Lost in the North

Whether we were reluctant to leave the south or whether our plans really were getting more difficult it is hard to say. The sites we had chosen to see around Cape Cross were the Messum Crater, Brandberg Mountain and Rock Paintings and then up north on the Skeleton Coast. If you look at all these on the map it doesn´t seem hard…until you realise you are a little short of roads!

Initially unaware of this, we left the misty, rather eery Cape Cross and the sleeping, fighting seals and headed east to Messum Crater.

We had secured our permit the day before from the seal colony reception area and were keen to be heading back into the clear, warm skies inland.

Messum Crater is a natural phenomenon, not caused by a meteorite but rather created by shifting rocks and mountains. It´s vast and the dirt road traverses the desert plains with numerous tracks criss-crossing around. With no obvious landmarks to the untrained eye, it is very hard to keep track of which way you´re going and where you´ve been.

Most people go with a guide. We chose to go it alone.

At first things went very well. Most of the spiral of trails led in broadly the same direction and our sat nav was very clear on where the crater was.

We found a large number of Welwitschia plants enroute

I´ve never seen so many in such a short space of time before as they only tend to grow in remote and barren regions

It was early in the morning and the colourful mountains looked stunning in the sunrise as the clouds slowly burnt off.

The crater itself was beautiful

And seemingly unending

There was no internet out here. There was little of anything at all and we certainly didn´t expect to see anyone else, even if we had stayed a week.

Our route onwards from the crater itself to the salt pans and then back to the coast was mapped out only by a photograph I had taken on my IPhone from the Namibian Wildlife Authority´s website….

Perhaps not the most detailed planning we had ever done!

We made it to the salt pans, we were rocking and rolling. But then to get out we had to head north to the dry river bed and turn west to the coast. Here was where it started to go a bit wrong.

We followed the track but it split and split again. We tried to head north but which way was north? Any of this could be the river bed, was it time to turn yet? We decided to keep on what looked like the most used trail but none of these had been used for a very long time.

Our sat nav couldn´t help, it was spinning around unsure where anything was. In the end we stopped and tried to calm our nerves – there was no point driving deeper and deeper into the unknown.

After a couple of deep breaths we managed to set the sat nav to point north. We zoomed out to see where the coast was. We had been heading in entirely the wrong direction, driving further away from civilisation and into the area where the guide at the Cape Cross Lodge had warned the tracks were dangerous.

We turned round and slowly picked our way west. The track barely existed but what other choice did we have? The mirages in the distance were like something out of a movie and you could easily imagine how sailors ship-wrecked on the skeleton coast trying to make their way through this landscape lost all hope.

Eventually the track started to get wider and looked more used. And finally the sat nav picked us up and found a route to Mile 108, a fishing area on the coast just north of Cape Cross. We were 46km away. The relief was palpable. James mentioned, not for the first time, that we need to stop doing things like this!

Our plan had been to head north east from there to Brandberg Mountain and camp up for the night, but when we set the sat nav for the mountain it told us to turn south rather than north. We tutted, was it playing up again? Google was useless with no internet coverage but Maps.me said the same thing – go south. We got our paper maps out to investigate and found to our dismay that there were no roads to Brandberg Mountain from here apart from the one going back – not just to Cape Cross but all the way to Henties Bay!

It was a 3 hour journey. We were more than a little annoyed. Our exciting day had just become an awful lot longer and we hadn´t planned on visiting Henties Bay again…ever!

But we´re not the sort to let these little frustrations get in the way – we took the opportunity to stock up on food and fuel in the town and were approaching Brandberg Mountain by early evening.

The campsite we had chosen was the Elephant Rock Community Campsite. It had good reviews but, more to the point, supporting community campsites seems much better than always staying in privately owned places.

As we approached it seemed deserted, in fact we almost drove straight past without seeing it. We pulled in and someone came slowly wandering up to see us. He looked decidedly stoned! He stood smiling benignly at me, agreeing with everything I said but making no attempt to register us or take any money.

Another man was heading towards us from a distance. The first man seemed far more concerned by telling me this was his friend coming to see us than he was sorting us out with a pitch. I was a little unnerved.

But finally the toilets and showers were pointed out, we were told to find any pitch we wanted and waved absently away.

The campsite itself was lovely, we had a perfect view of the mountain and were the only ones there.

But we decided it would be best to lock to doors before going to bed that night just in case, and we weren´t going to hang around the next morning.

That evening a little grey cat came up to us and mewed sweetly, rolling on his back. Local cats are not uncommon round here but friendly ones very much are. I called to him and put my hand out. To my surprise he ran up to me and was happy to have a cuddle. Before long he was sitting on my knee purring contentedly and was my best friend after I´d made him a cat bowl out of an empty packet of cheese straws and given him some cream.

Maybe this campsite wasn´t so bad afterall!

The next morning I was up before 6am and was rewarded by a gorgeous sunrise over the mountain.

The cat came running up to me as soon as I climbed out of Henry. He settled himself into my flip flops to watch me train and nibbled at my toes as I was doing my stretches. For this he was rewarded with a bowl of milk.

Shortly afterwards one of the campsite guys came up to see if everything was ok and ask if we wanted hot water. I asked him the cat´s name and was told he was called Roxy. He then told me Roxy was the father of 3 kittens….uh oh!

He went off to get the kittens and brought them back for me.

The cat-mom came too, along with a little dog and it was clear that these animals were very much loved and cared for. We chatted to both the guys for ages about all sorts. My view on these two people was changing rapidly. I realised that my first impression had not just been slightly off but, in fact, could not have been more wrong.

We decided to stay another night and settled in for a relaxing day drafting the next blog, sorting photos and playing with Roxy.

James, as ever, did some maintenance on Henry and at one point I looked up from the laptop and was amused to find two pairs of legs sticking out from underneath. Everyone around here is keen to help, or at very least have a nose around the ´beautiful car´!

In the evening, as the sun cooled, I walked up the mountain a little way to see the Elephant Rock with one of the guys whose name I now knew was Kennedy.

The rock looked amazingly like an elephant!

The second set of rocks was supposed to be two elephants together but wasn´t quite so convincing.

And I saw my first snake! There are surely snakes everywhere wherever we stay but they keep themselves to themselves and are rarely seen. This one was very small but made me jump as it slithered past my foot and disappeared into the undergrowth.

When we got back to the campsite James was chatting to the other guy, whose name we never found out. We sat around discussing everything from family life amongst the different tribes, to the work Kennedy was diligently and carefully doing on the campsite garden to the fact that our names were apparently like ´names from the movies´!

We had steak that evening, shared with Roxy and the cat-mom who was so thin we gave her extra portions.

And the next morning they got a whole chicken breast and most of our remaining milk.

Roxy thanked me by sitting on my feet whilst I tried to train!

We were sad to leave, our view of this place had turned entirely on its head. These guys were caring, thoughtful, hard working and kind. They made us smile sporting their matching pink and blue sunglasses and trendy hats, of which they were incredibly proud!

We gave them generous tips and in return they gave us two small amethysts.

We drove around to the other side of the mountain and stopped at the White Lady Rock Paintings. World famous apparently and it cost quite a bit to pay for a guide to take us the hour-long walk up the mountain to see it.

The walk was interesting, although it was very hot with no shade and, whilst I´m not one to disrespect these historic sites, I wasn´t quite sure what all the fuss was about. The White Lady isn´t a white person and isn´t a lady, apparently the French archaeologist who made it famous got it wrong! It´s just a picture of a local Shaman.

We spent that afternoon delivering a parcel for our guide to the nearest town of Uis, stocking up on food and fuel and failing to find a campsite! We ended up driving all the way back to the mountain and checking into a beautiful campsite only 5 minutes down the road from where we had started. But at least a little girl had her parcel and gifts for her Christmas party!

Another little cat came to visit the next morning but he was no Roxy! He was nervous and distant although very pretty.

And as we drove back to reception to check-out we saw our first meercat of the trip.

Sadly, our Groundhog Day circling around Henties Bay was not done with us! In order to get north to the Skeleton Coast we had to go south back round Henties Bay yet again.

Around this part of the country we had noticed a large number of road-side stalls, most of which were unmanned but which had wonderful figures around them – whether to make them look inhabited or just to attract tourists we weren´t sure.

Some were very creative!

We planned to stop for another lovely lunch at the Misty Bay Café in Henties Bay but when we made a stop to stretch our legs half way we found Henry´s back door hadn´t been shut properly and the whole inside was covered in dust – just a day after James had spent 2 hours cleaning it. Tempers were frayed and we were in no mood for lunch. We stayed hungry and gloomily pressed on all the way back to Cape Cross and the lodge where we had started nearly a week ago.

The life of a nomad, bumming around the world, seems idyllic to many people with nothing to worry about and no-one to answer to. And to a large extent it is, we know how lucky we are and try to make the most of every day.

But easy and stress-free it is not. Sometimes you just get bone-achingly tired, fed-up of never knowing your surroundings and frustrated with the problems life constantly throws at you – especially when your home is a notoriously high-maintenance Landrover! It doesn’t matter how compatible two people are, sharing all the ups and downs of life all the time with no support and never having any space from each other can strain even the best of relationships.

And so it was at Cape Cross Lodge when we arrived back.

We had driven the long road through Henties Bay three times and felt like we had got nowhere. The weather was cold, damp and overcast. Henry was full of sand and one of his wheel bearing seals was leaking yet again – to add to the diesel leak under the bonnet and the swivel seal leaking on the front wheel. We were both feeling down so were unable to cheer each other up. We kept out of each other´s way for the rest of the day – me working on the laptop in the lounge area of the lodge and James replacing Henry´s seal at the campsite. Sometimes you just need to give each other the space to be grumpy.

The next day we were due to drive the Skeleton Coast. We had done it on our honeymoon and really enjoyed it – the eery, misty atmosphere, the wrecks, the remoteness – so it was supposed to be a highlight. Plus it meant we were finally moving on from this area and making progress into the north. It seemed a shame that the day we finally had to get going was a day when we were feeling so down.

But it didn´t last long. We were up early to get to the gate just after it opened and make sure we had plenty of time to see everything before having to exit at the other end before 5pm. The gate looked familiar, James posed for the same photo we took on our honeymoon!

But this time it looked a bit more run-down, one of the gates had fallen off and it was all rusting a little.

Undeterred we set off into the national park to the first shipwreck. The Benguela.

Wrecked in 1976, it has been slowly eroded by the sand, sea and wind for the last 45 years and it won´t be long before this one disappears altogether like so many of the others

As we drove on I caught site of a huge whale bone in the distance by the sea-line. We parked up and walked over to take a look.

As we walked across the beach we saw evidence of plenty of other victims of this harsh, unforgiving environment.

We also saw fresh lion tracks so went back to the safety of Henry before we got ourselves into any more trouble!

We passed the old oil rig which has fallen even further since we last saw it and looks strangely beautiful in its twisted, rusting way

There were four or five jackal loitering around, including some cubs hiding under the structure. Somehow I find the image of a lone jackal wandering through windswept sand makes a place look even more desolate.

There were no other wrecks in this part of the national park, most have been washed away or eroded to nothing. It was a little disappointing but we made it as far as Torra Bay for the first time and here things really started to feel remote and untouched.

Technically, you need a guide to go beyond Torra Bay as the Skeleton Coast further north gets very difficult and dangerous. But there was a wreck marked on the map further up, between Torra Bay and Terrace Bay and we had seen so little we wondered what harm it would do to carry on the 30km up the coast to take a look – if we had booked into the Terrace Bay camp we could have driven all the way there so we assumed it would be ok for us to do so anyway.

I´m glad we did as the whole place started to have that other-worldly feel about it that we so enjoyed last time but had seemed missing this time. The wreck wasn´t visible but we enjoyed the journey.

On the way back we got caught in a small sand storm. I clambered out of the car with my camera, covering my face with one hand and the camera with the other as stinging sand swept across from the dunes. I took a few photos trying to capture the drama of the storm but the end result simply looks like I forgot to focus properly!

After about half an hour we were back at Torra Bay and turned inland towards the exit gate. It was only lunchtime and the drive had not been as exciting and mysterious as we remembered but the extra few miles beyond Torra Bay had made it worthwhile.

We were on our way inland again into Damaraland – home of the UNESCO Twyfelfontein Rock Engravings and the Desert Elephants. The landscape was stunning as we headed towards the Etendeka Mountain range.

We were firmly in the north now with hot, steamy weather to look forward to, especially as we were now well into the hot, wet, summer months. We had a lot to see and do yet in this country and I started to realise that, despite having nearly three months on this leg of the journey we were actually running out of time! If we were going to get the north done before the rains set in we would need to get a move on….