Namibian impressions….  Saturday, 08/02/2025

I’m several days into my Namibia trip, and it is not disappointing! I had an easy flight here last Sunday, and on Monday morning was picked up and taken to the car hire place. There I had lengthy instruction on how to operate everything on the vehicle. Then it was off… well, not quite. I stopped at a nearby shopping mall and bought some supplies and got a Namibian SIM card – a process that took the best part of two hours.

And then I was off, a 345 km (215 mile) journey southwest down to Sesriem. Just outside Windhoek the tar road gave way to gravel, so it was a tiring drive, about 4.5 hours altogether. I arrived at my campsite just after 6pm, no problem setting up because sunset is about 7:45pm. A great campsite: each place had its own toilet, shower and sink. 

Sossus Oasis Campsite…

Tuesday morning I headed into the Namib-Naukluft National Park, headed for Sossusvlei and its sand dunes. This is genuine desert, an unforgiving landscape. After an hour’s drive you arrive at the 2-wheel drive car park. From here a government-run shuttle takes visitors on another 5 km to close to the dunes. Having a 4×4 I was free to drive on, although not without risk – it’s common that 4x4s get stuck in the deep sand. I had deflated my tires from 2.2 to 1.8 bar to assist in sand, and set out. I didn’t have any problems, although in places the wheels spun a bit. 

What a glorious sight: massive dunes (some of the largest in the world) and a few vleis (vlei is Afrikaans for swamp). Sossusvlei occasionally gets some water, and therefore there’s a scattering of trees and bushes. Doodvlei (dead swamp) however gets none – about 900 years ago the sand dunes shifted, blocking it from the river which runs when there is rain. As a result, the trees died, and because the air is so dry there is no rot – so there they stand, blackened but intact. Quite remarkable. 

I walked around, and walked about halfway up to the largest dune, Big Daddy (325 metres high). I didn’t go further: it was midday and the temperature was 39 degrees (102 Fahrenheit) – a bit warm for a very strenuous climb. It’s amazing how there’s life even in such a barren place: all sorts of insects and reptiles, as well as small mammals and some bigger ones: springbok and gemsbok (oryx), as well as ostriches. How they manage to survive I really don’t know. 

There were a reasonable number of people around, but certainly not busy – as I think it would be in high season: winter time. Sossusvlei is a remarkable place – it fully justifies its prominence on the tourist trail. 

On Wednesday I drove 347 km (216 miles) northwards, to Swakopmund, an old German town on the coast. This was an interesting drive: across the Namib desert. A harsh, stony landscape with few features. The road reaches the coast at Walvis Bay, from where it’s about 30 km up to Swakopmund, a drive through coastal dunes. Swakopmund is a curious place: a small windblown town wedged between a cold ocean and a hot, inhospitable interior. In contrast, the temperature on the coast is cool – no more than 20 or 21 degrees, thanks to the cold Benguela current which flows northwards up the coast. The town itself is nothing much: there are a handful of German buildings built in the early years of the 20th century, but they are dominated by pretty bland modern buildings. A lot is made of how German Swakopmund is, but it seems to me that this is exaggerated by the tourist industry. It certainly gets plenty of German tourists, no doubt curious about a place that used to be German (if only for a short while: from its founding in 1894 until the First World War – thereafter South West Africa was handed to South Africa to administer, right up until the country gained independence in 1990). Aside from the ubiquitous German tourists, I didn’t hear any German – the most common language, by far, spoken by local white people is Afrikaans.

There were a few mildly interesting things to see in Swakopmund. I went to the snake park (great!), a crystal museum featuring all sorts of semi-precious stones, the local museum, and a small art gallery. The museum was interesting, but there was something weird about it: it focused heavily on the old German days, with next to nothing about the 70-year South African interlude (which had a huge impact, not least because apartheid was applied here just as it was in South Africa), and nothing at all about the struggle for independence that was waged from the early 60s until the end of the 1980s (and included a guerilla war against the South African administration). It would seem that this is a town that has totally failed to come to terms with its history – a bit of misty-eyed stuff about the old German days, and that’s about it – although incongruously, there was a special installation detailing the genocide that the German forces perpetrated against the local black people in the 1890s (but then absolutely nothing about what happened to the black population thereafter). Afterwards, at the art gallery, the elderly woman on duty, who said she was of German blood, was interesting to talk to. I suspect one reason for there being few obvious Germans is that according to her, almost all the younger people have left Namibia – destined for Canada, the U.K. and Australia she said. In her view, this was because if you have 30 years left to live, there is no future here. That was blunt.

I visited Windhoek yesterday. It’s a significant harbour; the town itself is a dump. Although Swakopmund is better, it’s not a place that you would recommend to anyone as worth seeing. (Ditto for the capital, Windhoek). Namibia is not notable for its cities, it’s about the extraordinary natural landscape. 

This morning I left Swakopmund and drove northeasterly, up to Spitzkoppen, where I stopped for a couple of hours. Huge boulders in the desert: quite a spectacle (a couple of photos will do far better than any attempt to describe the place). And then on: up towards the Brandberg mountains, where I’m staying two nights at a lodge that has both chalets and a campsite. There are Bushmen’s paintings up on the side of the mountain – I’ll take a walk up there tomorrow. It’s a beautiful location, and the campsite is huge, spread over a large area. I’m pretty much by myself: there might be one other set of campers.