ITCHY FEET TRAVELS

Windhoek to Sossusvlei

June 4, 2024

Namibia is much like Botswana in the sense that other than between main towns, there are few public transport options. As a traveler, one either rents a car and self-drives or joins tours. My allergy to being herded is as strong as ever, so I decided to rent a car. My partner in crime was Angie, whom I had met in Divundu. We met up again in Windhoek, rented a car and set off for the famed dunes of Sossusvlei.

The road out of Windhoek is a ribbon of asphalt with nary a pothole. Wonderful, I thought, this is easy. But that little bubble of ignorance was short-lived. Soon we were on a gravel road. Made of hard-packed dirt, this was still not so bad albeit not made for a sedan with its low-slung undercarriage. The road seemed to go on forever with no towns or villages or townships or signs of habitation anywhere. The scenery changed from rocky ridges to savanna grass to flat plains dotted with acacia shrubs. And the dusty ribbon unraveled. Signs of any other vehicle was heralded long in advance by their dust plumes.

Thatch-like lumps on some tree branches had us puling over for a closer look. It was a nest! But not just a single nest, it was a commune, the birds all like sparrows, flitting in and out. Each nest appears separate but are clustered together in a lump. Never have I seen or even known of this.

The road continued, now worse with deep furrows and high ridges made of large rocks, courtesy of all the four-wheel drive vehicles roaring down the road. The thunks and scrapes on the undercarriage made us wince. Angie is far better at this and were it not for her driving the bulk of the way, I doubt I could have managed to arrive with daylight each day. We slithered down into a ravine and crawled up again. The signposts indicated rivers or waterways but the beds were all bone dry.

There are fences along the way – some are posts on the ground strung through with wire. Some are closely spaced, some wide apart. Some have wooden posts arranged on the wire so they look like they are floating in space. They go on and on for miles but what are they keeping in? Or whom are they keeping out?

Perhaps the fences keep animals in we guessed, because every so often we would see a lone oryx. Then a herd of wildebeestes and some ostriches that pranced off as soon as we stopped for a closer look. There were plenty of the two-legged variety as well. The 4 WD drives, jeeps, buses and vans that roared past us were all crammed with tourists. One group were dutifully getting a group picture at the crossing of the Tropic of Capricorn.

A few signposts proclaimed some lodges and hunting camps but the lodges themselves were tucked away out of sight. We saw no other homes or towns except a pair of buildings that sat squarely by the side of the road, delightful in their idiosyncratic architecture.

Despite not really stopping for long anywhere, we were racing the sun. The endless gravel, the constant jolting and the clunks and rattles of spitting stones ensured that we did not zip through. We crawled into our campsite with the sun sinking past the ridgeline.