The flight to Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge was on a tiny six seater Cessna. We arrived at Windhoek’s “little” airport called curiously Eros Airport and met Dion (?) our pilot who grabbed our bags, walked out onto the tarmac and stuffed them in the back of the plane. This sure beats check in at Heathrow. Isabelle got to sit up front with the pilot. The emergency exits are “jump out of the door” and then we bounced out onto the runway and we were off. It was pretty bumpy on the climb out of Windhoek: the stuff they call “turbulence” on large commercial jets isn’t really turbulence, it’s just a mild joggling. My head hit the roof a couple of times.
Dion said that there wasn’t much to see until we got near the end of the one hour flight but the view from 3000 ft was fascinating all the way. Namibia is empty. Really really empty. We flew about 150 miles and saw a couple of very remote farms and a few dirt tracks. The landscape is barren scrub, deep gorges and canyons and forbidding mountains in the distance.
As we flew over the dirt airstrip, we noticed that the whole of the landscape is covered in spots. They are completely barren circular areas between 2m and 10m across devoid of even the desiccated grass that covers the rest of the plains. It turns out that they’re a bit of a mystery. Nobody really knows how they form. There are a number of theories ranging from radioactivity or UFOs to the remnants of a Euphorbia forest which poisoned the ground. The current most likely theory is that they’re related to underground termite activity. The termites secrete a chemical which inhibits the plant growth and so when it rains (once or twice a year) more rain gets to them…or maybe it’s aliens.
The Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge is another C C Africa place and is probably the most beautiful place we’ve been on this trip. The picture on the left is the view that you get sitting on the toilet! There are 10 stone built cabins with glass windows on the side that faces the velt. There’s a waterhole about 50m in front of the main lodge and you sit on the terrace looking out over the Namib desert. The mountain lodge is part of a 110,000 hectare game reserve which joins the Namib Naukluft national park which is one of the largest in Africa. It’s a stretch of land about 150km deep running from Angola down into South Africa and is one of the driest places on earth. At the coast they receive less than 5mm of rain a year and even here more than 120km inland, they only get 80mm of rain a year. It’s really dry here. Most of the land around here used to be sheep farms before it was turned into a conservation area. It is difficult to imagine how the sheep survived in the desert. The dune fields which we will be seeing tomorrow are also huge. Bigger than Belgium!
There will be more about the desert and the dunes in tomorrows blog when we go to see the famous Sossusvlei dunes (some of which are more than 300m high). Trish and I went for a very hot walk up one of the steep hills and we did a game drive with Ronney our guide. There are fewer things to see (obviously) given that the landscape is so harsh but with a bit of practice, we spotted Gemsbok, Springbok, Ostrich and two types of Zebra. The landscape is very deceiving. From a distance, it looks like huge plains of corn but of course, it’s all just a very scrubby rocky land with a few clumps of desiccated grass. When it rains seemingly the whole place turns green although it’s hard to believe looking at it at the moment. However, the guide pointed out that what we see as a very arid environment is actually more grass than they have had in years. There was a lot of rain last year and so the plains are relatively full of grass.
The Namib mountains are incredible. Huge lumps of pre-cambrian red granite which rise out of the yellow plains. The colours particularly at sunset are stunning.
The sky in Namibia is incredibly clear. No moisture and no light scatter makes for very good star gazing and the Mountain Lodge has a small observatory attached to it and a resident astronomer. They have a nice 12 inch reflector telescope that isl GPS and computer enabled so it finds the stars for you. The southern sky is quite different from the northern sky and as I don’t really know my way around very well it was good to have the astronomer to show us the various things. Alpha Centauri (clearly visible as a triple) and a wonderful little open cluster called the Jewel Box with many multi coloured stars in it. We also saw Omega Centauri which looks like a faint smudge to the naked eye but is in fact a huge globular cluster of more than 1,000,000 stars. Finally, we looked at Jupiter with the four Galilean moons strung out around it and, of course, our own moon. With the magnification and power of a 12 inch telescope, you need a filter to stop the moon being too bright. At the terminator line between the dark side and the lit side, we could see the shadows that the mountains cast over the craters.
Up at 5am tomorrow for the trip to the edge of the Namib desert…
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