

At first we let her book our accommodation in the Etosha National Park. We have to compromise a little on our itinerary but that is no problem. After that she refers us to Lagoon Chalets. This is some sort of Holiday Park, where we hire a bungalow with kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms. Thus we now have our own kitchen and a good supermarket so tonight we cook gourmet food.

But first we go to the bay to watch flamingos. We don't expect much, but we see large flocks of water birds and among them two kinds of flamingos. The larger white one and the smaller pink one. The desert and the ocean meet each other here, which is quit strange since we now see water birds in the desert. At sunset we drive to a couple of little lakes where we see a flock of white pelicans.

Around Walvisbay, 20 september
Because we are in the civilized world again for a while we spend the morning doing all kind of necessary things like bringing our clothes to the laundry, surfing the internet and of course buying groceries.

When all of that is done we buy our permit for the Welwitschia drive. This is called a scenic drive but we can't discover the scenic part. We thought that we had seen the worst of desolated landscapes by now but this beats everything. The landscape is completely flat to the horizon. Nothing grows here, not one single plant. The earth is of the dullest grey imaginable. It is unbelievable that we are so close to the breathtaking Sossusvlei and that both deserts are part of the same Namib desert.

But of course one comes here for the welwitschia's, extremely rare plants. It belongs to the fir family but we can't see that. It looks more like half dead leaves that lie on the ground.
The largest welwitschia is over 1500 years old, five feet high and more than ten feet in diameter. This makes this specimen one of the rarest plants in the world, which is quit special. That is why it is surrounded by a fence of chicken wire, supplied with a true watch tower to allow people to look over the fence.

After finishing the welwitschia drive we go to Swakopmund. When we approach the coast again we see a very weird flat cloud develop over the ocean. It rolls in nimble pace towards the desert and in no time we are surrounded by thick mist. Very bizarre, it seems like science fiction. In our guide book we read about the characteristic mists at the
Between Walvis Bay and Swakopmund we see both pelican species flying through the desert. Of course they are on their way to the ocean but it remains a strange sight.

In Swakopmund we visit Peter’s Antiques, an antique shop. It is striking how much nazi-gewgaw from the Second World War is on sale here, like SS-stuff and all sorts of things with the swastika.

The gourmet cooking of yesterday didn't have the intended result so tonight we go for a pizza at Harry Peppar. Magnus recognizes us immediately and comes for chat. They are still busy decorating the restaurant, but the take-away is open. The restaurant furnishing looks very promising. We hope for him that he will manage to make a living out of this and we will try to follow him through internet in the future. We don't know where he gets his information, but he is still acquainted with the last results of speed skating and still knows from memory all the lap times of the ten kilometer.

We take the pizza to our Lagoon Chalet. The arrangement is nice and surprising but there is no salt at all in the pizza. We even have to borrow some salt at the neighboring bungalow, that is how tasteless a salt less pizza is. If we might see Magnus again we should tell him to add salt to his pizzas.

Along the Skeleton Coast to Damaraland, 21 september
We leave quit early since we have a long drive ahead of us along the Skeleton Coast. We want to go to Damaraland and don't yet know where we will spend the night. We will see where we'll strand tonight, but we won't come across many places where we can stay.

We drive to Cape Cross to start with. This is a reserve for Cape fur seals and depending on the season there are between 80.000 and 250.000 seals present. So we see a minimum of 80.000 seals. We won't count them but there sure are a lot of them. According to our travel guide the males return to Cape Cross in October and the young are born in December, but even now we see many seal-babies. Unfortunately 90% of them are already dead. Most of them are probably crunched under the enormous weight of the colossal bodies of the adults.

They even warn about the shocking image of dying young in December. When you see how clumsy the adults move over land we can imagine that they roll over the young animals. Thankfully we don't see any seal dying. We do see a sea-gull, approaching a one-day-old baby. Apparently it wants the placenta. The mother makes successful attempts to scare him away.

The Skeleton Coast is famous for its many ship wrecks. Alas most of them lay in the area that is not open to the public. But also on this stretch there are some wrecks here and there. Signs show the presence of these wrecks. At one of them we turn off in the direction of the ocean. The path becomes less and less passable and when another car approaches us they tell us not to go further because they got stuck there. We are pigheaded and drive on anyway and we'll manage for a long time until we get stuck too. And this wreck is not even worth it since it is only one unidentifiable rusty piece.

We see some fishermen with 4x4 cars and ask them for their help. They help us but they don't hide that they find it ridicules that we drive through Namibia in a normal car. In this case they're right of course, but for the rest we find it somewhat exaggerated.

This landscape is also unbelievably dull and flat and there seems no end to it. Most group tours turn back after visiting Cape Cross and drive to Damaraland via a different route. In retrospect that would have been better, but than we would have probably asked ourselves what we would have missed at the Skeleton Coast. We know that now: nothing! Finally we can drive inland again towards Damaraland. The landscape gets better by the mile. It is beautiful red and hilly. We see a herd of zebras and ask ourselves if this might be the rare mountain zebra.
We left Cape Cross for over seven hours now and we still smell of fur seals. All those seals together give a terrible smell but that it, seven hours later, still sticks to our clothes and camera bags is very remarkable.

We decide to stay the night at the Aba-Huab campsite of the Nacobta. But at first we face a big problem. Our gas tank is starting to get very empty and if there is no gas station near the Aba-Huab campsite than we cannot leave there anymore. But if we go somewhere else to fill up than we won't be at the campsite before dark. We venture it and thankfully the Twyfelfontein Lodge near the Aba-Huab campsite has a gas station.

At the campsite we find a large Dutch group of Djoser or some kind of VAR-organization near the ablution block. When we are on vacation just the two of us on a distant destination, we very much dislike being around a large Dutch group, so we look for a spot as far away as possible. We find a nice secluded spot at the river bank, which is a driver riverbed here too.

Nacobta stands for Namibia Community Based Tourism Association. This is a non-profit organization that wants to make sure that the local people benefit directly from tourism. And so this campsite is managed by people who live in this area.

The bathroom is very special. At first we can't find it. Signs indicate its whereabouts but we still pass it without seeing it, until we see someone with wet hair and a towel appear from behind a reed garden screen. We go there and see a likewise reed door.
Once inside we cannot believe our eyes. There is a huge tree surrounded by walls of these reed garden screens. It has no ceiling so you stand under the open sky and the top of that tree. A shower head sticks out of one of the branches and a warm and cold tap appear form another part of the tree. At some places holes are cut out of the screens to give way to the branches, some of them at crotch level, but we don't think of that. We have a splendid shower!

Next: Damaraland and Kaokaland