Southern Africa 2025. Part Four: The Skeleton Coast and the Namib

 

21^st October 2025 (Day 10)

Wake up at 6:35, five minutes late for breakfast. It’s so cold! Must be ten degrees. That’s because we’re in the desert. Should I put on long trousers? Nah. It’ll warm up.

The early morning light is beautiful. In the desert scrub there are numerous roadside stalls selling art and gemstones, the vendors desperately trying to wave you down, but I doubt anyone will stop today. There are small settlements of tiny mud-walled and grass-thatched huts, and small tumuli dot the landscape which I presume to be graves. The green slowly disappears and we’re in proper desert. That could be because we’ve crossed from the Kalahari to the Namib.

The sea! The sea! We stop for bushy-bushy and it’s still cold - about 13c. Somebody whispers that the Skeleton Coast, so named because of all the shipwrecks, rarely gets above 20c because of the winds from Antarctica. Which, of course, I knew already.

About ten thousand cape seals bark, squawk and flap around, moving as teams to fight their rivals. Some of the bulls are huge. There’s a walkway and underneath this the mothers give birth. The smell is atrocious.

 Down the coast is the town of Henties Bay where we stop for supplies and I buy biltong. It’s very white Afrikaans, most of the houses being second homes for South Africans. We have lunch by the beach, a beautiful expanse of white sand with huge waves crashing across the South Atlantic directly from Brazil. It’s completely deserted.

We have a brief stop at the wreck of the Zelia which sank in 2008. The waves are so relentless that the debris of the other ships that sank earlier in time have totally dilapidated.

Then to Swakopmund, a strange German colonial town where the first genocide of the 20th century occurred against the Herero people. We have to stop at an activities centre, because that’s where Sunway Safaris get commission, but we just go to the next-door garden centre for a coffee and Claire buys seeds which are illegal to take back to the UK.

The Prost Hotel is adequate once power is restored - the wi-fi being half decent. We go for a wander. Claire’s glasses are broken after Tawanda sat on them during her moment in Torture Valley, so we find an optician who will fit the lenses to a new frame for £32. There are modernish shops and restaurants here such as KFC, Dominos and the Stadtmitte cafe chain which has the same logo as Starbucks. We walk to the seafront which is channelling Clacton in its grimness. Hawkers hang around the public toilet which has an appalling stench.

We don’t feel entirely comfortable. People are constantly asking for money, calling us ‘mama’ and ‘papa,’ and if you smoke on the street you’re pestered for a cigarette. Because although Namibia gained its independence from South Africa in 1990, the white people still have all the money.

I sit next to Jonas at dinner in a supposedly Italian restaurant. His views echo those of the security guard with the catapult outside the shopping centre in Outjo. These boys can go to school, but they don’t because it’s easier to beg from tourists. They turn into monkeys, give them anything and they will follow you around. In the village he grew up in on the South Africa-Zimbabwe border, the chieftain would whip any boys caught begging. Jonas is a good man and works extraordinarily hard. He drives eight-ten hours each day and, when we stop, he immediately has to unpack the Tank and prepare the evening meal. He’s up at four in the morning to prepare breakfast. This is his last trip. He wants to drive monster trucks in Australia.

Or become a poler. He's not sure yet. He's only 25.

22^nd October 2025 (Day 11)

Today we’re having a holiday from the holiday. Tawanda and Jonas need to get the Red Tank serviced, buy food etc… Vladka and Zivana are going to the spa. Team Kiwi, Lesley and Sybille are driving up a sand dune, and poor Jenny is still crook with Susie looking after her.

We don’t want to do anything strenuous. We go on a shopping trip to try and find extra virgin olive oil, halloumi and hummus and, bizarrely, are successful in an upmarket branch of Woolworth’s. Woolworth's is the equivalent of Waitrose here, with the Spar being Sainsbury's. Choppies in the Lidl.

We buy nice T-shirts for me and the kids that are made in Namibia, apart from the cotton. Claire gets her glasses back. We buy expensive souvenirs from a posh shop, and water, wine and hot sauce from the supermarket.

Swakopmund is just weird. It’s only 15c but when the sun is out it feels hot, perhaps because of the humidity. The streets are extremely wide but there’s little traffic. You wouldn’t notice the colonial German buildings if they didn’t have a date on them. There are numerous arcades and mini-malls in the back streets full of upmarket craft shops, clothes stores, coffee shops and opticians – so many opticians. We ended last night with an above average gin and tonic.

In the pubs the beer is imported from Germany, the food is German, and the staff are white and speak German. There are security guys everywhere to keep the beggars and hawkers away. I might even enjoy the place if I could stop feeling so guilty.

We found a restaurant during the day which had cold beer and good chips and the Kiwis join us there for dinner. Food is late because they had to defrost Alan and Jinni's fresh seafood platter before they could burn it to buggery, but my ribs are good. It's a fun evening, especially after our third bottle of wine is opened. We walk back to the hotel cautiously.

23^rd October 2025 (Day 12)

The dunes to the left get taller as we truck south to Walvis Bay. It’s the second most populous city and the main port not just for Namibia but Zambia and Zimbabwe also. Even stuff for Malawi and the D.R.C comes through here. Queues of huge cargo vessels bring in goods from Europe and the Americas and these are picked up by large heavily-laden long-distance trucks.

In a muddy bay there’s a colony of mainly-white flamingos, pelicans, plovers and cormorants. At the behemoth of a mall it’s time to pick up ice, go bushy-bushy and grab a coffee which is expensive, not very nice and too hot. This becomes an issue because the road soon becomes bumpy-bumpy as we rejoin the desert.

Two hours of being thrown around, the Tank a migraine-inducing rattle, because Jonas is trying to beat his own land speed record, and then we go real slow with twisty corners as we climb into the mountains.

The Naukluft Mountains are barren, beautiful and seem to go on for ever, although obviously this isn’t the case. We do a photo op at the Trop of Cap.

After many hours of desolate yet stunning wilderness, not a Herero, Himba, San or Nama in sight we reach a lone coffee shop in a place called Solitaire which has a big clean toilet block, outside of which we make sandwiches.

We reach Desert Camp at 15:30. We’re assigned a ‘permanent tent’ each. It’s obviously some buzz word because they’re spacious solid brick structures with a fabulous shower, quiet aircon, a hidden kitchen with a fridge that struggles (did I mention the temperature has returned to the high thirties?) and a terrace with a stunning view over the desert to the mountains beyond. There are no insects. Yet.

We get no time to settle in and we’re whisked away to a gorge. It’s nice, reasonably cool, looks a bit like the ones in Crete.

The barman opens a warm beer for Claire which she rejects but is still charged for. The cost of laundry is extortionate but I give it to them anyway. They iron my socks.

Another great meal from Jonas. A jackal comes for dinner. Love it, love it, never want to leave here.

24^th October 2025 (Day 13)

Wake up in the middle of the night, go outside to see the stars. It’s like the lighting department in Debenhams. Cold in the morning because we’re in the desert. Wildebeest join us for breakfast.

The Namib is the world’s oldest desert, possibly, and has the earth’s highest dunes, maybe. Dune 45 is so called because it’s 45 km from somewhere. It’s picturesque, well-trodden and red. Lesley is first to the top.

 

This is our first small group tour but I should point out that everyone in the group is more-widely travelled than us. Dinner conversations typically feature phrases like ‘When I was staying with Buddhist monks in Myanmar…’ ‘That time in Tajikistan when everyone got ill…’ and ‘It was one a.m. when we had to get up to see the sunrise over the dunes in Oman.’ Frankly, I’m embarrassed at having been to only 69 countries, 54 of which I’ve actually slept a night in which was not on a train. I also realise how boring other people’s travel stories are.

A springbok-laden drive to the car park where we’re transferred to a jeep that’s going to take us the final 4km to Sossusvlei for the outrageous sum of 200 Namibian Dollars return. The ride is bumpy-bumpy. Here’s where you find Big Daddy, the world’s largest dune, maybe. You probably know it because it’s featured in every single film set in the desert ever.

“We meet back here in three and a half hours,” says Tawanda. Three and a half hours?! Are you mad? It’s the desert, there’s hardly any trees to shelter under and there’s no bar, not even an ice cream van.

Lesley, Sybille and Warwick are straight up Big Daddy. The rest of the Fellowship climb over a much smaller dune, which is still quite strenuous, to Deadvlei, an extraordinary petrified forest created a thousand years ago when it was cut off from a river. Strangled by sand, it wasn’t even able to decompose. There are human footprints in the ground which looks like hexagonal elephant dung, which indicate that it must have rained here at least once. I walk to the end of Deadvlei (6km round-trip), watch people descending Big Daddy like ants on a black run, and go back because it’s burny-burny. Two hours to go. The desert is so still, so beautiful.

Did I mention that I’m in the desert?

Tawanda persuades a 4WD driver to let him have a go. He’s not as good.

A few days ago, in a moment of drunken sincerity I offered to cook dinner, to give Jonas and Tawanda a night off. I don’t think they’re arsed either way and Claire didn’t think it was a good idea until Tawanda told her he didn’t want to deny me the opportunity of cooking in the desert. I gave them a shopping list on the back of a receipt and agreed to buy the more expensive ingredients. They spent 30 minutes in the supermarket looking for things called aubergines and courgettes, and nobody knew what they were.

So, after lunch I’m off to our permanent tent to fetch the olive oil from our fridge. There’s a little kitchen that’s hot as hell, a fridge that is overstuffed and won’t chill, a plancha above two camping gas rings and a box where cooking utensils have been bunged.

The first two hours are spent removing bones from lamb that I specifically asked to be boneless. I fry the tomatoes for the Greek salad because they're tasteless, they forgot to buy oregano and the flat breads won’t rise.

Jinni is the person unlucky enough to first ask if I need any help, and she assembles the bad-idea veggie kebabs. Claire reverts to 'this was a terrible idea' when I rope her in to roll flatbreads which are too liquid because I've used up all the flour. Namibian yoghurt is not what I’m used to and in the latter stage of frying the flatbreads they become covered in teflon.

Then there’s a sandstorm.

The wind is still too strong around our dining area, so I use the sheltered braai for the vebabs at the nearest permanent tent which is Vlatka and Zivana's, and Alan cooks the marinated lamb aided by Tawanda who eats the ones that look like they might fall into the fire.

So, with the help of the Fellowship a meal is conjured. The feta in the Greek salad is weird, the halloumi on the vebabs have fallen into the fire, the courgettes aren't cooked and Woolworth hummus is horrible however much extra virgin olive oil you add. Still, the ugly teflon-coated flatbreads taste okay and the lamb is exceptional, which is the only thing that matters. Due to very low standards the meal is a great success and the team has bonded. I'm not saying anything horrible about the Fellowship ever again.

Tawanda says, perhaps truthfully, that other groups have cooked for them before but this is the first time he's enjoyed the meal. He asks for the kebab recipe which is basically lamb, lemon juice, olive oil and as much garlic as you can be bothered to chop with a knife that has the sharpness of a rolling pin.

Desert foxes and oryx join us for dinner.

25^th October 2025 (Day 14)

A mist shrouds the far reaches of the desert at dawn. Tame weaver birds join us for breakfast.

We head north-east, oryx and wildebeest by the roadside, even though we’re not in a park. An hour and a half to the oasis of Solitaire where there’s an unlikely bakery called Moose McGregor’s which does an ixcellent cappuccino and chocolate croissant, yis…

Oh no! I’ve turned into an African Kiwi.

We take a short cut, I guess, into the hills onto a terrible road that nobody else is taking. It’s my turn to be front left in the sun trap next to the rattliest window, with ample legroom and the jeopardy of Tawanda slamming the door on your feet. There are springboks, baboons, ostriches and mountain zebras (more pony than donkey), eagles in the sky, wilderness and all this useless beauty. The stones spit off the road at our windscreen as we ascend the central Namibian plateau.

A meerkat! “Did you see the meerkat?” I ask the person behind who happens to be Maree. It’s a bit of a running joke. Maree really wants to see a meerkat but wasn’t with us when one was under the table in Damaraland. Every now and then someone asks who’s seen a meerkat and everyone else puts their hands up. Maree didn’t see the meerkat.

We reach Rehoboth about noon, a settlement founded by people of mixed Nama-Dutch descent called Basters. They fled the Boers in the Cape Colony, sided with the Germans and then endured the worst prejudice in the Namibian apartheid years. The road to Windhoek is surfaced and straight.

Lunch is beside the busy roadside under a tree sandwiched between a petrol tanker and razor wire. There are ants and midges.

Windhoek doesn’t look too bad on first impression. It has dual carriageways and roundabouts, it’s hilly, clean and the houses don’t look too bad. We continue down Robert Mugabe Avenue to an oldish German church and there’s a Museum of National Genocide opposite with a statue in front of Sam Nujoma, the founder of Namibia. Gerbils and exotic lizards populate a rock garden. We’re given an hour.

A sign says the toilet is on the 1st floor so we wait for the one lift. It’s on floor 5 and has to go through SG2 and SG1 before getting to ground. We go to the 1st floor. The toilet is in the closed museum. We decide to walk to the 4th floor restaurant, but each floor has five sets of stairs. We wait for the lift which is on floor 5 and going down. Eventually, we get to the restaurant. There’s a cricket match below - terrible fielders. I spy the townships in the distance.

A quick coke and Fanta and it’s time to leave.

Meanwhile, Sybille has her credit card stolen at an ATM but the security guards get it back.

We have a nice room in Fortress Guesthouse, and it has a fridge, which is what excites me most these days. I will summarise the information sheet: do not leave the Guesthouse, ever.

We drive in the tank to Joe’s Beer House, an enormous complex with over 400 covers that channels scrapyard chic. It serves a lot of meat. I have ribs, perhaps.

Never wanted to come to Windhoek anyway. It’s just on the way.