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| Lost in Space by Mark Jones |
| Highlife (British Airways In-Flight Magazine) - April 2007 |
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Lost in Space
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The
world’s least necessary road sign is on
the C27 a few miles into the NamibRand Nature
Reserve. Interestingly, it follows the world’s
second least necessary one, the one that reads
"SAND". There’s a thousand-kilometre
dune system half a mile on your right, and there’s
sand on the fields, halfway up the mountain, on
your windscreen, under your wheels, between your
toes. You know about the sand, and don’t
really need a sign to tell you about it. But the
sand sign is trumped by the one showing a picture
of a giraffe. It’s right and proper to warn
speeding motorists about the dangers of hitting
a running giraffe. But first consider the facts.
You’re in a 200,000-hectare wilderness.
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There are exactly
two giraffes here.
The land around the road is dead flat, and giraffes
aren’t as hard to spot as, say, a gerbil. It is
good of the authorities to warn you against giraffe-related
traffic incidents. But as risks go, it’s one you’re
largely prepared to take.
The land is empty here. Namibia itself is pretty empty:
1.8 million people in a country four times the size
of the United Kingdom. The Namib-Naukuft wilderness
is one of the emptiest parts. You can drive up the main
highway for 300 kilometre and your encounters with others
cars won’t reach double figures. And that’s
like Times Square compared with the C27, which runs
through the NamibRand Nature Reserve. Then you turn
off the C27 - indicating is rarely necessary - onto
a really quiet road. Around 20km later you emerge at
the reception of the Wolwedans. By this time, human
habitation seems as unlikely as a wristwatch in a dinosaur
movie.
Abi Brückner used to have a sheep farm here. But
the soil is poor and the distances gob smacking. The
farms didn’t thrive, so after a bad drought in
the 1980s, Abi persuaded his neighbours to sell their
sheep, tear down their fences and create this reserve.
It’s not a bad parable of post-independence, post-apartheid
Namibia. Enlightened, controlled tourism and wildlife
management are where the smart entrepreneurs are going,
in truth, it’s not a great game park. There are
thousands of springbok, lots of oryx, the aforesaid
giraffes and a few zebra. You come here instead for
the dunes, the mountains, and the great wide silent
plains. The Hollywood celebrities who camped here a
few weeks before my arrival probably arrived having
ruled out Antarctica and Irian Jaya on the grounds of
practicality - they would have alighted here as the
next best bet. If you spend your life being hounded
by paparazzi, it’s a pretty good place to hide,
they’d need a long lens the size of the Hubble
telescope to snap you in your bathing costume.
There’s another good reason for choosing Wolwedans.
The design is state-of-the-art breathtaking. Imagine
a Malibu beach pad erected by your most fervently eco-conscious
Californian neighbour transplanted here to a desert
the width of two continents. You have solar panels,
canvas walls, leather sofas, old books, modern plumbing
and a plunge pool, all set on stilts linked by a series
of raised walkways to protect you from the snakes, and
the dunes from you.
My room was called Mountain View and no one can accuse
the owners of exaggeration. Beyond the deck, framed
expertly by the architect, is Losberg Mountain. Monet
would have loved it here, capturing the changing light
and shade of the mountain, from dune to olive to Uluru
red with a hundred variations in between. Or if, like
me, you don’t have any paintbrushes, and can’t
paint anyway, you can gaze at the thing with a cold
drink and think great thoughts. You know the kind –
permanence versus impermanence, mutability and humanity,
and why gin and tonic after dinner always tastes wrong.
Dinner itself was a communal affair with the residents
of the other cabins. We ate kudu steak – a type
of large antelope with long curly horns, and drank Stellenbosch
Shiraz and were a convivial party; but I’d perhaps
have been as happy at my table in my room with my mountain
and the lost, hot, west wind for company. Perhaps Brad
and Angelina felt the same way, which may explain why
they chose to stay away from the lodge, a few miles
up the track at the Wolwedans Tented Camp.
Colours are not normal in Namibia. Take the drive into
Sossusvlei at dawn. This landscape looks like it was
devised by a sci-fi movie-set designer. The plains are
yellow, the mountains indigo, the trees black and the
dunes a deep martian red. The landscape consists of
huge sculptured mountains of red sand and salty pans
of a livid pale-green hue. The yellow plains are dotted
with unearthly bare-branched trees. Strange circles
are etched into the ochre grass.
The road comes to an end at a wide vlei and I drove
on in my four-wheel drive. I chose my dune (“Big
Mama”) walked to the top, bounded down like a
giant running in slow motion. Then I drove back to the
lodge and wondered if that place really existed.
The evening light at the Desert Homestead, the lodge
close to Sossusvlei, doesn’t bring you much closer
to normality. The thatched roundel hut stands milky
white on the edge of a desert plain. The ground cover
of short, dry, bushman’s grass stretches out to
the bare mountains like the background to Dan Dare illustration.
The indigo sky is dappled with fish-scale clouds and
a planet sits bright and low in the sky. The planet
is Venus; but you feel you could be anywhere in the
solar system.
Four days of Namib Desert driving and your senses begin
to reshape themselves. Sight becomes a negotiation between
glare and perspective.
There is constant water mirages on the road and mountain
ranges on the horizon are suspended in midair. Everything
feels dry. I tried to count the different kinds of dry.
There’s the rigid dry of the bushman’s grass.
There’s the fibrous dry of the weavers’
nest, incredible thatched-house structures in camel-thorn
trees and atop pylons, some of them a century old. There’s
the fine, choking dry of the drifting sand on the dunes.
There’s the thirsty hot dry of the wind. I left
my notepad outside one day and it curled and turned
brittle within minutes. The wind had sucked the moisture
from the paper.
It’s just as well that the Namibians make a very
good cold beer. When you arrive at your lodge after
a day on the road, they’ll try and give a welcome
drink. This is usually some sweetened Sunny Delight
concoction. Politely refuse. Windhoek lager is the way
to go, believe me.
The desert is, in short, a blinding, sublime, parched
place; from which-despite its beauty-you’ll need
some respite. Which leads us to Swakopmund.
Just off the Atlantic coast there runs the Bunguela
current. It’s the reverse side of our Gulf Stream.
While the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the most
northerly shores, this cool current brings coolness
and life to the African Atlantic coast. In Scotland
you get palm trees and pink beaches; on the Namibia
coast, you get sea fogs and seals. The weather is temperate,
often cool; the inlanders flock there in the dog days
of December and January.
You also get one of the most fertile, plankton-rich
stretches of ocean in the world, supporting a rich,
fat density of marine and birdlife, including orcas,
sharks, dolphins and squadrons of goggle-eyed, open-beaked
pelicans. The neighbouring ports of Swakopmund (Swakop)
and Walvis Bay were established by the Germans and the
British respectively to bring in the sea harvest. But
while Walvis has remained a working town of wide streets
and small processing plants, Swakop has hauled in the
tourists.
You drive from Walvis up the D2, a straight but hair-raising
stretch of coastal road. On one side there are fishing
fleets and scraggy beaches; on the other high dunes
and buggy racers. Over the causeway is Swakopmund, widely
advertised as a town of quirky German architecture,
a piece of Saarland stuck on the edge of the desert.
It’s true that there are a few bleached examples
of 19th century gothic churches, public buildings and
hotels. But the illusion is short-lived. Once over the
causeway, you’re in the kind of New World country
town you’d find anywhere in the States, Australia
or South Africa: a grid of streets, covered walkways,
bottle shops and drugstores.
Leaving Swakopmund, the sweaters and jeans went back
in the case. The shorts and walking boots were dusted
off, causing a small sandstorm on the Angolan border.
The desert beckoned again, but not without an overnight
stop at Erongo to the northeast. The landscape here
doesn’t have that Star Trekian two-dimensional
look: the filmic references here are all John Ford and
John Wayne. It’s and epic backdrop of granite
boulders and green ravines, sheer cliffs and open plains
stretching a day’s ride away.
The Erongo Wilderness Lodge is an encampment of thatched
huts housing tent-like lodgings and some of the sexiest
bathrooms in Africa. The luxury inside- and a very fine
restaurant perched high up the cliff- don’t dispel
the frontier wariness you feel as you survey the camp
sheltering beneath the rocks. It feels like the kind
of place where there’s a snake under every rock
and a cheetah in every shadow. But the invaders they
mainly worry about here are fire and baboons. A gang
of baboons was seen hanging about high on a ledge wondering
if a sortie down the cliff might be in order. The lodge
managers deflected sunbeams off large mirrors until
they drifted off.
Then it was the long drive to the Etosha Mountain Lodge,
made five hours longer by some incomplete directions
on the itinerary. You don’t want to spend five
hours trying to find the right road in Namibia. I had
to retreat to Kamanjab to refuel and try to get directions.
It was then, late afternoon, on a dirt track off the
C40 that I stopped to let two kudu spring out from the
bush. I wrenched the wheel to the left and the kudu
crashed into me, missing the windscreen by inches. Vehicle
and beast both stopped and then limped on.
Finally, I found someone who knew the way and picked
my way 50km through farms and tracks to the gate. It
took another 20km through the eerie darkness before
I reached a spectacular new building set high above
the plains of some of Africa’s richest game land.
The manager gave me dinner, took pity on me and installed
me in the VIP suite, a lodge with two big rooms, a large
deck, a pool and a place altogether of Brangelina proportions.
Driving through Etosha, past the huge dry inland lake
of the Etosha Pan, stopping for zebra, giraffe, springbok
and ostrich, seeking out the waterholes for elephant,
lion and rhino, is one of those African experiences
that make people go all shiny-eyed. But the wildlife
story will wait for another time. This is about the
lodges, so let’s finish off at the most extraordinary
of the lot, Onguma. Onguma sits just outside the Von
Lindquist Gate at the east of Etosha, bordering the
pan. They make long game drives into the park, of course,
but there’s plenty of interesting wildlife in
the Onguma reservation itself. I can attest to this,
having heard the deep, grunting breath of a lion a few
metres away as I lay trying to sleep in my tent.
If it doesn’t get wilder than Onguma, it doesn’t
get much more stylish either. The main building is like
living in a £200 coffee-table book. There’s
teak furniture and antique white beaded chairs, traditional
artworks next to brushed concrete walls, all overlooking
a waterhole where no interior designer would dare to
tread. Onguma only sleeps six. They’re building
a larger camp on the edge of the pan. But package-tour
safari doesn’t seem to be the way Namibia wants
to go. To remain lonely and harsh, with these small
exquisite lodges dotted around the landscape like designerly
oases - that seems to be the future. |
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