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Namibia
Namibia Part One
Namibia has been all about the essence of this trip; getting out onto the road and camping under the stars.
We soon left the rain behind us and headed north to the boarder with Namibia. Unfortunately we have not been able to leave the wind behind with the same success as the rain. The wind in Namibia is constant and incredibly dry. It dries out your skin rendering it reptilian in nature, it leaves your lips cracked and sore and worst of all, combined with the fine dust, it leaves the inside of your thighs tender with a severe heat rash that makes walking somewhat difficult to say the least.
You pass by these incredibly tiny towns that don’t even rate a pub but have big brand new tourist information centres and begin to wonder what the attraction of the towns could be – dust, dust and wind, wind and dust. I can see the Namibian Tourism Board’s new slogan now; “Namibia, it leaves a lasting impression like the rash on your inner thighs”.
We camped for a few nights at a giant quiver tree forest. These trees are actually a type of aloe and as a photographer I could have stayed there for weeks with my camera. However we had decided to head back to the canyon as we had found a spot where we could drive down to the bottom of the canyon and camp. We spent two nights at a magical spot surrounded by all sorts of wildlife with only chirping birds and the wind as our sound track. Access is through a farm property, and as the property is about to be sold we will probably be one of the last people to experience this part of the canyon in this way.
On our second day we were just about to head off and explore when on the cliff above us a troop of baboons began to converge. They were determined to head down through our camp but were a little apprehensive of us. Jacinda became a little scared when they began pacing along the cliff and growling at us. I was ok until one decided to flick rocks down at us – he would look for a rock of the appropriate size, flick it over the cliff at us, see that it missed the target and then look for a better rock. I picked up the machete and walked a hundred yards from the camp to a spot where I knew I could climb up at confront our attackers.
I must have scared the crap out of them, cause when they looked around and saw me suddenly only several yards from their vantage point they were off like a dirty shirt (which given all the dust is not an uncommon item of clothing in these parts). They obviously were surprised by how we do things in Australia and will be mindful of machete-wielding Australians for some time to come I suspect (I kind of think it was similar to the scene in Star Wars when Obi Wan scares off the sand people). Speaking of movies, when you wonder around the floor of the canyon, with the wind the only contrast to the silence, it is reminiscent of the opening scenes from the original Planet of the Apes movie. The baboons above our campsite reminded me of the opening scenes of 2001 A Space Odyssey.    
We got there the next morning at dawn and were the only ones there. Having the place to ourselves we were free to wonder, savour and absorb this place. Sand drifts had reclaimed a lot of houses but you got a sense that at the turn of the century this would have been a vibrant and colourful town with beautiful, grand buildings, a rowdiness that money from diamond mining could bring, all contrasted with a bare and barren desert.     
Some smooth talking, persistence and careful interpretations of certain facts secured us a spot on the overflow area of a fully booked campsite. We spoke to an Italian couple who had had similar problems and who basically used this approach at other NWR campsites to good effect.
So this is the end of Namibia Part One. We are currently in Swakomund for a few days stocking up on supplies before hitting the road again for a week or so of camping, which hopefully includes Etosha Game Park among the highlights. Namibia Part Two – Truckasaurus Has a Close Shave I start this chapter fighting to regain control of the car, the rear end sliding out, that feeling of weightlessness as the car teeters on the brink of rollover. I carefully try to correct the slide while taking off some speed thinking this could be the end of our trip. This precarious position started several days before… Several days before we had arrived in Swakopmund, A small coastal town famed as the adventure capital of Namibia. All around are miles of clean white towering sand dunes, just waiting to be conquered by a motorbike. However ‘Swakop’, is fairly cold, misty and windy this time of year. We ended up staying where a few overland trucks were passing through and met Norm and Cheryl from country Victoria. We ended up bumping into them several times over the next week or two as we crossed paths. We decided to do the Welwitschia Drive on our way out of town. Welwitschia are a ‘living fossil’ plant, extremely primitive and some specimens are believed to be around 1500 years old. In contradiction to the usual NWR practice we were actually given a map and some information on the drive, listing all the ‘highlights’ along the way. These included a lookout over sand, a lookout over rocks, and ‘interesting’ varieties of Lichens. The real highlight for us was a sign that signalled the end of the dust further up the road. What we found was 500m of tarmac and then more dust roads. We must have missed the sign saying "end of the end of the dust".
The plants themselves are interesting, if somewhat not worthy of the rough and dusty drive to see them. These roads are slow going and give you time to do many productive activities such as inventing jokes. A zebra has a lot of odd jobs to do around the house so he sees an advert in the local paper for a home handy man. He phones the number and a jackal comes out. The jackal sees that some paving needs to be done so he paves. He notices that some taps drip so he changes the washers. A tree is blocking the driveway so he trims it back. The zebra’s car is running rough so he tunes it up and changes the oil. The zebra comes out and is very impressed and says to the Jackal "you can fix anything, you are a Jakal-of-all-trades". We camped the night at Spitzkoppe. A truly beautiful place that had Jacinda spooked. She was adamant that she could hear several wild cats of some description and many pigs. Close investigation by yours truly – this time without machete in hand - revealed the wild cats and pigs to be the call of various birds. After dinner we partook in star gazing as this part of the world has an amazing view of our galaxy. The stars were so clear they were not points of light, but rather clouds of light. The next day we headed towards Twyfelfontein, which means doubtful spring, to see the rock carvings. The roads out of Spitzkoppe began to deteriorate. They were heavily corrugated, twisty, the camber of most corners are set opposite to what they should be and they are riddled with patches of soft sand. The corrugations hammer your tyres. No matter what pressure you set them to they will always overheat. When warm they should only increase in pressure by two to three psi. I was constantly getting around an 8psi increase and so kept inflating them. This combined with all the weight that we were carrying in the back meant that the steering became very light – a possible recipe for disaster. A giraffe comes home from school. Dad says to him "how was school" and he replies "not good I got expelled". Dad asked him what happened. Well, I was standing around the school water hole when a group of lions began to pick on an impala. I stepped in and told them to pick on someone their own size. They began to growl and roar and a teacher came down and thought I started it. I got sent to the principal and was expelled. Dad giraffe turned to his son and said "I thought I told you not to stick your neck out for anyone". We came over this hill that suddenly veered and dropped away, the camber of the road ran the opposite way and the corrugations grabbed one side of the car while the soft sand the other. Suddenly before I knew it there was severe under-steer, the back end then lost traction and slid out. We could both feel the car become almost weightless and get dangerously sideways. A rollover was only one small mistake away. Careful not to overcorrect the steering and compound our problems I gently fought for control, regained it and had no option but to run off the road into the bush to bleed off some speed. Dodging rocks, trees and a fence we managed to regain full control and make a somewhat graceful, well relatively graceful compared to how we left the road, return onto the road. Our trip was a fleeting heartbeat from ending right there. We stopped the car to survey the tyre marks and an incredibly strong craving for a cold beer swept over us. We decided to settle for a coffee instead as the beers in the fridge would probably be a little shaken if our nerves were any indication. Tyre pressures were dropped back somewhat as I figured that additional tyre wear would be a better alternative to vague steering. Looking back it was one of those things where a lot of things conspired to get us unstuck. We just hit a bad part of the road at a bad time with a slightly bad line. We had dropped our speed back considerably on this stretch of road, and even halving it again might not guarantee avoidance of the situation.
A lion, a leopard and a zebra were playing poker. There was a fair pot of money in the middle. The zebra shows his hand, he has two kings. The lion smiles, he puts down four queens and begins to reach for the money, when the leopard grabs the lion’s paw and says "not so fast Leo". He puts down five aces and smiles. The lion roars and turns to the leopard and says, "You are a blasted cheetah". We were on our way to Etosha NP. We had tried to book through the NWR office but had no response. We checked our emails an hour from Etosha to find that we had received confirmation of our booking. Talk about cutting things fine. At least we did not have to bluff our way in this time. The wildlife in Etosha this time of year is concentrated around the water holes, making wildlife spotting fairly productive, along with the joke telling of course. We saw black rhino, giraffe, impala, lion, elephant, wilder beast, zebra, kudu, oryx, among a few dozen different animals spotted. The water hole at Halali camp is floodlit and we were treated to some thirty elephants converging there at once on our first night.
We had gotten into the habit of leaving our shoes at the base of the ladder for our tent at night while we slept. During the night a honey badger comes through and decided to steal one of my shoes. By the time I get out of the tent and down the ladder he had taken off into the night with my shoe. Once the sun came up I found my shoe a few hundred metres away. We now hook our shoes several feet off the ground on the ladder when we go to sleep. Halali camp has so far the best showers in Africa and the next camp up the road, Namutomi has easily the worst, although it is in the middle of serious renovations. Still an award is an award at Namutomi gets the prize for the worst showers. We hope to put some video on the website of some of the wildlife to give people an indication of how much traffic some of these waterholes get. The profusion of wildlife and the variety of animals drinking at once is something special. Seeing African animals in the wild is something so special that no zoo could ever come close to recreating it. While we were there a German film crew was filming and interviewing, we suspect for their version of Getaway. We heard them say "just past this car (Truckasaurus) you can see…" so we hope that we might be on German TV in the coming months. Speaking of Germans, there are hundreds of them touring around Namibia. We were told that two thirds of foreign visitors (outside Africa) to Namibia were German and the numbers we saw seemed to support this. I joked with one German family camped next to us that I didn’t think that there would be anyone left in Germany; they were all on holidays in Namibia. They laughed at first and then got a little worried as they thought about it and realised I was probably right. Were the streets back home deserted? Were the few remaining people left in Germany looting the streets? Was their house safe? An impala is blind and wants to cross the road but can’t because of the traffic. A lion seeing an opportunity for a quick meal goes up and offers to help. "Who are you?" asks the impala. "I am a zebra," says the lion. The impala sniffs the air and says, "no you’re not, I don’t know who you are but I can tell that you are a lion to me". We are currently in Windhoek stocking up on a few supplies before heading up to the Caprivi Strip and then Botswana and then onto Victoria Falls. Things are starting to run pretty smoothly with Team Truckasaurus. Jacinda is doing a stirling job at navigating, complimenting the GPS. We are pretty quick at setting up the tent and packing it down and camp cooking has been simplified allowing more time for other things. We are constantly stopped by people who want to know about our car and feel compelled to take photos of it. The Cooper tyres are holding up incredibly well considering the state of the back roads and the abuse they have copped. They have very few chips out of them, which I find surprising, and they usually grip the roads very well. They are a great dirt-road tyre. We were expecting our little journey off road near Spitzkoppe to have at least destroyed one tyre, but they came out without a scratch. We have seen a lot of shredded tyres by the side of the road in Namibia and are thankful at how well ours are holding up. They actually perform quite well on the bitumen as well. I would recommend these tyres to anyone who needs a good strong dirt tyre. We will review some of our other gear in the coming few months to give you a real world account of how they perform. Our fuel economy has been surprisingly good. We have been hammered by a combination of strong head winds, large hills and corrugations that greatly increase a tyres rolling resistance and therefore fuel consumption. Given the amount of weight we are carrying and the drag from the roof rack, tent, spare tyre and water tank, we have done well. Our worst fuel economy was 6.7km/L (30km/h+ head winds and hills/mountain passes) and our best has been 8.4km/L which was achieved on 50% tar and 50% off road low speed driving through Etosha. Since leaving Cape Town we have travelled nearly 5000km (6000km by the time this is posted) and our only casualty so far has been two stone chips in the front windscreen (repaired in Windhoek) and the loss of our rear diff guard. This was a victim of the corrugations. They vibrated the top plate off the guard (I should have used some thread lock glue) allowing the rest to vibrate resulting in half of what was left developing a stress fracture in the steel and falling off somewhere along the way. I have learnt to check the oil filters every few days as well. These can vibrate lose and seep oil, another victim of the corrugations. I am now in the habit of popping the bonnet every few days to make sure all is secure. It sounds like overkill, but over here you need to do it. As I write this we are preparing to head to the Caprivi Strip in northern Namibia. We have found what looks to be a nice camp site right on the river, so if the bugs are not too bad we should have a nice few days (they have a floating fenced pool in the river so we should be safe from crocs and hippos when we go for a swim). We then head to Botswana, the Okavango Delta, and more wild life before we cross into Zambia and see the Victoria Falls – from the Zambian side, not the Zimbabwe side of course. We read an article in a local paper that Zim now has inflation at 7000% (no that’s not a typo) and unemployment is around 80%. This effectively means that if you buy a beer, by the time you finish it and are ready to order one, the price of your second beer is higher than your first one.
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