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…

We had to get up “hideously” early to get to Cape Town International at 6am.  The airport at Cape Town is a pretty big airport and nicely appointed but there were only 7 flights leaving all day.  Odd.

One of the flights was ours to Windhoek in Namibia.  Landing at Windhoek was an surreal experience because you fly over completely featureless scrub with absolutely no sign of human habitation or even roads.  You get closer and closer to the scrub until…bing, there’s the runway and you land.  The airport is about the size of, say, Inverness airport.   It’s also strange that it’s about 45km from the city.  Why put your airport that far away from the city when there’s 45km of featureless scrub which is closer to the city?  Maybe the Windhoek town planners are planning for a massive expansion of Windhoek into the Tokyo of Africa…

We’re at the Olive Grove Guest House which is a rather trendy place on City Hill.  Windhoek isn’t large but the really strange thing about it is that almost all of it that we’ve seen looks like southern California.  Fabulous houses behind high walls topped by electrified fences.  All the hills that surround Windhoek seem to be covered in these mansions.  Who owns them?  No idea.  There’s a lot of money here for reasons which aren’t obvious.  According to the excellent Wikipedia article on Namibia (gosh I love the Wikipedia) Namibia has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.  Looks like all the wealth is in Windhoek and there are a lot of very very poor people everywhere else. Namibia only became independent from South Africa in 1990 and one presumes that there was some influence of the South African government on the development of the country.  English, Afrikaans and German are the three languages that you see on every sign:  a remnant of the German occupation in in the 19th century.
We walked into the center of town along streets called things like Promenadeweg, Johannes Strasse and Robert Mugabe Avenue:  it’s a weird mix.  Once again, it just felt like a very prosperous suburb of L.A.  The center of Windhoek is also very prosperous and compared to Cape Town, the majority of people buying things in the fancy shops are black. 

Kudu on the menu tonight and then we’re flying into the bush to Sossusvlei.  Very unlikely to have Internet connection there so the postcards won’t arrive until we stop over for a couple of hours in Johannesburg.

One of the most widely spoken languages in South Africa is Xhosa or <click>’hosa.  If you click here, you can hear it said.  Xhosa imported a number of “click” sounds from the language of the Khoisan which is called !Xóõ.  This language is remarkable in that it has more phonemes than any other.  There are 83 different click sounds alone.  The Bantu speakers who displaced the Khoisan imported a few of these clicks into <click>hosa and it’s very arresting to hear these phonemes used by English speakers since you never hear them in any European languages.

Another set of photographs have been uploaded for your enjoyment.  These are the photographs from Cape Town and Grootbos.  Not quite so many this time you’ll be glad to know.

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Back to Cape Town and stay at the Cape Grace.  Packed for Namibia tomorrow.  A quiet nothing day.