11/09/2014
It is only recently that I started getting an interest in Sossusvlei. I’ve come to love photo’s of skeleton-like trees against a backdrop of the red dunes, and would love to be able to take one myself.
Today, we set off from Swakopmund to the Sossusvlei area. I’m slightly apprehensive, because it would be gravel road for the entire way. The good news – we encountered several graders busy grading the road. These gravel roads are often better than many of our potholed tarred roads.
For some reason, I always imagined Namibia to be rather flat, other than some sanddunes, and a rather large canyon. Tsk tsk tsk. Driving through the Kuiseb and Gaub passes, I felt particularly silly for ever having such misconceptions.
During World War II, Nicolaas Spreeth got tired of having to make a 30km detour via the Remhoogte Pass, in order to collect goods that were delivered for him at a bus stop at farm Namibgrens on top of the mountain. So he decided to trek uphill along the existing Zebra tracks. He fortified the paths with quartzite rocks whenever he took the journey, and soon, a bright white line running up the mountain, could be spotted from quite a distance. And so, over time, he built a pass with his bare hands, using dynamite to flatten obstacles. Today, the bulk of the pass is brickpaved, and we were quite pleased about that, seeing that gradients between 1:4.5 and 1:6 makes it the steepest pass in Namibia. Well worth the slight detour!
Solitaire is a little town near the Namib-Naukluft Park, and is one of the very few places in the area where you can refuel. It also has a bakery that sells the most amazing variety of confectionary, including their very famous apple tart. We stopped here, refuelled, but settled for their ice cream instead. What this town lacks for in size, it most definitely makes up for in character.
Our accommodation is at the Namib-Naukluft Lodge. But we opted for the Soft Adventure camp. Which really means that our room does not have walls with windows to the ceiling, but rather tented sides. We’re roughing it – well – about as rough as we would dare, but it means that we have a little veranda that overlooks a watering hole, and we were pleased to be able to watch some springbok. It was only at supper, that I figured out that the weird “barking” noises I heard, was not the noise of the springbok, but from the Barking Geckoes, who really only become active around sunset.
We have an early morning tomorrow – we are off to Sossusvlei.
