Story and Photos by Libor Pospisil.
After exploring the desert at Sossusvlei, Part 2 of the Namibia series, I continued south to reach the Fish River Canyon. While the canyon was impressive, I was even more fascinated by the other uniquely Namibian landscapes discovered along the way.
Namibian forest: Getting an early start, I felt upbeat but challenged as it was one of those days with a drive of hundreds of miles. Slowly, the sandy desert of Sossusvlei receded, and colorful rocks appeared. It reminded me of the American Southwest. As a break from the endless driving, I stopped outside the town of Keetmanshoop and took a walk in a small, unusual desert park with a rare cluster of uniquely Namibian sights—Quiver trees. A subspecies of aloe that only survives in a few spots across southwestern Africa, all Quiver trees look remarkably similar. Their bare trunks suddenly split into dozens of upward-pointing branches, each ending in little green leaves. Their majestic regularity starkly contrasts with the craggy, rocky terrain in which they grow. They are so named because they resemble a quiver full of arrows, which, intriguingly enough, is not just an analogy since, in the past, the San people of Namibia cut the branches of Quiver trees and carved them into cases for their arrows. That is apparently how the trees got their name.
Quiver trees are associated so closely with Namibia that they could compete with Deadvlei, (the famous salt pan of Sossusvlei described in Part-2), for the most iconic image of the country. That image is even more striking at night. By booking a visitor permit in advance, you can stay at a campsite near Quiver Tree Park. Quiver trees against a starry sky make a beautiful iconic image that has, for some visitors, become the photographic highlight of their trip. As an aside, a two-week photography tour is a niche way to explore Namibia. Several travel agencies offer it, with promises to take visitors and their cameras to the many extraordinarily scenic spots around the country.
The crowded places in the desert country: The Giant’s Playground is close to the Quiver Tree Park. For me, it was another place to take a short walk. It is so named because of its oversized boulders stacked into gravity-defying formations. I took a quick peek and headed for a large service station to refill the gas tank and get more supplies before leaving Keetmanshoop. Such stops are no mundane activity in Namibia; instead, given how far apart services can be located, they are an all-important part of planning.
At the service station, I found myself in a different world. The desert and solitude were gone, and, instead, I zig-zagged among humming cars, trailers, buses, and streams of travelers lining up to get fast-food meals. Keetmanshoop may be a small town, but it is the major intersection of the south. Many tourists crowding the station enter Namibia from South Africa, the country’s southern neighbor, as Keetmanshoop lies closer to the border than Windhoek. Tourists usually stay in the parks and resorts in the south, including in the Fish River Canyon area, where I was headed next.
As it developed, I didn’t need to worry about the tourists. The country is so immense that on the way out of Keetmanshoop, clusters of cars quickly dispersed across the largely empty landscape. Without traffic, my drive was now slow as I considered and took in the landscape. I made a detour to inspect the upper stream of the Fish River before it reached the canyon. There, the river carved just a shallow gap in those upper reaches, and in December (summer), when I was there, its water seemed to have dried up and vanished.
My next stop was unplanned. I noticed an old ranch house on the side of a gravel road. Signs by the road offered coffee, Namibian steaks, and German apfelstrudel. The decades-old rusty cars used as decoration amplified the historic vibes and echoed a bygone German colonial era. The ethos demanded a stop. Reflecting, I noticed that in the south, the names of settlements were more commonly German; from Mariental down to the south; there were Grünau, Lüderitz, and Karasburg. The region was always sparsely populated. A colonial genocide decimated the Nama people who had lived there. With the Nama gone, many locations received European names. In contrast, the big towns to the north such as Rundu, Oshakati, Otjiwarongo, and Tsumeb have names almost exclusively taken from African languages.
Driving on, close to the canyon, the road passed through Gondwana Nature Park where I took amusing pictures of ungainly ostriches on the run. Finally, after the long drive, I reached the lodge where I had booked a reservation. It was buzzing with tourists enjoying their dinners and beers, some of whom I thought I had met at the service station in Keetmanshoop.
Ocean of rock: First thing in the morning, I drove to the Fish River Canyon and took a short hike along its rim. It is possible to do a backpacking hike along the river at the bottom of the canyon. The hike is strenuous, involving eighty kilometers (fifty miles), and always requires an authorized guide. I was there in December, and with the summer heat, it was not the month for a long hike. (The canyon administration operates those hikes only from May to September.)
The statistics of the Fish River Canyon are staggering. It is over 160 kilometers long (100 miles), up to 27 kilometers wide (17 miles), and 550 meters deep (1800 feet). Based on these metrics, it is the second-largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon, and it is undoubtedly the largest one in Africa.
The visual spectacle more than matches the statistics. From the rim, I kept staring deep down at the meanders of the Fish River far below, with intervening layers of rocks in brown, orange, and grey. The occasional bush or cactus only served as a reminder of the barren landscape. I walked from one scenic viewpoint to another, enjoying the same thrill of remoteness as in the other deserts of Namibia. A car honking in the distance only added to the sense of isolation. The driver of that car assumed I was lost and needed help. I waved thumbs-up and again had the canyon to myself.
The Fish River Canyon, however, suffers in the eyes of us who have visited the Grand Canyon. The Namibian canyon is a true natural wonder, and it is beautiful, but unlike the sand deserts of Namibia, the canyon looks familiar and lacks unique characteristics. Add to it the beer-drinking vacationers in the lodge, and I began to crave one more dose of an undisturbed, distinctly unique Namibian landscape. I was happy to find it the next day while driving back north.
A desert full of life: At Mariental, I left the main road and, this time, headed east into the Kalahari Desert. There, the landscapes were mild, with no craggy mountains on the horizon. The gravel road passed by private reserves, and I stopped outside one of them to observe African wildlife. To see wildlife it seemed, I did not need to go on a safari, get up at dawn, and drive in a jeep; right there, behind the fence, beside the road I watched a family of giraffes munching on bushes. The other locals, the desert termites, might not have been visible, but I knew they were around thanks to their tall mounds, which lined up along the road like signposts.
I arrived at my last trip destination, a small lodge in the Kalahari, which had a mercifully low occupancy. I spoke to the host; he had moved there from the north, and his language was RuKwangali. He taught me to say thank you as “Mpandu,” which was easy to pronounce.
Toward the evening, Ivan, one of the lodge’s rangers, took me in his jeep into the desert. We followed rough, red, sandy tracks, which bounced us up and down like a roller coaster. We saw herds of uniquely African animals, including zebras and ostriches, and then a bird, a lilac-breasted roller, with feathers that looked very unusually colored and unique to me. However, I learned it was a common species in that part of Namibia.
We stopped at the top of a hill to look around. The scenery of the Kalahari was so different from what I previously had seen on the trip. This desert was made of long, linear waves of red sand, and unlike in the west of Namib, there were no extreme dunes. The Kalahari gets some amount of rain, however small, which means that grass can grow from the sand. The shallow valleys between the waves even sustained bushes and occasional trees. The vegetation anchors the wavy dunes and prevents the wind from moving the sand as it does in the west of Namib. Animals make their home in the vegetation of the Kalahari, and suddenly, the desert is full of life.
After the severe craggy landscapes of the previous days, I began to appreciate the mildness of the Kalahari. The sunset light made the red color of the sand radiate through the grasses. Not far from where we stood, I noticed ostrich eggs. Ivan identified them as abandoned and thus safe to hold, which I did.
Can you say ostrich egg? Ivan mentioned that he grew up in this area and that Nama was his first language, which piqued my interest. In Namibia, there are two broad families of languages. Firstly, Nama and San (also known as the Bushmen language). Those are spoken by the very original inhabitants of the land, now living primarily in the center and the south. Nama and San are called “click languages” thanks to their unique sounds that resemble clicking or popping. In the country’s northern half, there are Bantu languages of Oshiwambo, Herero, RuKwangali, and others, initially spoken by pastoralists who began migrating to the country’s territory from central Africa in the 14th century. The distinction between the two language families is a bit complicated; however, since it is a linguistic fusion, RuKwangali adopted some of the clicking sounds from Nama.
I asked Ivan how he would say, for instance, “ostrich egg” in Nama, which he held in his hand. “Amis !upus,” he said clearly, using the click sound in the place of the exclamation mark. I tried to repeat, but my tongue couldn’t do it. Then he said it in the San language, where the phrase has two clicks. At that point, I called off the language lesson.
Surviving in the desert: Four young men arrived at the lodge in the morning on a pickup truck. They jumped off and changed into traditional San bushman attire of leather cloth and a headband. They were members of a group from a nearby village that reenacted the hunting lives of their ancestors. For authenticity, they spoke to me and a few fellow guests only in the San language. Helpfully, their leader provided some commentary in English, but only after making us guess what was going on.
The San led us along a path into the desert. They stopped at one bush and pointed to a straw sticking out of the sand. With their hands, they removed the sand around the straw and showed us, victoriously, the ostrich egg that was buried there. They had buried the egg there as their ancestors would have done. Empty ostrich eggs were used as jars. Filling them with water and hiding them carefully along their hunting routes enabled lengthy hunts. The straw sticking out of the ground helped with geolocation.
We came to a termite mound where one of the group members descriptively gesticulated toward its base. Termite mounds were good places for hunting since termites served as food for aardvarks, and aardvark meat was on past San menus. The hunters devised ingenious ways to trap the animal because, despite its small size, aardvarks are aggressive and have sharp claws. The San leader was pleased with the detailed hunt demonstration and said in English: “The guys are great! I think we should go on a tour around the world with this.”
“Are there still any San people that live as hunters?” was the last question to the leader. The 1980 movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, with its romanticized view of Africa, suggested some San still lived a traditional bushman life. “No, no one does. Not in Namibia. To live like this, even a small group of people needs to keep moving across a large territory. But there are too many ranches with fences now, and we have droughts. And people have other options. Those who stayed just settled. Why should you hunt for antelope for two days when you can get a steak in the town of Spar in two minutes?”
Capricorn: I left the lodge, saying “Mpandu” to the gentleman at the gate. “Aah! You remember!” “Well, I could remember the RuKwangali word. But I am not able to pronounce anything in Nama.”
I went to Spar again since I had to buy supplies for the last stretch of the drive back to Windhoek. Afterward, I drove for some time until I reached a road sign that could be easily missed despite its significance. It marked the Tropic of Capricorn, the southernmost latitude where the sun is directly overhead at noon. That latitude runs through Namibia; coincidentally, it was late December, the time of the solstice, noon. I had a lunch picnic at the sign, with the sun directly overhead and its ray pointing directly into my head. It was possibly not a good thing to do in the desert because of sunstroke, but my body was warmed, and my lunch was brief.
In Windhoek, I returned the car with sadness. It was the same car that I had not even wanted to rent when I came to Namibia to hire a driver to take me to rocky canyons. Instead, I moved around alone and walked on the sand dunes without tourists. I came for solitude, and I got it. Without a guide, my planning and responsibility for everything on this trip added to the solitude and sense of accomplishment.
As I remembered the unexpected beauty of Namibian landscapes which had left me speechless, I reflected that it must happen to anyone who sees them for the first time. Although I was eager to talk, there was mostly no one to talk to. I met no one on the endless gravel roads or in the remote desert vistas. That made me even more grateful for the occasional memorable conversations with the few Namibians I encountered.
I reluctantly boarded the evening flight at Windhoek airport. I did not want to let go of the thrills of this trip. As we took off, I quietly watched the sky from the airplane window. With the sunset over, the sky turned purple; that was the most wonderful sendoff I could have asked for.
IF YOU GO: Around Keetmanshoop – Quiver tree forest https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/where-is-the-quiver-tree-forest-in-namibia
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