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Orange River Border crossing
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Namibia only has two main tar roads north to south, east to west the rest are dirt but well prepared.
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It is a country of vast empty and untamed spaces, plenty of sunshine, wide horizons, apricot sand dunes, rugged rocky plains, adapted animal wealth and depending on your taste, great beauty and much much more.
Travelling mainly in the outback away from the main roads, we sometimes drove for days without seeing people, so it was never a problem finding a spot to sleep undisturbed in the night.
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Most of the time we could see for miles, sparsely vegetated landscape with unbelievable endless valleys one more stunning than the next with coloured mountains or dunes far in the distance.
Someone once asked me why go there, there's nothing?
...this is a place where you learn to see.
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We travelled north always finding our own camp somewhere in the nowhere.
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| On our way to Lüderitz, we travelled through an incredible valley of horses, one of the most unforgettable sights I've ever seen, an awe inspiring, vast and magnificent, silver-yellow, windswept arid plain, surrounded by suncoloured jutting maintains, like a painting of 1000 colour tones, home of the wild desert horses. |
 
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Our noble Landie took us through sand storms, up and down steep passes, along sandy river beds, and through varied types of mindblowing landscapes, as well as the tourist attractions like Ais-Ais hot springs where sulphurous springs well up from the ground, Fish River Canyon, said to be second in size to the Grand Canyon in U.S.A, Sesriem and the gracefullly curved and enormous apricot Dunes of Soussusvlei, the still and strange vast beauty of the Namib, and the magic dream "moonlandscape".
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The Namib Naukluft Park is one of the largest game parks in Africa and consist's of 5 areas: the Naukluft, the Namib, Sandvis, Sesriem and Sossusvlei.
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At night it was 10°, at 8:00 in the morning it was often 33° and midday it reached 50° in the shade.
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We drove in the midday heat so as to generate a breeze and drank plenty of our warmed up water to keep from dehydrating.
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 Skeleton Coast road
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My magic birthday was spent in a strange desert drinking red wine under the half moon with Peter and some giant 1500 year old Welwitchia for company, while the myriad stars were sparkling like diamonds and the southern cross was climbing the sky dome.
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The mysterious ancient plants lie strewn across the desert at odd intervals like weird and patiently waiting aliens.
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Buried in the sand beside our Landie slept a handsome Sandviper |
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We saw few people and nobody ever harassed us. Always north was our direction through the stark beauty and what seemed for us untouched Skeleton coast to the fascinating and wild rugged Kaokoland, which lies in the very northern part of Namibia and stretches to the Angolan border.
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Warning against entering the Skeleton Coast via the Kaokoveld
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 The Kaokoland is so inhospitable and remote that it is not advisable to enter alone without a back up vehicle, plenty of spare tyres, as much fuel and water as one can carry and a least 1 week of food ration. We teamed up with a unforgetable and well travelled couple, 'Horst and Anneliese'. |
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This is also one of the most undescribable beautiful places on earth for me. I once heard, that if you ever enter the Koakoland you will never want to leave, and now I know that's an understatement.
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| Dry river beds with soft traps of deep sand which can become raging torrents overnight, stony tracks enclosed by walls of boulders deteriorating into rocky ruts and corrugations that shook us to the bones and at times forced our speed to 10 km's. |
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Beautiful valleys strewn with a carpet of broken boulders faded to others covered in hues of red sand.
Incredible as it sounds amongst this inhospitable wilderness we came across animals such as the orynx antelope, springbok, ostrich and elephants. |
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 Sometimes a town on the map was only a waterhole, 3 huts and some sleepy donkeys.
The Himba People, a peaceful nomadic tribe make this region their home.
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With our uncanny luck we didn't have a single flat tyre up to now, but the sharp stones had left their Marks and stripped most of the rubber off our tyres and the steel threads where starting to show, and our friends tore their diesel tank which is why we had to leave and find a town with a welding machine, which was by no means an easy task.
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Our Route took us up to the Kunene River which is the border between Namibia and Angola.
Things got very lush and green up here and as I stood on a rising staring across the river into Angola it seemed to me it could have been the Amazon Jungle I was looking at.
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We met Sakkie who was in the process of creating a beautiful campsite on a no-mans-island in the middle of the crocodile infested river complete with bananas and green lawn, and we spent some time investigating up and down the Kunene in his rubberducky.
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From Ruaccana there is a straight tar road that takes you east to Etosha Pan once believed to be a great lake, now a endless pan of silvery-white sand upon which dustdevils play and mirages blur the horizon, covers about a quarter of the Etosha National Park.
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In Gobabis we where invited to stay a few days with the 'Goldbecks's' and the 'Becker's', two very kind and hospitable family's which gave Peter a chance to check the Landrover.
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Orphaned, and Injured animals which are rehabilitated at Harnass Wildlife Orphanage.
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 Some of Nonna and Gerald Becker's
beautiful animals
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'Bongani the Lion'
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| We left Namibia at Buitepos for Botswana on the 19th of Februar 1998. |
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Tour 1
Map
