Skeleton Coast

My latest trip lead my friends and me all the way up the coast from Swakopmund to Terrace bay (that is as far as you can get). This is a more than 350km drive on salt and gravel roads with hardly any features to rest your eye at. We saw some shipwrecks and left overs from the diamond mining times on the way, that was it. However, even this huge amount of nothingness is amazing, though quite tiering for the eyes. It was also very windy and when someone got out of the car the sand pricked the sking like thousand needles. Not a welcoming place, but there ist still live in this desert. We spotted a jackal and a couple of springbocks and even some ducks in a little puddle in a riverbed. Terrace Bay itself is an assortment of some bungalows and most guests come here for fishing. There is really nothing else one could do. We only spent one night and then moved on to Palmwag lodge behind the desert girdle. We drove through a great landscape with lots of little table mountains. Palmwag lodge is a nice place and they offer game drives to see elephants and lions. After one night we continued via Fingerklip to a farm near Outjo. There we split up - my friends went to Etosha next day while I drove home. All in all it was a bit too much driving (1700km in 5 days) with too little to see and too few activities. But at least I have been through skeleton coast without leaving my skeleton there.

trying to fly

Last weekend we spent at the coast as I wanted to try hanggliding. After a couple of exercises such as running with the thing I moved a few metres up the dune and started with the first hops. Early afternoon I was successful to fly for about 20m, but the landing was a bit too fast, I twisted my ellbow and finished the sport for this weekend. However, I got the taste for it and I definitely want to continue with it.

the coast

One night we camped wild at the Brandberg with no-one around for a couple of kilometres. We enjoyed the nature and the absolute quietness. Then we explored the other end of our proposed original route, the Brandberg West camp. We drove through a deserted mine and just as we thought nothing will be there and wanted to turn around a simple camp appeared. We were greeted and the woman had a registration list ready and also hand-drawn maps of the way through Doros Crater. So, from this side the undertaking looked much more possible, but now it was too late. We turned around and drove to the coast. The Skeleton coastline is as bleak as described in the books, but we did not get bored by this. I even enjoy this emptiness. The kids went bathing in the Atlantic at 13 degrees water temperature, mist and an unpleasant wind outside. On our way we visited one of the largest seal colonies in Southern Africa. The number of animals was quite impressive and it stank horrible. We watched the acrobatic swimming for a while.
We stayed a few days in Swakopmund to get some entertainment. The boy and the man went quad biking, the girl and the woman had a look at the Kristallgalerie and adjoined jeweller shops. One day we joined Tommy’s Living Desert tour which was great fun. I had been on the tour over a year ago, but it was very interesting again. In Walvis Bay we met a pelican selling souvenirs and my visitors bought a few.
On our way back to Windhoek we stopped for one night and a bit of scrambling at Spitzkoppe. The kids enjoyed this adventure a lot.

Ugab Terraces

The next leg of our journey brought us along the Ugab river to the famous Vingerklip. Long ago the river cut through the landscape and created towers and funny shaped hills with steep sides. One of these towers is the Vingerklip, so narrow at the bottom that one wonders that it does not tip over. We enjoyed this amazing landscape for 2 days and then carried on to Twyfelfontein. On the way we visited the petrified forest where we marvelled at 30m long logs of stone. We stayed in the Aba-Huab community camp, right next to the Huab river. One evening I strolled along the riverbed and discovered several elephant footprints. Although they were not fresh I found this quite exciting. We explored the surrounding, found the Wondergat, a very deep and narrow hole in the ground and looked at the Organ Pipes, a strange volcanic rock formation. Twyfelfontein is known for its rock engravings and we joined an interesting tour to see these. Usually I prefer looking at rock art at my leisure, without a guide. However, this was not possible in this place and it was indeed good to get some explanation of the engravings. Some of the pictures were like a map where temporary and permanent wells are marked, essential knowledge in an area like this. Most engravings showed animals, sometimes with human body parts. This should symbolize the shaman who is transforming into that animal. Then there was an ostrich with 5 necks which showed its movement.
Originally we intended to cut through the Doros Crater to the coast from there, but warnings about people getting lost, lack of a detailed map of the area and lack of information about the way from local people deterred us from this. We went on a day trip on the 4x4 path into the area and back instead. Then we made our way on a long detour around the east of Brandberg to get to the same point.

mishaps

I could not believe the number of broken things on this tour. It started with the fridge in the car: it worked for the first 200km, then said “beep” once more and then it went dead. No light, no tone, no refrigeration. So we had from then on a very bulky and inefficient cool box which restricted us in our food shopping. However, we managed surprisingly well without it. The next thing was the borrowed gas cooker. Our attempt to cook tea on it required a windstill place and a lot of patience. The flame was tiny, not enough gas was coming out. We checked the valve and the outlets, but could not find anything wrong. So, this meant cooking on an open fire whenever we wanted anything hot. OK, I could put up with this. Then, on a camp site in Etosha, we had a screw in one tyre and it lost a lot of pressure. We decided to change the tyre in camp rather than somewhere on the Etosha roads with hungry lions around. We had problems getting the nuts off and asked for help at the local petrol station. The man there helped us with some tools and we thought the problem was sorted. It was not so. When trying to use the hydraulic jack it only moved a few centimetres and then stopped. It turned out that the oil had been leaking out. So we also borrowed a jack, finally changed the tyre and got the hole fixed. At our stop in the next town I bought more useful tools for the nuts, a new jack and also showed the gas cooker to the man in the garage. He tried it out and it worked! He said he had not done anything, it just worked. Hm. Well. What I had not expected was that we needed tha jack and the tools the next day as we had another flat tyre in another camp. We also got that tyre fixed in the nearest town. To finish this unpleasant story, later one tyre was torn by a stone and the last one ripped totally off on a normal gravel road. We ended up driving 150km along the coast without a spare. In Swakopmund I ordered new ones. And I remember my brother asking me in the beginning why the hell I have 2 spares! I think 4 flat tyres within 2 weeks is quite a record and in the end we were very quick in changing it.

Etosha once more

This time I went on tour with my brother and his kids. The Landrover was fully loaded with borrowed camping gear and food for 2 weeks and off we went. We took our time to enjoy everything in leisure and to avoid too long drives in a day. Our first stop was the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a place where they care for injured and orphaned cheetahs. If a cheetah does not learn to hunt from its mother, it will not be able to survive in the wild, so it has to be kept in a reservate and fed. We were introduced to the concept of the place and saw the feeding of a group of the cheetahs. There is even a clinic and laboratory to care for injured animals and to do some research on them. The museum nearby was also very interesting. They do a morning exercise with the cheetahs, where there is a piece of fur pulled over the field for them to hunt, similar to a greyhound race. Unfortunately, we missed that.
The next highlight was Etosha. Although I had been there before it was still a great experience. Already in camp the night before we entered the park we heard the lions growling. We had 3 days to spend in the park and saw everything one could wish for: a herd of 20 elephants crossing the road just in front of us, 4 lionesses with 7 cubs relaxing at a waterhole, oryx fighting, giraffes with their offspring and a pair almost twisting their necks around each other … The funniest thing I saw was a large group of zebra mongoose whirling through each other at the road side and the strangest thing was a single black rhino pestering a group of elephants at the waterhole – and the rhino won! Usually this is the other way round. After those 3 days in the car we took a day off and relaxed in a camp outside the park, just walking around a bit and using the pool.

Rhino Horn

I spent another wonderful weekend climbing at Spitzkoppe. We did a number of routes, up to grade 22, Andreas leading all of them except the easiest one. The highlight was the 22 up Rhino Horn. I got some great pictures abseiling down the other side of it. In the afternoon we quickly wanted to get up an unknown route for which we did not have any description. It did not look so long from the bottom, but it turned out to be about 200m of climbing, 5 long pitches. Andreas only had 13 quickdraws with him and needed 17 on the first pitch, so he had to keep coming back down to retrieve them. To complete the mishap I then dropped one of them after taking them out, so it fell down the 50m into the bush at the bottom and it was missing for the next pitches. The sun was going down, but we completed the climb and reached the car just before dark. Next morning we had to search for the lost quickdraw, but we were lucky and Andreas found it easily.