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Day 13: The Journey Ends in a Dream Landscape
By Sanjayan
Two days ago we crossed into Skeleton Coast National Park — the last leg of our journey. And we're in a hurry to get home.
Our pace has quickened: Even the camels and the Save the Rhino Trust rangers feel it. Kilometers clip by, our daily distance targets are easily met and our noonday siestas now become longer and more leisurely.
We're probably getting physically stronger, too. We've certainly absorbed the routine — we don't need Rudy calling out “Five minutes! Five minutes!” to get us on our feet (which have healed, although we still tape each toe religiously every morning). Some mornings, we're actually waiting for him and the camels to catch up, so eager are we on the trail.
We're also eating more efficiently and drinking less too. My daily intake has fallen from gulping a nauseating six liters on the first day to sipping, as if at a polite cocktail party, just two on the last. We're apathetic of sunscreen and are pretending that the clear chunks of gelatinous fat in the bully beef are actually veggies.
A welcome breeze rehydrates our parched, lizard-like skin. The mornings bring a thin film of dew, dripping slowing off our tents. And coastal fog forms a dark gray band on the horizon, like distant mountains. The sight of it hurries us along.
Learning to Read the Dunes
The land itself now seems limitless — gravel plains where fine sand is packed tight as talc and held in place by basalt chips as if steamrolled.
Then we encounter huge towering dunes of shifting sand, folded and meandering, one behind another behind another.
In the dune fields, our forward progress is limited by the path we pick — and again and again we have to climb dunes as high as 200 meters to scout for a place to bring the camels through.
The camels cannot walk on steep dunes and have to be led around them. We would similarly exhaust ourselves in a straight-line charge.
So the game becomes learning to read the dunes, walking on the razor-thin crests, avoiding the shifting, deep-slip faces.
We spread out, at times just specks on the horizon as we each gamble for the best route. Still, our energy level and anticipation is so high that we cannot but help climb some whopping big dunes just for the views.
Isolation, Insignificance and a Spaghetti-Like Plant
There are often no visible signs of life in these dunes. And there are virtually no plants except for the occasional welwitchia plant — a true desert survivor.
The welwitchia mirabilis is an ancient plant, neither a true conifer nor a flowering plant. It has but two leaves that split and tear to form a spaghetti-like mess, and it lives only in this region of the desert, where in places there is no recorded rainfall — ever.
It gains what little water there is by harvesting — in little drips and drops at night — the dew that blows in from the cold ocean some 35 kilometers away.
Some of these plants are over 1,000 years old and suffer almost no mortality once they reach adulthood. In a few shallow draws, there are sparse carpets of desert-adapted grasses, some aloe plants, and a few other straggly shrubs. Otherwise, this is as barren a place as I have ever encountered.
It is land to humble the senses — limitless. We are like a bit of discarded flotsam drifting in the big ocean, drawn slowing and irrevocably by a wakening current.
As we walk often alone now, the sense of isolation and insignificance heightens and it is easy to allow the mind to wander and the imagination to bolt ahead of the pace of our feet. It is as if we are in a dream.
Fresh Lion, Leopard and Rhino Tracks!
Then we find lion and leopard prints — fresh tracks right up into the border of the Skeleton Coast National Park, in the Obob Canyon.
It is astonishing to think that a pride of big cats can find enough sustenance to survive out here where no visible water exists. The Conservancy's Richard Jeo deploys his infrared-triggered remote cameras and we catch some of these desert lions on film.
More impressively — and certainly more significantly — we find fresh rhino tracks deep in the park, made not more than few hours ago.
How could such a large mammal can find enough forage to push so deep into this true xeric landscape? Rudi tells us that rhino were found in the park in the late 1970s, but the last confirmed sightings in this area were over 25 years ago. Hunting by military forces when South Africa claimed Namibia (then called Southwest Africa) certainly played its part in decimating the rhino.
The tracks are an exciting sighting because it proves without doubt the ecological viability and interconnectedness between the proposed “Peoples Park” in the community lands outside Skeleton Coast and the existing nationally protected parks. In exceptional years of heavy rainfall, pioneers like this rhino are venturing between the community lands and the national parks. Like us, they see no boundaries.
The trackers are eager to follow the spoor, and we do so for a kilometer or two — but we don’t want to spook “this old chap” as Rudi calls him. The last thing the rhino needs is to summon the energy to flee us. Just yesterday, our camera guy and our photographer came across a sleeping rhino in a small canyon, which fled at their arrival.
The Egg
There are other incidences too, less ecologically significant perhaps but each a minor miracle in their own way:
- A trail made by springbok and oryx, cutting through a huge gravel plain like a highway.
- A namaqua desert chameleon, turning from gravel brown to an angry black and orange at our approach. It hisses and gapes furiously as we coo over it.
And then there is the egg.
A single giant egg — glowing like a beacon — attracts us from a kilometer away.
It lies where an errant ostrich had deposited it without any companions, nest or broken shells, as perfectly placed and undisturbed as if human hands had gently laid it as an offering on the gravel plains.
The trackers crowd around and marvel at the egg. It could make perhaps a dozen omelets — enough to satisfy them and us. I can see the eagerness in their expressions and some internal debate and discussion in a language that is totally foreign to me. I cannot discern what is being said but no doubt their job conflicts with their stomach.
In the end, we decide to leave the egg be. It will be a welcome packet of protein for a hungry scavenger — but we are in a national park and everything is protected here.
These little apex moments help chart our course providing us a sense of reference, a feeling of before and after, a reality check as to the progress we are making inexorably drawing towards the end.
I Can Hear the Ocean
We also have a welcome distraction in the form of Roberto Hernendez, his wife Claudia, and his grandson Luis, who join us at the entrance of the Skeleton Coast National Park and accompany us on foot for the last 50 kilometers.
Roberto is a member of The Nature Conservancy's board of directors, and he is a keen supporter and adventurer who harbors little ceremony in his participation. He almost clubs one of our colleagues when the man suggests that Roberto should ride a camel. He wants to walk — and as preparation he tells me he has sworn off red wine and has increased the intensity of his yoga sessions.
We are skeptical. But after 20 kilometers on the first day, Rudi sidles over to me and says in a hushed but impressed tone: “Boy, the old chap can really walk." It's perhaps the best compliment Rudi can give.
Luis is as energetic as Rudi’s dalmatians, who climb dunes for the sheer fun of it. Having the Hernendez family allows us to shift our thoughts from our own discomforts to worrying and caring about someone else. It is new energy just in time.
Tonight as I sleep I can hear the gentle and distant roar of the ocean, but 10 kilometers away. All we have to do is follow the sand river — the Uniab — westwards and we will be there. Tomorrow I know we will end.
| « Expedition Namib |
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Luis Bosoms (Camel team on gravel plains); Photo © Luis Bosoms (Namaqua chameleon); Photo © Sanjayan/TNC (Manieke tracks a rhino); Photo © Sanjayan/TNC (Sanjayan and the ostrich egg in the Skeleton Coast Park).
