Text and photographs by Yvette Cardozo
Vol. 13. No. 6
Running a few steps, I launched myself onto a waxed Formica snowboard which sent me plummeting into a screaming freefall down a huge sand dune. In Namibia, sandboarding, on your stomach, or for the more expert, on your feet, is huge.
You would expect this southwestern African country, made famous by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, to offer safari viewing typical of the usual Africa experience … elephants, giraffes, lions, zebras. I never considered that it could be considered the adventure capital of the continent-complete with crazy adrenaline-washed visitors sliding down sand dunes on snowboards, traversing or sidehilling on ATVs, camel trekking, parasailing…. Oh yes, and even hugging a three hundred pound seal.
Yes, the animals are there, but we’ll get to them later.
In Swakopmund, a seaport town midway up the coast of Namibia, a sandboarding day starts on four wheel ATVs, or quadbikes. It’s one thing to drive along sand dunes in a Jeep. Try surfing down the middle of them on a motorbike, floating through a sea of frozen golden waves. If you’ve been on a snowmobile, you know how this works … a bit of body English, a lot of gas, a ton of flying … well in this case not snow, but sand.
At the base of a two hundred foot dune, you pick up your “board” — a three-foot length of brown, construction grade Formica, rough on one side, polished smooth with floor wax on the other — and trudge up to a knife edge ridge. Up top, you flop across the board and head down, though if you’re chicken like me, you’ll drag your toes. That not only keeps your speed down, it lets you actually control your direction. Sort of.
Yeah, the sand gets in EVERY thing. Yeah, you will be knocking it out of your clothing, shoes and body parts for days. Yeah, it’s a raging rush.
And the seal? That was a whole different experience, as was Tommy, the safari guy with the lizard dangling from his thumb.
The seal’s name is Robbie. He greets tour boats regularly, happily letting people pet him and, if you don’t mind, joyfully nuzzling back. We took off in a small tour boat just after dawn and fifteen minutes from the dock Robbie showed up, sitting on the back platform, his large wet eyes expectant.
Captain Walt held up a fish and Robbie wiggled aboard, where he sat patiently while everyone fed and petted him. He was followed by snow white pelicans, with glowing orange beaks, then formations of cormorants…hundreds of them, and finally schools of dolphins. And for us, eventually, plates of incredibly fresh local oysters to eat.
Namibia varies dramatically from other areas in Africa. Originally, this wide expanse of desert, the size of Oklahoma and Texas combined, belonged to South Africa. It won independence in 1990. Its acres of sand, scrub, golden grass and mines are resources for everything from gold and diamonds to uranium. But above all, it is part of the Namib, the oldest living desert on Earth.
Its thirty years of German colonial history is displayed in the ornate architecture of a few small towns that are home to the majority of Namibia’s two million population. While mining is the top income producer, tourism is becoming a close second. The 250,000 yearly visitors here are a fraction of the million Kenya can get in a good year. You can drive all day along the endless miles of gravel road and not see another car.
Our afternoon was spent on the dunes with Tommy Collard, who runs what he calls his “Living Desert Tour.” Tommy is straight out of Indiana Jones central casting … safari shorts, wide brimmed Aussie hat, bare feet and an instinct for desert life that can only be described as amazing.
We head towards the dunes, the Land Rover planing weightlessly like a boat on water. Suddenly, Tommy leaped out of the car, dug through the sand and came up with … well, an assortment of wriggling stuff. The best was the sand-diving lizard, which latched onto his thumb.
But our real experience with the dunes came at Sossusvlei to the south. The sand here is made of powdered quartz and other minerals. The more the quartz oxidizes, the redder the sand becomes. Sossusvlei’s sand is blood red.
Sossus Dune Lodge, a line of tastefully simple but upscale cabins, is set against a low row of hills just minutes from the best of the dunes.
In early dawn light, the dunes … sixty miles deep, 600 miles long, 1,300 feet high … were an incredible swirl of colored patterns that outlined the sculpted lines of the sand. At dawn, the light crept up the sand, turning the beige a vibrant salmon. An endless blanket of yellow grass glowed and people atop the dunes cast pencil thin shadows in a montage of angles and lines.
Our host, Hilmar Tonnemacher of Abenteuer Afrika Safari introduced us that afternoon with the first of what was to become many sundown celebrations. We stood in the middle of the desert, dunes on one side, mountains on the other, as the setting sun reflected in our glasses of champagne.
But that was nothing compared to the surprise he had for us at the coast just outside Swakopmund. After bouncing along a desert track for twenty minutes, we arrived at a ridge overlooking a wall of glittering lights covering the sides of a narrow canyon. Hilmar’s staff had spent hours setting up hundreds of luminaria candles in paper bags. Dinner was waiting in a small courtyard ringed with reed fencing.
Slowly, we began to relax and understand…. “In Namibia, nature reaches out and touches you, Hilmar had said.” It’s subtle. You might not feel it the first day but it will make you feel well and happy.”
Hilmar has a talent for displaying this sort of thing. It was his company that hosted Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for seventy days. In fact, he threw this same dinner for them. For all I knew, my bum was resting on the very chair Angeline Jolie had used.
From Swakopmund, we flew by private plane to Etosha, Namibia’s great wildlife reserve where herds of elephants and giraffes silhouette against a blood red setting sun, jackals skulk near waterholes, and rhino and buffalo and herds of springbok wander past your camera’s viewfinder.
Etosha is the location of Okaukuejo Premier Waterhole Chalets, the largest of Namibia Wildlife Resorts’ safari lodges.
The Namibia Wildlife Resorts story is a bit of wonder. In 2005, Namibia safari lodges looked like 1960 holdovers from US budget motels…plastic furniture, mattresses on wood platforms, walls of peeling paint.
Some $17 million US and a lot of work later, the lodges have been completely renovated into upscale accommodations that could be featured in the pages of a slick architectural magazine … simple, elegant decor with beds romantically covered in soft pillows, duvets and white gauze mosquito netting, marble floors, tasteful African art.
Okaukuejo gets its name, “Premier Waterhole,” honestly. The animal gathering at the resort’s waterhole, just yards from our chalet, was nothing less than amazing. The animals moved in at sunset and by 7:30 pm, there were fourteen elephants including half a dozen babies, along with a couple of rare black rhinos, half a dozen warthogs and who knows what else in the tangle of legs, trunks and hooves.
Eventually, a jackal wandered by, looking like someone’s scruffy lost dog.
We were told the bright spotlights keep the animals from seeing us but there’s no doubt that jackal knew we were there. After he drank, he approached to look us over making eye contact before nimbly leaping over the spike-topped rock wall and disappearing into the darkness between our cabins.
The jackal was gone but the people stayed. They were still out there at midnight watching the parade come and go. They were mesmerized.
If you go:
Namibia is located below the Equator, just north of South Africa on Africa’s Atlantic coast. The best time to visit Namibia is during winter, May through November, when the temperatures are cooler and the trees are less leafy, so you can see the animals.
The currency here is the Namibian dollar, about seven to the US or Canadian dollar. It’s just about the last place North American cash is worth something anymore, especially in craft markets.
Abenteuer Afrika Safari has an assortment of custom tours ranging from two or three nights to a week, covering lodging, food and transportation within the country.
South African Airways has daily flights from New York and Washington DC nonstop to Johannesburg. Most visitors must overnight in Johannesburg where the Westcliff, an Orient Express Hotel, has rooms hugging a hillside that overlook the city.
Namibia, www.swakop.com or www.namibiatourism.com.na
Abenteuer Afrika Safaris, www.abenteuerafrika.com
Westcliff hotel in Johannesburg: www.westcliff.co.za
South African Airways: www.flysaa.com