Tuesday, 02 March 2010 17:09
Date: 01/03/10
Location: Desert Sky Lodge, Swakopmund
Miles travelled: 549 miles over three days (Van Zyls Pass to Marble Camp Site - 53 miles, Marble Camp to Sesfontein - 177 miles, Sesfontein to Swakopmund - 319 miles)
Weather: 32ºC, hot again but tres cold at night
Today we mostly listened to: Radiohead, Lemon Jelly and Norah Jones
We have made it back to civiliation after five great days in the wilderness. And it has been an eventful few days so we have lots to report. In a change to form I (Dickie) am writing the blog on account of most of this being about off-road driving - you will have to indulge me here I’m afraid! So I’ll start with the Van Zyl’s Pass. We ignored the first two pieces of advice about the pass - “Don’t do it alone” and “Don’t do it in the rain”. We’d met a family from Joburg in two pimped up Toyotas that were planning to attempt it but we lost them in a riverbed and never saw them again (hope they’re ok). It happened to be raining on the morning we set off too, and we didn’t have time to wait for a dry day so off we went alone in the wet. Van Zyls actually only refers to the last 1km of bum-clenching cliff-like nastyness at the end. The other 19km - as we were to learn - is just a warm up. It’s purported to take about 2 hours to do the whole thing. There’s a lot of stopping before the hard bits. We’d jump out of the car to take a look, shake our heads in disbelief then I’d jump back in while Charlie would try and direct me with varying degrees of success (see the videos for examples). We got down in one pieace though.The trick is to let the car do the work. I put it in low range first with the diff lock on and pointed it down the hill. Charlie likened it to the Thunder Cat car crawling over rocks. Once through the pass we left a rock with our names painted on it with the pile of other rocks with other peoples names on, had a cup of tea and headed for Marienne Fleuss. This is a large expance of flat sandy plain surrounded by stunning mountains. It’s home to Zebra, Giraffe, Desert Elephant, Cheetah, Leopard, lots of dear like animals that I can never tell the difference between, probably Gazelle though, and Himba tribes people. It’s a pretty magic place due in no small part to how remote it is. We didn’t see another car for two days of driving and aside from a couple of Himba on donkeys didn’t see people either. We’d naively thought that once through the Van Zyls our tricky driving would be over, it wasn’t. The nice sandy plains of Marinne Fleuss soon turn into rocky roads of sharp slate and marble and it was pretty slow going as we headed south to Marble camp site. We set about the camp ritual of making bread and drinking wine. After a leisurely breakfast of the bread we’d made the night before we headed out for our third day sans tarmac. About 100Km south of the Marble camp site we turned right on a detour that would run us closer to the skeleton coast. It was a great road and for hours we drove through beautiful desert-scape occasionly seeing gazelle and bigger gazelle with horns. Unfortunately you can’t get into the Skeleton coast National Park here, we could have saved a days drive to Sesfontain if we’d cut onto the coast there.
Camp outside of Sesfontein - more drink and fixing of Monty. The next day we set off from Sesfontein for the long drive to Swakopmund. By this point we’d given up on there being any tar in Namibia and settled into driving on gravel. Monty was a little injured after our jaunt into the wilderness. The anti roll bar broke yet again, there’s a rip in the side wall of one of the tires, there’s fuel leaking out of the fuel tank where I think the anti-roll bar has knocked a whole in it, the shocks have become extremely bouncy and need changing and you can turn the steering wheel at least 20 degrees in either direction before the front wheels respond! All this made for a bit of a hairy trip down the skeleton coast but we arrived safely in Swakop. About 100 miles north of Swakopmund on the desert road 20 meters from the surf we stopped for a break and I asked Charlie to marry me and to my amazement she said yes!