Desert highlights of southern Namibia

By Roxanne Reid
When you go travelling in Namibia, that vast underpopulated land mass in southern Africa, nature, diversity and people are bound to be part of your story. Here are some desert highlights from our recent eight-week Cape to Kongola road trip. This post focuses on the desert landscape from the Fish River Canyon to Swakopmund.

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Canyon Roadhouse

The Gondwana Collection’s Canyon Roadhouse is a welcome stop on the way to the Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia. Good burger and yum Amarula cheesecake, but the best thing is the décor. This lively bar sits in the middle of a huge shed stuffed with old cars, tractors and auto memorabilia. In the grounds are more old cars and trucks, including what may be one of the oldest Land Rovers I’ve ever seen and a car whose insides are sprouting a riot of cacti. This is a great place for anyone who appreciates anything funky.

Fish River Canyon

Namibia’s Fish River Canyon is the second largest in the world. Depending on how you measure, it’s 90 to 160km long, a maximum of 27km wide and 549m deep. The looping of the river is supposed to have been gouged out when the snake Koutein Kooru was trying to get away from San hunters. More prosaically, rivers on low-gradient plains don’t have a predefined direction so they form loops. Intriguingly, we watched a young Asian woman using her selfie stick, but not against a background of the magnificent canyon. She considered the carpark a better background for her selfies!

Canyon Lodge

Gondwana Collection’s gorgeous Canyon Lodge was our home for two nights. The vibe and funkiness of Canyon Roadhouse was gone, in its place a sense of quiet, space and a red-rocked glory. Once the brutal heat had seeped from the day, I recovered my sense of humour and my ability t revel in the beauty of my natural surroundings. It was what I refer to as a Prozac moment, something I can draw on later when urban fuss is getting on my nerves.

Klein Aus Vista

Camping at Klein Aus Vista (also part of the Gondwana Collection) in southern Namibia is how camping should be. No power points, but sites spaced far apart for privacy, running water, good ablutions and a kick-ass view of koppies of warm apricot-coloured boulders. We woke to the sound of sociable weavers in the camelthorn tree above us and visited the Garub waterhole in the hope of finding some of Namibia’s famous wild horses.

Wild horses of Aus

It’s luck of the draw whether or not you find the wild horses at the Garub waterhole near Aus in southern Namibia, but our patience paid off after about half an hour. There are some 200 horses surviving in this dry landscape, living mainly off desert grey bush which is green year round. An adaptation is that they also eat their own dung, maximising the benefit of the plants they ingest and adding protein too. In dry times they will graze for 20 hours a day, dropping to 12 hours when rains have brought better vegetation. There are about 25 families of horses and the stallions outnumber the mares 136 to 64.

Namtib Biosphere Reserve

The Namtib Biosphere Reserve in the Tirasberg mountains in southern Namibia was another spectacular spot for camping. We had only one neighbor about 100m away. These poor Germans had no clue what a donkey boiler was or how to work it so we volunteered to make the fire for them. Ten minutes later they arrived for their showers. As I said, not a clue! (For those who don’t know, with a donkey boiler you make a fire that heats your water for a shower where there's no electricity, solar or gas. Obviously it takes at least 45 min to an hour to make hot water.)

NamibRand Nature Reserve

At the Family Hideout Campsite in the private NamibRand Nature Reserve I was smitten with the landscape of Kalahari camelthorn trees and red dunes, but always with a background of mountains. We even had a visit from Namaqua sandgrouse. Great conservation work being done there too.

Little Kulala 

This was the view from our bedroom at Little Kulala lodge at Sossusvlei in southwestern Namibia. Friendly staff, delicious fresh food, topnotch service and décor that reflected a theme of the nearby Dead Vlei with its ancient dead camelthorn trees. Such a treat, this luxury Namibian hospitality from Wilderness Safaris. And that view at sunset – sigh!

Sossusvlei

Dune 45 at Sossusvlei is a classic shot. But we didn’t climb it. With our Wilderness Safaris guide from Little Kulala, Athan Gawiseb, we walked up the 320m-high Big Daddy dune to Dead Vlei in the early morning (although there is an easier flat route). Ghostly dead camelthorn trees in epic contrast with the white vlei floor and red dunes. Why are the dunes red? Because of the high content of iron oxide, which ‘ rusts’ over time.

Sky bed at Little Kulala

The rooftop star-gazing bedroom of Little Kulala lodge near Sossusvlei is magnificent at dawn. We didn’t sleep there the whole night because winter nights in the Namib Desert are toe-numbingly cold, but it’s a fabulous space to contemplate the Milky Way at night and the pink sky at dawn. As always, the dead camelthorn trees are a reminder of the harsh desert landscape where you might get just 20mm of rain per year but the evaporation rate can be as high as 3500mm a year. Thank you Wilderness Safaris for sharing this special place with us.

Namib Desert Lodge

Namib Desert Lodge was a green oasis in southwestern Namibia, especially after our not so-pleasing camping experience at Sesriem (think scalding heat, dust, noise and flooding bathrooms). It’s about 60km from Sesriem, which is the gateway to Sossusvlei. Behind the Namib Desert Lodge rise fossilised red dunes. There were two pools where startlingly pale Europeans basked in the sun, though they may have been sorry to next day! A special touch for the nosy want-to-kno like me was the laelling of the shady indigenous trees like camelthorn, sweet thorn, wild olive and wild ebony. This was a peaceful place surrounded by crinkled mountains that turned mauve at sunset. Recycling of water and use of solar energy ticked the right boxes too. Thanks The Gondwana Collection for sharing your lovely lodges with us.

Solitaire

Solitaire in the Namibian desert, population 92, is a favourite stop between Sossusvlei and the Namib Desert. No wonder, since it sells fuel and wonderful fresh baked apple crumble at Moose McGregor’s bakery. Moose died a couple of years ago but the staff still have the recipe to keep travelers happy. We stopped for 15 minutes and no fewer than 10 vehicles pulled in during that time.

The dunes at Swakopmund

If you think these dunes around Swakopmund are empty of life, go there with Tommy Collard of Living Desert Tours. He’ll show you the living desert where every plant is a city, and where some 200 types of beetles live. They stand arse in the air when the fog rolls in from the ocean, and water condenses on their waxy bodies and rolls into their mouths. He calls them mobile water bottles because any chameleon that eats the beetle gets the benefit of that water too. Tommy showed us Namaqua chameleons, sidewinders and horned adders, dune ants, skinks, shovelsnouted lizards, a scorpion and a tiny palmato gecko with translucent skin. The dunes were cooking at a surface temperature of up to 63 degrees C but Tommy walked everywhere barefoot, just burrowing down to the cooler sand below the surface as the desert-adapted creatures do; 14cm below the surface the temperature is 14 degrees cooler. Best of all, there’s no dust in these white and yellow dunes. ‘Kids can play here all day and you just have to vacuum their ears and put them to bed,’ he said.

There’s lots more to tell about these places (and many others) and I'll be rolling out further posts soon. I'm hoping to inspire you with the passion I feel for amazing Namibia in all its diversity.

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