Deadly Desert

Solitaire, Namibia

A giant thunder cloud tears through the sky and crosses south bringing with it massive droplets of warm rain that will more than likely flood our campsite in a few hours. The rainy season in Namibia is still baring her teeth making it the wettest season in several years.  Dry rivers are now bursting with life causing shock and surprise to all the locals and giving extra swim holes to their dogs.

I enjoy watching the excitement but also fret severely because we rented a measly VW Polo which is already struggling on the dirt and trenched-out roads.  It’s not only painful for the car but also your rear-end trying to maneuver over the “Main-Gravel Roads”, as they call them, with crevasses shaped into a deep V which we manage through sideways. 

To top off the fun we came across an empty section of the Aba Huab River which gave us 50 meters of sand to drive through. After some contemplation and a few large rocks removed we nailed it straight on at a barreling speed only to get marooned in the center.  We tried to dig our way out getting our entire bodies under the car digging and digging through the hot sand when a 4x4 vehicle came up and happily (easily) pulled us across.

We continued our journey to the next stop of Twyfelfontein, ancient rock carvings now turned national park, and for only $5 you can have a guided tour with a man who ever-so-discreetly compares women to low life forms such as centipedes and talks your ear off about how wonderful Texans are and sometimes puts in a few words about the carvings themselves. What a jerk. Needless to say, I was rather upset when Heath tipped him $10 Namibia dollars. He didn’t hear the centipede comment.

Now we were off heading east to Khorixas, opposite the way we came to avoid that darn river, when we hit it again on the other side and this time we weren’t so lucky.  It was flowing rain water about 3-4 feet which we wouldn’t dream of crossing and had to double-back stopping at a corner store for a well-deserved Coke.  We aimed to follow a different route, the C39, which meets up with the first route we couldn’t take but, luckily, I asked the shop owner about the road and he said it was completely overflowing. Back to the sandy Aba Huab for us.

We got stuck again. This time a safari truck came along and four guys jumped out of the bed and pushed our car through.  Why Budget Auto rented us a 2-wheel drive, I don’t know. It’s obvious these roads are not made for them anytime of the year.

We were finally off to Torra Bay, dead center of the Skeleton Coast national park, which was the direction we originally wanted to go anyway. A quick history of Skeleton Coast:  The San call it “The Land God Made in Anger”.  The coast line is hit with the cold Benguela current and has a similar cold feel of the Pacific Northwest. Mix that with sandy dunes and you have a perfect blend of thick fog for the majority of the year. It almost never rains.  Boats would get lost in the thick fog and crash onto the shallow, sandy shores only to be faced with miles and miles of desert nothing.  Zero survivors.

I have never seen anything like it, not in the movies, not in real life. A land full of nothing.  Well, except for the rusted-out old oil rig, date unknown, which looked straight out of the movie Saw.  And then a few miles down a small shabby sign pointed us to the “Ship wreck” which was literally, a ship wreck dated sometime in the early 19^th century.  You get a creepy, spooky feeling standing on that beach knowing that so many lives have been lost there; so many people have been stranded.  As neat as it was to see, it wasn’t a place I wanted to hang out in so we jumped back into the car and reached the end of the national park.  

The end gate.

Here are a few more animal photos just to give you something more than nothing too look at:

Mr. funny-face elephant at Etosh National Park, Namibia.

A wild and crazy Springbok at Etosha National Park, Namibia. Very pretty and also good eatin'.

A male lizard. I tried to get his name but he wouldn't tell me.