Namibia 2010: Dunes, Damalarand and Dassies

Dear all,

In which Ilana visits the land of sand dunes and dassies, towering mountains and elephants, gemsbok and springbok, lions lyin’ on the path to your tent and porcupines who nibble your trousers.

Almost five years to the day, I returned to Namibia. I did rant and rave a lot when I was last here so I won’t reinvent the pen as it were, and will confine myself to new rants. Mary-Anne (our other graphic designer, who has been at WS a mere seven months) and I flew to Windhoek, ran to a short meeting Windhoek – a very pretty little town – then ran to the other airport and flew south to the famed Sossusvlei dunes.

Here, the desert is almost complete; no semi-desert this, rather, it is prehistoric, with sand in layers everywhere, bare rock peeping out between tufts of grass and a few hardy (or foolhardy) bushes, and shadows stretching away ink-black as the sun sinks. “Lunar” is a clichéd description of the place but it is the correct term. From high in our little plane the landscape looks like a rumpled brown duvet, all hills and crevasses in varying shades, then we’re over the plateau and the colour changes to rust, valleys widen and the mountains rise higher to meet us. Where I've once wondered why there aren’t more names for shades of green, here I pondered over the lack of suitable descriptive terms for all the browns around us – red-brown, beige, dark brown, tan, blonde... nope, not enough.

The requisite sand airstrip, a warm Wilderness welcome and a bouncy drive in the golden light, past the odd gemsbok and springbok and even bat-eared fox (YES! One of my favourites, with their antenna ears and teddy bear faces) through the gravel plains of our private Kulala Wilderness Reserve (a barren yet stunning setting if there ever was one) to Kulala Desert Lodge, to arrive just as the sun was setting behind the black dune hills in front of the lodge. We settled into our ‘kulala’ (means ‘to sleep’ in Oshiwambo) and then I ascended the rickety ladder to the roof where you can sleep under the stars – or daven a late mincha in my case. The arching heavens turned blue-black, an inkiness that the stars punctured through one by one. The hot desert breeze turned cool. But suddenly, some 15 minutes after sunset, the sky in the west blazed pink – an encore if you like from the main performer out here; it is the sun after all that cuts and carves, colours and shapes much of this landscape, and with few trees, there is no escaping it.

As always, Namibia hits me in all the senses, overwhelming me with what is not there. Again, I felt like someone had given my eyeballs a good scrubbing as everything is so clear, springbok seem so much closer than they really are in this clear, heady air. The silence (broken only by the rasping noise of a barking gecko) of the night is complete, making the ears wonder if they’ve gone deaf – except there’s that roaring sound you get in your head which only occurs in such utter silence. Is it the blood rushing around my brain? The Earth’s subterranean fiery engines pounding? The sound of the universe expanding? As I sit here, it seems to me that the intervening years between my last sitting in the silence of Namibia and this one has been filled with clutter and noise, both in the head and out. And now, once more I can sit content and rest my ears.

A pleasant evening and the prerequisite calming of the panic-stricken staff about kosher (who then come up trumps with a delicious meal), and we sleep the sleep of the dead – or deaf in this case – and are up before the sun. Then, standing looking out at what we thought were hills yesterday, we saw them change. As the sun rose behind us, the black knolls in front of camp slowly and ever so shyly flushed rosy pink and then reddened; their colours were hidden last night because the sun had set behind them. Now filled with (coffee and) anticipation, we alighted our vehicle with Angula (first name Abisai but he prefers his surname), our guide and champion dune climber, but we didn’t know that then.

Off we whizzed through the private gate that Wilderness has into the Namib Naukluft Reserve (where the dunes live see), stopping only to watch the sun finally lift itself up from behind the desolate rocky mountains in the east. As it does, you turn around to gaze up in wonder at something you didn’t notice before: Dune 1 – an enormous hill of sand that had been black then grey, before gaining colour to finally flush that triumphant, bold, African orange-red.

I’ve seen the photos, hell, I’ve written the text, and nothing prepares you for the actual grandeur of the spectacle. All the more so because it is not pure sand, but almost impossibly, life: grass tufts grow determinedly up the steep slopes. Serendipitously, just before I came I read a thought by Rabbi Kelman of Toronto who describes being humbled as being faced with an awesome thing of nature and realising everything there is, and thus everything I am, comes from God. That is exactly the response here: to be in a place where one could not survive without all the trappings of civilisation and compare this to the size of dunes and their grandeur – enormous, stretching into the blue sky up to 300 metres, they seem to proclaim God’s glory – this presses one into a human shape. I feel my mortality and frailty press down on me. I feel much lower than the angels, in fact, while I may be larger than the grains of sand, yet I am so much smaller than the dune they have built.

It’s not just the size, but the sweep of time. For 40 million years, each grain moved infinitely slowly, starting as silt coming down the Orange River many miles to the south, then washed out to sea and pushed first north by the Benguela Current and then back onto land and right up the old river mouth and bed for kilometres, unhurriedly, to where they began to build up and up and up, moved by wind this way and that to become a huge, towering dune – and from the air, a sand sea made of red waves. Each grain played its part to shape one of the great spectacles on this planet – an enduring work of art by the prime Artist.

In between the dunes lie flat, hard once-pans, long ago filled with water (and in the rainy season some of them still are) they are now stranded as blinding white calcrete vleis – hence the name “Sossusvlei” – the place filled with water – or Dead Vlei, evocatively filled with the twisted shapes of trunks and branches, the remains of long-dead trees.

Sossusvlei though is a public park so you meet the public here. We therefore turned up our noses at Dune 45 'cos there were too many people climbing that one and drove on to Big Daddy, a monster of a ‘star dune’ – i.e., it has a number of arms in all directions as opposed to a linear dune, which has only one main dune ridge (see how much there is to learn just about sand?). The wind however had picked up so Angula suggested we only climb one of Big Daddy’s arms, which was only about half the height of the centre point of the dune. Halfway up, puffing and blowing, we were blessing his sagacity. You have to walk on the crest of the dune, the sand flowing steeply down on either side in an acute triangle, and if possible in someone else’s footprints as that’s easier. The wind was howling and sand particles were flying like mad across our shoes – interestingly and luckily not much higher – to flip over the crest and pour with verve down the other side; “dune on the fly” is how I thought of it. If the wind kept up, the dune would shift slowly over Dead Vlei which was on our right, but apparently it regularly blows back the other way, so that the dune pretty much stays put. Finally, heaving and panting, we reached the top of the arm – and ran straight down the steep side to the bottom, yelling a bit on the way, naturally. You can’t fall 'cos your legs sink into the sand almost to your knees at each step so that you are held up and supported by the sand that kept you back when climbing. Wobbly-legged I keeled over and lay flat on my back on the blessed hard floor of Dead Vlei and admired the 800-year-old gnarled trunks of dead trees that persist and insist on standing on this moonlike surface. Yet it’s not like the moon; even here we saw toktokkie, fog-basking and long-legged beetles scurrying about and a shovel-snouted lizard diving head first into the sand.

After all that exercise we journeyed on to the actual vlei that is called Sossusvlei, just next to Big Mama dune, and parked under an enormous camelthorn tree for coffee and bikkies. There’s something very restful about sitting in the shade sipping coffee and watching other people climb laboriously up that steep dune.... All around us were beetles and birds busily doing their thing, flitting in and out of the dusty green leaves – and the words “ma rabu maasecha” reverberated through my head at every turn where I could see life and its superb adaptations to an unforgiving environment.

Well, after all that colour and light, we took a drive back to the gravel plains and mountains and visited Sesriem Canyon (an unexpected crack in the Earth 30 metres deep that holds remnants of water in the dry season), then after lunch took a drive across the reserve to see the other Wilderness camps, finishing off with a lovely dinner and well-deserved sleep – unfortunately not under the bright swathe of stars that stretched out across the skies, mainly 'cos they come with a heavy dew.

We were meant to go hot air ballooning which I was so excited about I could hardly sleep. Unfortunately the wind had other ideas and so on our final morning we stayed on good ol’ Mother Earth and used flat feet and gravity to walk along the dry riverbed in front of camp, enjoying crunching over river sand and seeing signs of animals, and even a glimpse of a jackal in the distance.

But the best was having a chat to Angula who is the chairman of the Kulala Environmental Club. (No ordinary club this, it’s one of those “that’s why I love Wilderness” moments, so indulge me here, okay?) A few months ago, four staff members from Kulala Desert Lodge - not managers or anything, just your average person working at the lodge as a guide, waiter or cleaner - decided that they too wanted to make a difference. So they started the KEC with just a simple premise: to clean up and teach others to clean up. They deal with litter – not around the camp because there isn’t any there, but in the Sossusvlei area which of course is a public area and thus has human beings who can’t seem to resist dropping their stuff everywhere they go. So every week, someone goes along and picks up litter. The club has grown so there are now more volunteers and more hands. Not content with this, the Club has now expanded its activities to the nearby village of Maltahöhe, where they take the day off to spend time with the kids and run a village-wide cleanup programme.

See? Not complicated. Just a simple aim – but what a difference you can make.

A short trip to the airstrip and we hopped on the plane for what’s known as the scenic flight to Swakopmund. And indeed it is, with the red dunes seeming to flow like water beneath us, for mile after mile until we reached the Atlantic and took a sharp right. Flying north, we watched the famous fog rolling in importantly to work. As you may know, the fog of Namibia is one of the miraculous everyday events that ensures that some moisture gets to this arid land, and many animals and plants are well adapted to harvest the precious liquid that occurs on most mornings. What I didn’t realise was quite how solid and well, present, this fog is. No mere wispy cloud this, but a solid bank of white that hangs just above the sea, moving determinedly eastwards. It seems to have a large flamboyant personality of its own, which changes to a gentler, persuasive one when it reaches the shore. Here, it transforms into tendrils and fingers that curl this way and that. It tiptoes delicately across the blond dunes (to be oxidised red as they move inland in their turn), leaving droplets of moisture and the possibility of life as it passes by, finally disappearing over the horizon.

II. Damaraland once more
After landing in Swakopmund we continued flying a lot more till we reached Damaraland – and still one of my favourite places on Earth. (Yes, I know there are a lot of them. Since God took the time to make them all, I assume some appreciation would be in order, no?)

I won’t speak much about Damaraland as I will just refer you to my previous experience in 2006. But it’s still one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, bareness and desolation in an almost Mordor/ Lord of the Rings sort of way. The land lies brooding, the morning and afternoon's dark shadows in the valleys contrast with the flat-topped mountains and hills that rear up into the infinite blue sky. It is majestic and breathtaking – literally everywhere I look I take in a breath sharply at the stupendour (that’s stupendous splendour, see?). We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly at the camp with managers Ilze and Ivan and took a drive in the dry Huab riverbed to see the ellies. During this season they hang out here as one of the few water sources there are so you’re pretty sure to see them. The riverbed seems dry as bone but every now and then a little surface water sparkles out and there’s always something drinking there – kudu, steenbok and even Egyptian geese. And when a honey badger raced across our path, and we saw the endemic Rosy-faced Lovebirds and Rüppell’s Parrots, well, my water bottle runnethed over. We also saw one lone bat hanging upside down in a tree – was he sulking? Or perhaps a penchant for hermitage?

One of the verses from Tehillim went through my mind constantly here: "Poteach et yadecha," we say to God, You open Your hand and sustain all living things with what they need. This is so clear here once more: despite the dryness and seeming inability to live here, everything that does, does so successfully. Every plant and animal is perfectly adapted to survive – and thrive – lives here in Hashem’s ratzon, His favour.

Just one more story and then I’ll leave you alone. We went to visit the Petrified Forest. This is a very impressive hilltop covered with very scared bits of wood (sorry sorry) that are in fact 280-million-year-old conifers that were carried here during an Ice Age and lay buried for aeons, until erosion uncovered them and German palaeontologists discovered them. It was all very primeval of course, what with ancient rock-solid tree trunks lying around, not one but TWO snakes (a western barred spitting cobra had been attacking a sand snake when we interrupted it; it saw us and then with that fluid ripple of power so evocative of snakes disappeared into a crack in the nearby rocks, while the other one just hung dead still on a branch, its tail was bitten, poor thing), and to end off things nicely, our guide’s name was Bacchus (the Greek god of wine), so all in all there was a lovely mix of the primordial and prehistoric, Garden of Eden snakes, and Greek mythology. A lovely drive back to D-Camp yielded bat-eared foxes again and great raptors, before we took to the skies ourselves northwards once more - to Etosha.

But that’s another story....