Date Of Entry: November 2nd 2016
Date of Writing: Tuesday February 21st
Again we’re up fairly early, luckily sleeping in tents the sunrise and hard ground has you waking up early anyway, and after a quick breakfast we’re piled back into Peter Tosh again and hitting the road. It’s around now that our rotation system in the truck starts disappearing which is a shame but as soon as some people stop it’s pointless to keep going so I just work on finding seats that are free and work for my leg. I’m wearing my compression stocking a lot on this trip. Blessing takes the wheel as always and somehow never seems to tried for driving. As usual in Namibia, the scenery is beautiful.
After several long hours on the road, the sun climbing higher and the temperature mirroring it we stop in a small dusty town along the road. There’s enough time that I go for a wander through town before buying my towns and being quite surprised to see maple syrup. I stop into a charming little cafe covered in plates everywhere for some local pastries. I then head off for a walk through this little town taking some pictures and talking briefly to the friendly locals who welcome me warmly and are very curious where I’m from and what I think of Namibia. Eventually it’s time to head back into the truck and heading deeper into the Namib desert.
We drive on a few more hours, today is yet another long day on the road, eventually stoping for lunch under one tree while also checking out a sociable weavers nest built into a tree alongside the highway. The tiny little birds nest together and continuously build these tree mansions until they grow too heavy and fall from the tree or bring the tree down with it. Even empty it’s quite something to behold. As dry as it is here, I find the idea of flooding hard to believe, but of course I’m no scientist.
As we keep driving the desert only gets more impressive, the earth tearning a more reddish tint leaving me excited for tomorrow which will hold another anticipated highlight of dune 45, for now though I’ll settle for the scenery and my first sighting of wildabeest a decent distance from the truck. Luckily Honary has quite an eye.
As we keep driving and the desert gets more and more impressive, including little dust tornadoes popping up left and right of us in the heat of the mid afternoon sun. We’ve ben driving through the desert for days now, it really does seem to go on and on, and the sheer scale of it is impressive to me.
Eventually we get to our main stop for what has been mostly a driving day, a series of tiny little openings in the desert floor making a winding path of crevices in the sand coloured stone. We’re told we can just look for above, so of course I’m quick to find a pathway down and stunned to find that it feels exactly how I imagine a certain special landscape from perhaps my favourite book, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Matt does some climbing into small caves but I take the more traditional path down to the much cooler sand floor of these high walled passages.
I walk through the passages climbing over some boulders until myself, Norman, Hannah, and Mia (two american girls who are super cool and sadly only with us until swakomund a few days off). At the end of the tunnels where the sheer rock wall blocks any passage forwards we find a small spring or large puddle and move to take some photos nearby, that is I until something stirs in the murky water and moves to strike. I approach afterwards but not too close because it looks like a snake, though some people say a catfish makes more sense there. We scramble back up to the truck a little shaken wondering what could have been and if the monster in the murky waters was poisonous or not.
About an hour later on the road we arrive at our campsite which is strategically placed near to the highlight of the Namib desert, perhaps the most known dunes in the world. We’ll be heading to Dune 45 pre sunrise the next day so it’s good we’re just a 25 minute drive away. After some ice cream from the gas station nearby we set up our tents and notice that a big oryx has wandered into the camp. I snap some photos as it comes to investigate the campsite, watching in rapt attention.
We eat another delicious dinner prepared by Honary and enjoy cold drinks and the campsite pool which is deliciously cool before being treated to one hell of a desert sunset, wetting my appetite for the next morning.
I go to sleep early, since we’ll be up around 4 tomorrow. Stay tuned, tomorrow is the best day yet.
