Last Saturday I started my three week overland tour that will take me through Namibia, Botswana to Victoria Falls. I am travelling with twenty five others on a converted lorry which has a comfortable bus like interior with large storage areas underneath for all the camping kit. We have a Kenyan driver and cook while our tour leader is an Austrailan woman who seems to spend her entire life on the road. We first travelled up through South Africa camping the first night amongst orange groves. As we headed north, the towns became smaller and the countryside wilder, bare flat topped mountains and scrub like vegetation. Our second night was spent on the banks of the Orange river and the border of South Africa and Namibia.
Namibia is a wild, empty place. In the last few days we have only passed through a few tiny towns which are surrounded by vast expances of nothing. The few people you see look distinctivily different, wide faces and narrow eyes to cope with the bright landscape; they also speak the distinctive 'click' language. In the first few days seeing Sprinkbok and Ostriches from the bus was quite a thrill, by the end of the week they were so common hardly anyone bothers to look anymore.
Towards the end of the week we arrived at Sesriem, a village on the edge of the Namib Naukluft National Park. This park is famous for it's large sand dunes which strech 55 km inland and which we explored with a local guide. He showed us where the animals lived (under the sand) and told us how the orginal San people survived in the desert. We climbed to the top of one large dune to watch the sunset, the sand is a beautiful orange colour due to it's high iron content.
We have now reached the coast and are in the resort town of Swakopmund. This is a German town, in fact the Germans in our group think it is more German than the real thing. All the shop signs are in English and German and German is heard everywhere. It's quite a pleasant place to recharge the batteries and to have luxuries like sleeping in a bed and eating food off a table, before we head off into the wilderness again.
In the next week we will head up to the north of Namibia and the Etosha National Park.
