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With Angela not getting any younger, we decided to take a leisurely journey up the mountain and desert region of Namibia to recover from our uncharacteristic burst of exercise on the Orange River canoe trip.
On our travels we’ve met people who have done Botswana and Namibia in 2 weeks and have heard of a guy that did Cairo to Cape Town in 21 days. We won’t be setting any records for our trip (we’ll be back in the UK in 2025 at this rate!) but that’s the point of it, we want to see things and not bypass most of it.
This philosophy means that we get to visit places like the Tiras Berg Conservancy, a collection of farms in, you’ve guessed it, the Tiras mountains, that market themselves as places to enjoy traditional hospitality on working farms and learn about the land, the people, the animals and the plants.
As you drive the gravel road to Tiras Farm, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing alive in this stunningly beautiful 120,000 hectare space. After a tour with host and owner Anita Koch (German South West African) you realise that what looks like straw interspersed with rocks is actually a very rich environment for trees, bushes, succulents and all manner of wildlife from leopard down to golden moles.
Anita takes us to see various Bushmen paintings including a famous but feint outline of a Dutch East India ship, which probably made a change from painting elephants, eland and hunters! Equally exciting was the evidence of their everyday life including flint axes, pottery and grinding tools, some left handed. We learn of the medicinal uses of the plants and hear how liptops (living stones that I used to buy in garden centres in the UK and kill 3 months later due to excessive watering) shed their skin to act as an umbrella against the fierce heat of the sun. You can only but marvel how an area of semi desert has evolved so many species of plants; it is no wonder that most of Anita’s guests seem to be professors of botany.
Anita’s husband Peter, who is re-building a 50 year old Series 1 Landrover in his workshop, spoke to us over afternoon coffee and homemade cakes about the visit of Queen Elizabeth 11 to Namibia and recounted with some annoyance how Namibian state radio described her as Queen Elizabeth the Eleventh, visiting with her husband the Duck of Edinburgh!
On their recommendation (Peter & Anita, not the Queen and the Duck by the way) we visited Kanaan, a farm 70km further north owned by Hermie and Marlene Strauss. The drive to the farm from the main road was a mere 8km of sand track, and you begin to realise the sheer size of the place when Hermie explains that Kanaan is 23km by 10km.
Hermie talks of Namibia needing to mix the old with the new, and you understand what he means when he mentions how he hosts websites for other businesses, bottles and sells the borehole water (now done in Cape Town!), designs and prints T shirts for game lodges, and hosts tourists like us in either the campsite or the 4 bedrooms. The “old” is a different take on the original sheep and cattle farm developed by his grandfather; Hermie has 350 gemsbok, 300 springbok and 120 ostrich, which he sells as meat. We buy some Gemsbok mince and can attest to its flavour as bolognaise.
Apart from the peace & solitude we have come to Kanaan for a sunrise drive to the Namib Desert dunes on the western boundary of the farm and it does not disappoint. The straw colour of the grass and the red of the sand dunes in the early morning sunlight is breathtaking, seeing our first polecat is pleasing and watching numerous peregrine falcons attempting to snack on ground larks is exhilarating.
After Kanaan we headed north on one of the most beautiful roads we’ve ever driven (D707 should you be going to Namibia) to Hammerstein Lodge, where we thought they had electricity in the campsite. They didn’t but we did get the compensation of 2 nights sharing our pitch with 3 young cheetah orphans.
The aah factor wore off a bit when we saw the size of their non retractable claws, and the two small cubs were very keen to chew our chairs. This was ok but when one of them thought about using the tent canvas as a scratching post I had to take action, probably the first and last time I’ll smack a cheetah! Adding to the Dr Doolittle experience was Hans, a somewhat mad Zebra, who came running up to us morning and night to say hello. Fortunately he was on the other side of a fence as we were warned that he liked to bite people.
The lodge also has two caracal (lynx), two full grown cheetahs and a female leopard, all orphans and all caged due to their size. We walked in with the caracals, declined the option of going in with the cheetahs, and kept well away from the leopard fence after hearing that it would go for anything or anyone going near. All this gave me the sort of photo opportunities that would be impossible in the wild.
From Hammerstein it was north again to Sossusvlei, one of the main tourist attractions in Namibia. Sossusvlei is where the Tsauchab River, on the rare occasions it flows with water, dries up in the Namib Desert, blocked on the journey to the sea by huge red sand dunes.
We got up early at Sesriem camp to drive to the romantically named Dune 45, climb it and watch the sunrise. This was not the experience it could have been as there were 2 overlander trucks doing the same thing so we shared the dune with around 50 people. This was a minor inconvenience compared to the other slight problem; it was overcast and drizzling with rain!
Sossusvlei is also best seen in sunshine, who said it never rains in deserts? The compensation was the final 5km drive to the vlei, restricted to 4x4 vehicles due to the deep sand. It was great fun, not least because we passed one Toyota stuck in sand on the way in, and two Toyota tour guide vehicles stuck on the way back. We couldn’t stop to help; we’d have joined them in the sand and in any case Toyota drivers give Landrover drivers so much stick about reliability it was a pleasure to leave them behind!
At Solitaire Guest Lodge campsite, prior to heading for the coast, we meet an American couple Paul and Meg who are taking a year off to do a world trip with their two sons. Unusually for Americans they are keen footballers, shame they support Arsenal! They give us some useful tips about driving in Botswana, our next destination, and we point them in the direction of Hammerstein, as the children are keen to see cheetahs.
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