Sand dunes at Dead Vlei

Dear Readers, Namibia is a country with a wide range of diverse landscapes. To the north and west, it’s all about sand – the red dunes of Sossusvlei and the yellow dunes at Swakopmund. Inland there’s the Etosha national park, with acacia forests and ephemeral rivers and lakes. You can bake on the sand dunes, where the temperature is sometimes in the high 40s, or shiver in the damp of a coastal sea fog.

Namibia is one of the most sparsely-populated countries in the world – there are only 3 million people, giving it a density of less than 4 people per square kilometre. You can travel for hours without seeing another person. It also has the lowest rainfall of any country in sub-Saharan Africa. We were in the country at the beginning of the rainy season and saw two massive thunderstorms – I’ve never seen storms as impressive as those of southern Africa. But it is hard to take advantage of these downpours. We saw a fair amount of solar panels, and electricity is more reliable than in South Africa, where ‘load-shedding’ creates all sorts of problems for the people who live there.

Namibian Flag

Namibia was colonised by the Germans from 1884 to 1920, and their massacre of the local Herero and Nama people is considered to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. After the First World War, the country was handed over to South Africa, who applied the same apartheid regime that was used in South Africa itself. In 1991, Namibia gained its independence, and in 1994 the South Africans pulled out from the last remaining military base and port at Walvis Bay. Today, the country is considered to be a stable democracy but has extreme levels of inequality, with more than 400,000 people living in ‘informal housing’ aka shanty towns. Tribal people move into the towns in search of work, and some find employment in tourist areas – two Bushmen helped move our luggage at great speed when we were in Etosha, and there are often people looking for a few dollars at petrol stations and shopping centres.

Interestingly, while English is spoken widely, Afrikaans is the true lingua franca, spoken by both white and black people. One of our local guides spoke the ‘click’ language !Kung, which was fascinating to hear, and there are 11 recognised official languages. Our guides, Hano and Andrew, were both white Namibians, but they had good relationships with all the black guides and staff at the many places where we stopped, and were happy to bow to other people’s expertise. Namibia has recently gained its first ever woman president, and the people that we spoke to seemed optimistic that she would be able to address the issues around inequality, corruption and infrastructure that dog the country. I hope that they’re right!

The Chinese have been heavily involved in Namibia, as they have in many other parts of Africa – they seem to understand that virtues of ‘soft power’ in a way that the US and the UK have forgotten. There are a number of. major roads that have been built with Chinese help, and our plane from Windhoek to Johannesburg had lettering in English and Chinese. Namibia is rich in copper, uranium, diamonds and other resources, and offshore oil was discovered recently. Tourism accounts for about 15 percent of Namibia’s income, but trophy hunting accounts for about 14 percent of ‘tourism’ – many game parks are set up to allow people to shoot species such as various antelope, black rhino, lions and leopards and even ‘problem’ elephants. Driving around the country you can see the high ‘game fences’ which keep animals in, and the lower cattle fences which keep the cows in the ‘fields’. These also stop animals from moving about, which has resulted in some areas being inaccessible to elephants, the ecosystem engineers of the country. Andrew pointed out fields which had been completely taken over by acacia trees, which the cattle can’t eat – these would previously have been kept under control by elephants and other large grazing animals.

Acacia with oryx/gemsbok

So, we arrived in Windhoek on 5th November (after an overnight flight to Johannesburg and a two-hour flight to Windhoek), and, after an overnight stay at a very pleasant lodge where we could watch the weaver birds, we headed off towards the red desert at Sossusvlei. There were sixteen of us, plus guides, from all walks of life – a coroner, some teachers, someone with a PhD in plant ecology (hooray!), a catering manager, two farmers, a breeder of Fell Ponies, two people from Yorkshire, and lots of others besides. We had two land cruisers between us, and we were raring to go. So, tomorrow, let’s head off into the sand dunes and see what we can find….

Southern Masked Weavers outside the door (the dangling nests protect them from snakes)