Namibia 2000
Namibia
By Tristan Cooper
Travelling by overlander truck through some of Africa’s most striking landscapes is an experience that will surely stay with all those intrepid souls who try it.
“Overlander”? What’s that?
Although they vary in terms of comfort and sophistication, overlander trucks are all built to the same basic scheme. Based on a substantial truck chassis, the vehicle comprises seating for perhaps 15 to 30 people and storage space for tents, provisions, cooking gear, food, water and backpacks. If you’re lucky, it will have a fridge – ours did but it didn’t work, so chunks of ice were a regular purchase. If you’ve booked one of the more upmarket trucks, it will have decent seats, as ours did, rather than the wooden slatted variety.
Your crew, driver and guide, know all the good places to get provisions along the way and in 5 weeks and 5,000 miles of travel, we never went hungry. We passengers were split into cook groups, usually of two people each and never two who were sharing a tent. If you share a tent you’ll probably share any bug that your partner gets, in which case, bangs goes a cook group. Each cook group will do 3 meals in a row and then the next takes over. Meanwhile, everyone mucks in with assembling tables, washing up, stowage and whatever. The entire group, which started as a disparate bunch of strangers, melds into a cohesive and self-sufficient whole. Friendships are made for life.
All in all, overlanding is a terrific way to travel if you’re prepared to take the world as you find it. Can’t live without a hot shower? You don’t have to: every campsite we visited had showers, basins, a bar, shop and friendly and knowledgable staff. Bedding down last thing at night, torch in hand, remembering that nights can get pretty chilly, thinking that there is nothing but a thin layer of canvas between you and those hyena/lions/hippo that you can hear…memorable? Just a lot.
Namibia is mostly desert, one way or another. Entering from Botswana, you would traverse the great Kalahari desert. What images does that name conjure for you? A great yellow and brown expanse, sparsely populated with scrub, some trees, diminutive and wiry San bushmen tracking game, intense heat, dust and rock. A major desert, not to be trifled with.
Once through the Kalahari, you’ll encounter more desert, heading west towards the Skeleton coast, the terrain is a stark and intense white with striking streaks of black where the lighter layers have blown off. A barren landscape where little survives but for the occasional Welwichia plant, some tens or even hundreds of years old.
Then to the dunes of the Skeleton Coast itself. Great mounds that hide the ocean from your view. Dunes high enough to make sand boarding viable if you have the stamina to climb them, no drag lifts here!
Heading south from central Namibia you reach the Namib. The oldest desert in the world. Surprisingly flat plains with a faint down of yellow or even green vegetation growing in this barren land, then huge intensely orange/red dunes soar skywards challenging your skills to climb them and photograph them. Here you will experience flaming sunsets that set the sky ablaze as the cirrus clouds challenge the dunes for intensity of colour; all too briefly as the sun plunges into the night.
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