Showing posts with label adventure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventure. Show all posts

Monday, May 8, 2017

Retrospective (July 2012): Peak Lenin: Pamirs 1, Hazenberg 0

Thunder Bay, May 8th

Asia Mountains base camp and its orange tents
This post may mark an all-time record for me in terms of not writing up my adventures at the time, and letting things slide.  It's been almost 5 years since I spent six weeks trying to live out my Reinhold Messner mountaineering fantasies in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, and only now am I finally sitting down to try to capture the experience in cyberspace.  The fact that I have now written something like 49 blog posts since I left Leysin in June of 2015 means that I can no longer be tagged with my friend Kent Foster's once-accurate label of "the world's laziest blogger", but there is still improvement to be made, including writing about adventures that happened during the five-year-long blur of working in Leysin.  I really enjoyed living in the Alps (even if there were only 2 good snow winters out of the 5 I spent there), but between teaching, sports and travel, I hardly had time to put fingers to keyboard in the service of travel writing.  I am trying belatedly to make up for lost time.

In the summer of 2012, after a wonderful month spent hiking in the high-altitude trekker's paradise of Ladakh with Terri, we went our separate ways; she to return to work at her school in Leysin, me to further adventures in Kyrgyzstan and China; having two and a half months off every summer was one of the biggest perks of teaching at LAS!  I had first planned to climb Peak Lenin, reputedly the easiest 7000-metre peak in the world, back in 2002 during my Silk Road bike ride.  I was going to meet up with my sisters Audie and Saakje in Kyrgyzstan for another XTreme Dorks adventure, but an attack of rheumatic fever that laid me low for 6 months put the kibosh on further riding or any thoughts of mountaineering.  A decade further on, after a couple of seasons of ski touring in the Alps, I thought I would be in as good shape as I would ever be in for mountaineering, especially after a month of acclimatization in Ladakh.  Once I had decided to try my luck on Peak Lenin, it was easy to tack on another mountain that had been on my mental radar for 14 years, since my bike ride (the original XTreme Dorks expedition) along the Karakoram Highway way back in 1998.  Muztagh Ata is a huge peak (at 7546 m it's 400 m higher than Peak Lenin), but it's a deceptively simple-looking snow ramp that looks relatively simple to climb.  My friend Eric, with whom I used to play tennis back in Yangon days, had also been thinking of Muztagh Ata and we decided to do an expedition together.  I had about seven weeks before I had to get back to Leysin for the start of the school year, and it seemed like exactly the right amount of time for two big peaks.

The various climbing routes; I was on route 2, the Normal Route
In the end, I decided to pay Asia Mountains, a well-regarded company based in Bishkek, to provide base camp services on Peak Lenin, and to do the same for both of us at Muztagh Ata.  It's not strictly speaking necessary to hire a company for Peak Lenin, but almost everyone ends up doing so, since security of your possessions can be an issue there, and it's also nice to have some good food and comfort at base camp before and after being up on the slopes of the mountain.  On Muztagh Ata, given the Chinese government's bureaucracy, paranoia and obsession with border security, it's obligatory (and much more expensive!).

The flight from Delhi to Bishkek took forever, as I was flying on Turkish Airlines and flew all the way back to Istanbul only to backtrack the same distance east again.  I got to Bishkek, dropped off my skis with Alyona from Asia Mountains (they were storing them until I needed them for Muztagh Ata), hopped on a domestic flight to Osh and was picked up at the airport by a car and driver from Asia Mountains.  We stopped off in town for me to buy food at the supermarket and pick up a stove and gas canisters at the Asia Mountains office, then headed into the mountains.  It took four hours to drive to the base camp for Peak Lenin, a bit faster than the three days it took me on a bicycle back in 2004.  In the intervening eight years, the Chinese had paved the road, so that what was once a rutted dirt track was now almost entirely smooth asphalt.  It's a spectacular drive, up a long valley from Osh, then up and over the hairpins of the 3615-metre Taldyk Pass where my cycling partner Antoine and I once had to hole up in a yurt overnight during a howling blizzard. It was beautiful sunny weather this time and we swept steeply downhill to the crossroads town of Sary Tash, where roads lead east to China over the Irkeshtam Pass, west to Dushanbe (Tajikistan) and south to the Pamir Highway through eastern Tajikistan.  Antoine and I had headed south back in 2004, but we had stopped and looked southwest longingly towards the huge white shape of Peak Lenin. This year the vehicle turned west for thirty kilometres before leaving the main road and bumping along a jeep track for an hour up a green and pleasant valley to Asia Mountains' base camp, which was to be my home away from home for the next two weeks.


I had last been atop a really high mountain peak back in 2001 with my sisters Audie and Saakje and their respective partners Serge and Lucas, on one of our XTreme Dorks adventures.  That year, after hiking the Inca Trail in Peru and spending time on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, followed by more hiking in the altiplano in Chile, we had climbed Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America.  At 6961 metres, it was less than 200 metres shorter than Peak Lenin, so I assumed that with similar acclimatization, I would be able to use a similar approach to climbing Peak Lenin.  Back then we had hiked in for two days from the road at Puente del Inca to the base camp at Plaza de Mulas, then ascended slowly to Camps One and Two (Canada and Nido de Condores), pausing to acclimatize at each camp for a couple of days while ferrying supplies further up the mountain.  Finally we did a big day to summit from Nido, doing about 1000 vertical metres, before returning to camp.  I envisioned a similar slow ascent on Peak Lenin, starting with ferrying gear to Camp One (Advanced Base Camp), staying there, then ferrying gear up to Camp Two and Camp Three before a summit dash from Camp Three.  I had my mountaineering tent, sleeping bag and mattress, plenty of food (including freeze-dried rations and some bacon, cheese, soup and noodles I had bought in Osh), fuel (small camping cylinders), cooking gear and a Kindle.  I felt ready!

Marmot near Peak Lenin Base Camp
There are a series of widely spaced base camps spread along the Achik Tash meadows at about 3650 metres above sea level, each run by a different mountaineering company.  You don’t absolutely need to stay in one of them, but they’re relatively inexpensive and provide a measure of security against pilfering.  Asia Mountains had a neat encampment of yurts at the foot of an old glacial moraine with a splendid view of the mountain and the rest of the Trans-Alai range, and plenty of marmots running around.  I was put in my own big orange half-cylinder tent and soon afterwards repaired to the dining tent to eat sumptuously.  This is the other advantage of using a base camp outfit like Asia Mountains:  at Base Camp and Camp One there are full-time professional cooks preparing meals that aren’t dehydrated noodles and soups.  I settled in for a great feed, and then packed my gear for an early departure the next morning. 

There were a number of groups at base camp that night.  There were 3 Muscovites (Nastya, Irina and Volodya) who were climbing together, and a group of 8 Slovenians, including a professional mountain guide named Branko.  As well there was a young Spanish snowboarder, Marcos, who was keen to make a snowboard descent of the mountain, but who was suffering from persistent dysentery and off to Osh to see a doctor.  I would see a lot of these folks over the next two weeks, and it was good to meet such a fun group of travellers and mountaineers.

How other expeditions move gear to Camp One
The next day, Thursday July 5th, was a long, tough day.  My idea was to shuttle a load to Camp 1 to get my body used to carrying a heavy load, and to use the old acclimatization adage of “climb high, sleep low”.  I was up by 7 am, breakfasting at 8 (on a delicious spread of eggs, bread, yoghurt, jam and other goodies in the mess tent) and underway by 9.  My pack was really, really heavy, maybe as much as 30 kg, and it was hard going.  I had been told that it was a 4-hour hike to Camp 1, but it ended up taking almost 6 hours.  The heavy pack was definitely a factor in slowing me down (I could have hired a horse to take my gear there, but I thought it was a better idea to get some carrying into my legs, after a month of having horses carry my gear in Ladakh), but I seemed to be ridiculously unacclimatized to altitude.  This was quite strange, as I had spent most of the previous month above 4000 metres in Ladakh and had been completely acclimatized to that altitude.  I found myself really panting for breath on uphills.  I also, because I underestimated the time, didn’t have enough snack food and water with me. 

Between Base Camp and Camp One; Camp One is up the glacier to the right
The path led up the valley that the base camp was located in, through carpets of beautiful wildflowers, and then through gorgeous Onion Meadow (full, unsurprisingly, of wild onions with their pretty purple flowers).  I then left the valley and the greenery and made my way up a ridge of red rock to the top of Traveller’s Pass, topping out at 11:15.  There was a sweeping view out into the next valley (in which Camp One is located), and at the top I met a garrulous, enthusiastic retired Englishman with whom I chatted about trekking and mountains for an enjoyable (but windy) half hour.  I thought that I was close to Camp One, but it was another three hours of tough walking, often up and down across steep moraine scree slopes.  I was getting hungrier and thirstier (there was no water after I left Onion Meadow) and puzzled as to where Camp One might be.  I was almost on top of it before it appeared, a series of widely-scattered tents clusters at 4400 metres above sea level, one for each mountaineering company.  At 2:40 pm, leg-weary, surprisingly tired and very hungry, I got to the Asia Mountains camp (the closest one, luckily), dropped my load and tucked into a magnificent lunch in the mess tent.  While eating, I met three more skiers, companions of the ill snowboarder Marcos.  I was starting to wonder whether I should have brought my skis to Peak Lenin too, but it seemed to be a long trudge before skis could become useful.  I was shown to my small tent, where I stashed my gear before setting off back to base camp at a much more rapid rate, passing dozens of fat orange marmots in Onion Meadow.  By 7 pm I was back at base camp, just in time for another huge feast.  My calves felt empty and sore, and my left ankle wasn’t at all happy.  I went to bed tired but also worried about my lack of acclimatization and the excessive weight of food and supplies that I was lugging around.

Scenery between base camp and Camp One
That night I slept fitfully, as though unacclimatized to 3700 metres.  In the morning, I packed up the remainder of my gear (substantially lighter this time) and set off at 9:00 again.  The weather was cloudier, colder and windier than the day before, with a few fitful snowflakes, and I walked slowly but steadily, taking a snack break below the Traveller’s Pass.  I felt a bit fitter than the day before, but it still took me until 2:40 pm to get to Camp One, exactly the same time as the day before.  I tucked into another sizeable feed before sorting out my gear, trying to reduce weight for the following day.  The rest of the afternoon passed agreeably reading and napping in my tent.  The weather was ominous, with heavy thunder and fairly heavy snowfall, the tiny sharp ice pellets known as graupel.  Over supper I talked a lot with Nastya, Irina and Volodya, milking them for information.  They, as well as a couple of Asia Mountains guides who were at dinner, were dubious of me walking to Camp Two the next day alone, as there are some serious crevasses in the underlying glacier.  I arranged to set off with them the next day so that I could rope up with them in case of a fall into a crevasse.  However that evening, as we sat around the dining table reading and chatting, the graupel continued to fall steadily.  The Russian trio eventually decided to postpone moving uphill for a day, and I was happy to take a day off as well after two days that had been substantially longer and harder than I had anticipated.

Fresh snow at Camp One, with the summit behind
Saturday, July 7th was a deliciously lazy day.  When we woke up there was a good 20 cm of fresh snow and my Asia Mountains tent nearly collapsed under the weight of it, and nobody opted to head further up until the snow had a chance to settle or melt.  I had slept poorly again, getting up several times in the night to pee, and tossing restlessly with a racing pulse.  I had to admit that I wasn’t at all acclimatized to this relatively low altitude of 4400 m, despite the previous month’s hiking.  I found it mysterious and not at all reassuring; part of my planning for the mountain had been predicated on being acclimatized and fit and moving uphill relatively rapidly.  Between the bad weather and the lack of acclimatization, this relatively rapid pace seemed unlikely to work.  I packed a bag to take to Camp Two the next morning; again I was planning to do two carries to Camp Two, sleeping at Camp One inbetween.

Beautiful view of the summit from Camp One
Those of us heading uphill the next morning were up in the dark at 4:30 am (I slept through a couple of alarms and was only woken by the noise made by other climbers getting ready).  By 5 am we were at breakfast, and by 6:15 am we were underway.  This early start was said to be necessary to get firm ice on the glacier as well as to beat the heat in the much-feared Skovorodka (the Frying Pan) just below Camp Two.  Once again I felt poorly acclimatized, panting and moving slowly.  I stuck with the three Russians until we had gotten over a pretty scary crevasse that we crossed with a running leap, aided by a rope pull from ahead (Volodya had leapt it cleanly without the rope, but Nastya and Irina and I were grateful for some assistance).  We stayed roped up on the flat section of the glacier, reputedly the most crevasse-ridden part, and then up the first steep pitch, but then I let them move ahead as I was moving like a slug.  The distance between us widened rapidly as I laboriously trudged up the slope, easily the slowest climber on the mountain.  

Climbers retreating downhill from Camp Two across the Frying Pan
By noon I had only made it to an altitude of 5000 m, and it was 2:00 pm before I entered the Frying Pan.  It lived up to its name, with no wind to cool me and the UV radiation off the flat snow and ice roasting me.  It seemed unbearably hot, and it seemed to take forever for me to cross this open space, past an avalanche-prone slope.  In 1990 avalanches, triggered by earthquakes, wiped out Camp Two in its previous location underneath this slope; 43 climbers died in what is still the largest single death toll in mountaineering history.  The snow had softened enough in the afternoon heat that I was constantly sinking in to mid-thigh, further reducing my snail’s pace.  It was 5:00 pm when I staggered, completely spent, into Camp Two, a compact village of perhaps 25 tents on a fairly steep slope at 5350 metres above sea level.  It had taken me almost 11 hours to cover what fit, acclimatized climbers usually do in 5 hours.  My lack of fitness and lack of altitude acclimatization was clearly evident. 

Since it was so late in the day, there was no question of retreating back to Camp One that evening.  I put up my Crux mountaineering tent, first digging a new tent platform into the snow slope with my avalanche shovel.  I was on my own now; Asia Mountains’ tents and food stopped at Camp One.  I used my shovel handle and blade (separately), my ice axe and two ice screws to fasten down the guy ropes of the tent.  I set up the tent, melted some snow (always a slow process) and cooked up bouillon with croutons, eggs and cheese, chatting with a couple of ultralight mountaineers from Kamchatka squeezed into one tiny tent.   I made some instant ramen noodles as well, but I just couldn’t stomach them, so I put them aside for breakfast instead.  One item that I hadn’t brought up from Camp One was my ThermaRest air mattress, so I made do with my foamie undermattress, not ideal on the snow.  I was very cold and bone tired when I crawled into bed at 7:30 pm.

I was in my sleeping bag for over 12 hours that night, although the second half of the night my slumber was disturbed by the sound of howling winds.  I had heard from other climbers who had been further up the mountain that it was unrelentingly windy once they got above Camp Two, and now the winds were scouring our camp as well.

The peak reflected in Irina's sunglasses
I felt really tired and sore when I got up, and it took two groggy hours to melt snow and cook up some breakfast.  By 10:30 I was headed back down the mountain with an empty backpack, leaving my tent erected and my gear and food inside.  It took only 3 easy hours to descend what it had taken 11 hours to ascend, and much of that time was spent on the flat part of the glacier on the final approach back to Camp One.  I had been dreading the killer crevasse all day, wondering whether I would have the nerve to leap it on my own, and yet I never even saw it on the descent; in only one day the glacier had moved far enough for it to fill in the crevasse by itself.  It was more than a little unnerving to find the ground beneath my feet so rapidly changeable.  When I got back to Camp One, I was glad to tuck into a hearty stew and some freshly baked bread.  In my absence Marcos, the snowboarder, had returned healthy from Osh and had been moved into my tent as my tentmate.  I had a sociable afternoon and evening chatting with him, and with Asia Mountains’ most glamorous guide, the young powerhouse climber Dasha Yashina, as well as her client Alex Goldfarb, a Russian-born Harvard Medical School researcher on kidney function.  I fell asleep to the disconcerting booming echoes of seracs falling somewhere up on the glacier.

Showing off my crampons, with the summit ridge behind

The next morning was Tuesday, July 10th, and I was up at 4 am (I heard my alarm this time!), breakfasting at 5 and off by 5:30.  The skies were clear and cold, and Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were all glittering in the pre-dawn sky.  The snow and ice were much harder than two days previously, and I finally felt as though I might be getting a bit better acclimatized; perhaps retreating back from 5350 m to 4400 m had improved things.  I had another load of food, fuel and gear in my bag, although it was definitely lighter than two days before.  I was still slower than most climbers on the mountain (particularly the professional guides and porters, who scampered past me), but I was at Camp Two by 12:30, seven hours after setting off.  On the way I was passed by Dasha and Alex, and met Volodya, Nastya and Irina retreating back to Camp One for a rest, along with my Kamchatka neighbours.  Six of the eight Slovenians I had met in base camp were on their way up as well.  It was good weather and everyone was on the move. 

Camp Two that afternoon was oppressively hot and still, with UV radiation pouring off the snow.  I tried to nap in my tent, but it was too hot.  I repacked a load of food that I planned to carry up to Camp Three the next day, cooked up some eggs and scarfed down as much nuts, cheese and bouillon as I could stomach.  I had been talked into buying no fewer than 10 gas canisters from the Asia Mountains office in Osh, but only now did I finish the first of them; I was clearly carrying an excessive supply.  After lunch the first clouds of the day rolled in and soon enough it was snowing again, blowing through a small gap in the fly where I had melted the zipper in a fit of inattention earlier in the day.  More eggs and more hideously indigestible ramen noodles, along with my first package of dehydrated rations (a potato stew), with lots of butter melted into it for extra calories, did for supper. 

That evening I lay in my tent listening to the wind howl.  I had been gathering intelligence from other groups of climbers, and what I heard didn’t sound very good.  Although the next stage, up to Camp Three, was shorter than either of the previous two legs in terms of horizontal distance, it was still another 800 vertical metres, and via a somewhat convoluted route up a ridge, over a bump (Razdelnaya Peak) and then down to a slightly sheltered spot where Camp Three is usually pitched.  The accepted figure for time held that it would be three hours to Razdelnaya, and then another hour to reach the camp.  The 4 Canadian med students I had met at Osh airport had been up towards Camp Three that day and had been turned back by howling winds halfway.  I heard that it was in fact the first day of the season that anyone had made it as far up as Camp Three, although that didn’t seem entirely plausible.  The winds were said to be strong enough to pick you up off your feet, and to have been this strong for a week.  I wrote up a plan in my diary that evening that saw me on top of the mountain five days later, then went to sleep.

Wednesday, July 11th marked a week since my arrival at base camp, and I was up early to crisp, cold, clear weather.  I felt tired and groggy, so I had a leisurely breakfast omelette, then sat lazing and talking, trying to overcome lassitude.  My plan was to carry a load of supplies up the mountain to Camp Three, stash them there, and then come back to Camp Two.  At 9:45 I set off up the steep slope right behind camp.  I made good time, reaching the top of the pitch within an hour.  As began walking along the relatively level ground from there, somebody flipped the weather switch and suddenly clouds started to roll in, driven by a pounding wind.  I struggled onwards, trying to follow previous tracks (not an easy task, given the blowing snow that was filling them in), and talking to groups retreating from above; several groups had turned back before Camp Three, and nobody recommended going onwards, as the wind just got worse with altitude.  I kept trudging, but at noon, atop a knoll at about 5700 metres, I decided to turn back in the face of some of the worst winds I had ever felt on a mountain.  I buried my food and gas canisters in the snow, marked it with a distinctive arrangement of rocks and turned back at 12:30.  It took only half an hour to race back to camp, blown downhill by a wind that seemed to have a malevolent personality of its own.  Camp Two was also raked by the same gale-force winds and I spent the afternoon sheltering from the wind, eating a ton and chatting with Dasha while dramatic clouds formed over the ridge before being ripped away by gusts.  It was awe-inspiring, but hardly confidence-inspiring. 

Dasha Yashina
I passed out in my tent for two hours of oblivious sleep and woke up to continuing gales.  For the first time I found myself wondering if I was really going to be able to summit, between the terrible weather, unseasonably deep snow, continuing lack of acclimatization and physical weakness.  I had been shocked that afternoon to feel how much leg muscle I had lost during my week on the mountain; the only other time I had ever experienced that was during my bout of rheumatic fever in Urumqi back in 2002, and that hadn’t ended at all well.  I continued to be puzzled at how poorly my body was reacting to altitudes that I had had no problem with a month earlier.  I also found myself tearing up with emotion as I lay reading classic poems on my Kindle in the tent, and remembered that this had been an early sign of physical breakdown on my bike in the weeks before Urumqi.  The fact that far more experienced climbers than myself were also talking about the low odds of success also gave me pause for thought.  I had read beforehand that about 29% of climbers on Peak Lenin are successful, and I was beginning to see why that might be.

That night I lay in my tent, unable to fall asleep because of the deafening roar of the wind and the crackling and shaking of my tent.  I was glad that I had such a well-constructed tent, but it didn’t make sleeping any easier.  I finally passed out from pure exhaustion at 2 am.  When I awoke at 8 am, the winds had dropped slightly, but were still fearsome.  Most of the climbers in Camp Two were on their way downhill, and I saw several tents that had completely shredded during the night.  I decided to sit tight and see how the weather developed, and spent the day lying in my tent reading, napping and eating.  By evening there were only a handful of us left in camp, and my diary records that the two things that concerned me the most were the continuing evaporation of muscle from my legs and my butt, and the fact that snow was being driven up under the flap of the fly and onto the mesh of the inner tent, from where it fell in a fine dust onto me and my sleeping bag to melt and increase the misery factor.

My view from the tent in Camp Two
Friday, July 13th was a decisive day.  I barely slept again as the wind continued its sonic assault, and I awoke tired, sore and weak.  I had breakfast, then trudged uphill with an empty backpack to fetch the fuel and food I had cached two days earlier.  Even without carrying a load, I was slower and weaker than I had been before, and was barely able to stagger up to the cache.  This made my mind up.  It was going to take far longer than the time I had allotted for Peak Lenin to get acclimatized and fit, and given the weather, success was going to be doubtful for anybody in this weather window.  I returned to Camp Two, packed up everything and set off on the long, heavy trudge back downhill to the sybaritic comforts of Camp One.  Just as I approached Camp One, I met a group of several British climbers with whom I had a good chat; one of them, a hard-looking nurse named Tim, would end up being the only climber (other than mountain guides) that I met on the mountain who would end up summiting.  I settled into my Asia Mountains tent and had an enormous meal, trying to regain some of the weight I had lost over the past week.  I felt very disappointed not to have summited, but I figured that I might as well rebuild my strength and focus on making my Muztagh Ata ascent a more successful enterprise.  Ironically the weather had improved, and everyone else in Camp One was planning to move up to Camp Two the next day, even as I was descending.  I was assailed by self-doubt; was I just being a wimp, or was it the right move?

Lovely sunset colours seen from Camp One
The next day I lazed around Camp One, eating, reading, taking pictures and waiting for a horse to carry my luggage back to base camp; I had decided that carrying heavy loads hadn’t helped me acclimatize; it had just made me tired, and wasted my leg muscles.  After lunch a horse and owner appeared from Base Camp and I negotiated a price to carry my gear.  It was amazing how easy it was to walk downhill, breathing progressively thicker and thicker air, unencumbered by weight.  We set off at 3, and by 6 o’clock I was back in a big orange tent, overjoyed to be surrounded by green grass, wildflowers, marmots and relative warmth.  After being in the lifeless white desert of the high mountains, this profusion of plants and animals was balm to a bruised and battered soul.  I spent the evening chatting with Dasha’s client Alex, and playing chess in the mess tent against a couple of my fellow climbers.  Alex and Dasha's presence in base camp wasn't surprising; the standard Russian/post-Soviet plan of attack on a big mountain like this was always to establish camps up the mountain, then retreat to base camp for a couple of days to rest up and recover before moving briskly up the mountain to the summit.  Dasha and Alex were planning on heading up to Camp One the next day to start their final push to the summit.

At Peak Lenin base camp, with the peak just out of view to the left
I spent Sunday, July 15th in Base Camp, in beautiful weather, as there was no jeep available to take me back to Osh until the next day.  I walked, talked with climbers, took photos and sunned myself in the afternoon warmth.  I felt a bit of envy looking uphill at what looked like good climbing conditions on the slopes of Peak Lenin, but it still looked windy higher up, with flags of spindrift hanging from the ridges and the summit.  That evening, after more chess (I love the fact that the post-Soviet world is so full of keen chess players!), I drew up a list of mistakes I had made, and reasons why I was leaving Peak Lenin empty-handed. It read:
  • Insufficient time budgeted (the ultimate root of the failure)
  • Insufficient sense of how big a mountain Peak Lenin is, and how much distance is involved
  • Too few rest days budgeted in
  • Not appreciating the importance of descending to recharge physically and mentally
  • Carrying too heavy a load
  • Assuming that my Ladakh acclimatization would carry over  
  • Not realizing the extent to which my muscles would waste at high altitude (it had never been an issue before) 
  • Overestimating my own physical strength and stamina
  • Underestimating the effects of heat and glare, particularly on the climb across the Frying Pan
  • Letting myself get physically run down
  • Wearing myself out on the first two days unneccesarily
  • Relying too much on analogy with my experience on Aconcagua
  •  The fact that I was now 43, instead of 32 as I had been on Aconcagua
  • Overconfidence
  • Extraordinary wind 
  • Deeper snow than usual for this time of year
  • A probable mild case of sunstroke on the first trip across the Frying Pan
I started reading up on Muztagh Ata, and trying to sketch out a plan of attack; it may have been Pamirs 1, Hazenberg 0 but I was going to try to equalize the score on the next mountain!

Alex Goldfarb saying prayers in base camp
On Monday, July 16th, barely 12 days after arriving in base camp, I found myself being driven back to Osh by the same driver as before, Marat.  Four hours later I was deposited in the Sunrise II guesthouse and went out to try to get a flight back to Bishkek.  There was nothing until Wednesday, so I had an enforced day of eating, reading and catching up on e-mail.  I also finally got a Kyrgyz SIM card for my phone, and used it to call Terri in Switzerland.  When I got through, she was in tears, and told me that Roger Payne, her neighbour in Leysin and a close personal friend, a man whom I knew well, had been killed a few days earlier in a massiveavalanche while guiding two clients up Mont Blanc.  A huge slab of ice and snow had hurtled down hundreds of metres off Mont Maudit and killed Roger, his two clients and six other climbers in one of the worst climbing accidents in recent years in the Alps.  Terri was devastated at his sudden death, and it put my own “failure” on Peak Lenin into sobering perspective; I hadn’t summited, but at least I was safely down in the lowlands afterwards.  Roger’s death would hang over my thoughts and my decision-making over the weeks to come.   Roger had left behind his climbing partner and wife to grieve for him; I really didn't want to impose the same burden of grief on Terri, so I was determined to err on the side of caution.


Finally, on Wednesday, July 18th, exactly two weeks after flying from Bishkek to Osh, I flew in the opposite direction, headed to the Asia Mountains hotel/headquarters and met up with my friend Eric, ready for the next phase of this summer of Central Asian mountain adventures.







Sunday, April 16, 2017

A couple of Google Maps of our Southern African overlanding trip

Queleas in front of the setting sun at Mwandi View, near Chobe


Now that the main narrative of the blog of Stanley's Travels is done, it's time to start filling in details and looking at things from different perspectives.  In aid of this, I've been busy creating Google Maps.

These two Google Maps might be useful in following the blog, and visualizing where we went.  The maps have all the main places we visited, along with dates, descriptions and a few photos (click on the place markers to see them).  As well, if you click on the layers further down the page, it will show the routes we followed in sections of the trip.  I think it's a reasonably useful resource for following our trip, or to help you, gentle readers, in planning your own African adventures.

Click here for the map of the first section of Stanley's Travels, from March to October of 2016.

Click here for the map of the second section of Stanley's Travels, from December 2016 to March 2017.

I hope the maps (also available in the sidebar of the blog) are useful!

More "best of" posts coming up over the next couple of weeks.

I love maps and flags.  Hope these maps are useful!

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Last Lap of Namibia: A Farewell to Stanley (For Now)

April 11th, Thunder Bay

Bateleur at Moholoholo
I am (finally) writing the final blog post bringing this chapter of Stanley's Travels to a close, at least for now.  I hope to write a few shorter posts on specific topics, trying to summarize some of our experiences for any travellers hoping to follow in our wheel ruts, but this post should bring the narrative of our trip up to date.  It feels good not to owe the blog another post, after being constantly behind for the past 18 months.

A South African Interlude

We took a brief break from Stanley’s Travels from the 7th to the 17th of February.  We flew to Johannesburg and led a trip of international school students on a week-long school trip in and around Kruger National Park.  It was mostly familiar territory, but it was nice to be paid to visit beautiful spots like Blyde River Canyon and Bourke’s Luck Potholes again.  In Kruger, recent rains had transformed the landscape from the drought-stricken brown we had seen back in May to an almost lush green that actually made it harder to see animals.  Our luck with animal encounters on our three game drives was fairly limited, but lack of quantity was compensated by quality in the form of a truly amazing encounter with a male lion just after sunset; he was lying right beside our vehicles, and the roars he produced as he summoned the rest of his pride had our ribs resonating and our hearts pounding.
Lion in Kruger

Drummer at Nyani Cultural Village
Aside from Kruger, the real highlights for us were visiting the Nyani Cultural Village and Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, both near Hoedspruit.  At Nyani, the dance troupe put on a very entertaining and highly polished dance presentation of the history of the local area.  Moholoholo highlighted the ongoing problem of human-wildlife conflict that is on the increase with the rising human population of South Africa.  We got to pet a cheetah that has been habituated to humans (used for presentations to local farmers and villagers to overcome their fear and hatred of big cats), feed injured vultures of all kinds, and meet a celebrity escape artist, the resourceful honey badger Stoffel.  We also heard a number of horrible stories of animals snared, poisoned and shot, and about Moholoholo’s attempts to rehabilitate them.  It was eye-opening, and not entirely optimistic.

The trip finished with a trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, an overwhelming, huge place that is very well designed and thought out, and which has a tremendous selection of artifacts, video, documents and art that present all the multitudinous aspects of life under apartheid and the struggle to end the system over the decades.  It was easily the best museum I had seen in a year and a half of travel.

Part of the dance show at Nyani Cultural Village


Ameib:  Unexpected Loveliness
Juvenile martial eagle at Moholoholo
The evening of Friday, February 17th found us back in Windhoek; we couldn’t pick up Stanley from his open heart surgery until Monday morning, so we spent a couple of days back at the Trans-Kalahari Inn, decompressing from the unexpected stress of actually working.  While there we met a number of fellow overlanders who were either in the process of storing their vehicles or picking up their stored vehicles.  One of the drivers told us that they had been robbed at Ondekaremba (another vehicle storage place where we had stayed in January) by a sneak thief who had targeted their cottage at night and stolen a backpack full of camera gear, credit cards and cash.  We decided that if we did decide to store Stanley, Ondekaremba didn’t sound like a very safe bet, and told ourselves that we would store at Trans-Kalahari Inn instead, if we did in fact decide to hold onto him instead of selling him.

Cape vulture







On Sunday afternoon we moved back to Pension Cori, in the downtown core of Windhoek, run by the irrepressible Rini, and Monday morning found us visiting Gearbox and Diff Doctor to pick up Stanley and his rebuilt transfer case.  It was expensive (32,000 Namibian dollars, or about US$ 2400:  ouch!!), but at least the 4WD worked again, allowing us to explore the desert tracks of Namibia as we had been dreaming for months.  We refilled the refrigerator at Pick’n’Pay supermarket, picked up the new eyeglasses we had both ordered when we were last in town, and headed north and then west out of town, glad to be back in the comfort of Stanley, free to go wherever we wanted.

Southern ground-hornbill, Moholoholo
Phillip's Cave
Where we wanted to go first was the Erongo mountains.  We had driven past them a few weeks before between Walvis Bay and Windhoek, and our guidebooks made them sound intriguing, so we turned off the tarmac at Usakos and headed north on dirt tracks towards Ameib Ranch.  We had driven far enough west that the relative lushness of the central plateau had given way to dusty semi-arid Karoo, and we approached Ameib through a landscape of shattered boulders and a backdrop of steep rocky hills.  Ameib proved to be a beautiful spot, a perfect place for our return to life in Stanley.  We went for a pre-dinner stroll, revelling in the freedom of walking by ourselves through the beautiful African bush, before returning for a campfire on which we braaied up some delicious pork chops.  There were, for once, no stars overhead, and we were plagued by thousands of moths and flying ants, so we retired to bed earlier than usual, glad to be back in the familiar surroundings of our faithful camper.

San petroglyph of a giraffe, Phillip's Cave
Bull's Party, Ameib Ranch
It was not a restful night, as the clouds eventually turned to heavy rain that continued almost until dawn.  We were up a bit late and groggy at 7:30, had a quick breakfast and set off on foot to see Ameib’s premier attraction, the San paintings and petroglyphs of Phillip’s Cave.  It was a beautiful 45-minute hike from the campground, across a dramatic landscape of big boulders, with a sighting of Hartlaub’s spurfowl (a new species for us) as a bonus.  We got to the cave and spent a while taking photos and trying to capture the vivid liveliness of the art with sketches.  It was a fabulous setting, although the art wasn’t quite as good as what we had seen in the Matopo Hills and at Domboshawa in Zimbabwe back in June.  We strolled back and whipped up a brunch of eggs and toast before packing up. 

Bull's Party
We drove first to another of Ameib’s scenic attractions, the boulder-strewn landscape of the Bull’s Party.  Our guidebook didn’t do it justice.  It was one of the most picturesque spots we had seen in southern Africa, with huge boulders perched on tiny eroded pedestals.  The setting, right underneath the cliffs of the barren Erongo mountains, was perfect, and the sky was clear and blue, making for dramatic colour contrasts between the reddish rock and the azure heavens.  There was even a series of modern copies of all the San rock art found on the property of Ameib Ranch:  the hills seem to be full of caves and rock shelters that served as prehistoric art galleries.  It would be rather fun to devote a week to exploring all the lesser-known rock art sites of Ameib on foot, if we were allowed.  The property also has an undisclosed number of black rhinos on it, and the owners are reluctant to give visitors free rein to wander absolutely anywhere in order to protect the rhinos from possible poaching.

A few of the thousands of kites we saw near Usakos feasting on flying termites
As we retraced our path back to the main highway, we began noticing more and more raptors circling in the sky.  Once we had regained the road, the numbers ballooned until we could see thousands of what proved to be yellow-billed kites and black kites filling the air as far as the horizon.  Neither of us had ever seen raptors in such numbers, and it was eerie, rather like Hitchcock’s film The Birds. Looking it up in our field guide, we read that kites often flock in huge numbers wherever there is an emergence of termites. Remembering the huge numbers of flying things that had bombarded us the night before, it all made sense.  The recent rains had prompted the termites to start flying, feeding and breeding, and the kites were feasting on the plague.  It was a good twenty kilometres down the road before we finally got out from underneath the cloud of kites; it reminded us of sitting by the Chobe River at Mwandi View back in September, watching undulating streams of tens of thousands of queleas darkening the setting sun.  Once again we felt privileged to witness another wonder of nature, and we felt as though we were once again living a David Attenborugh documentary.

Welwitschia, Lichens and Sea Lions:  The Skeleton Coast

Prehistoric-looking welwitschia plant
We drove along the main road toward Swakopmund for quite a while before turning off in search of another wonder of nature, this one botanical.  We followed a dirt track a long way south into the barren gravel desert, across the dry bed of the Kuiseb River and up the other side toward Welwitschia Drive.  Welwitschia mirabilis is avery prehistoric-looking plant found only in the desert strip just inland of the Namibian coast, and our guidebook told us (misleadingly, as it turned out) that it occurs only in this tiny area near Swakopmund.  We drove further and further, with Terri at the wheel becoming more and more dubious about the merits of this detour, until finally we recrossed the Kuiseb, crested a rise and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of these huge, tangled masses of long, dry, split leaves.  It was getting late, so after a few quick pictures we hustled back towards Swakopmund.  We were slightly nervous since we had realized, partway along the road, that we were supposed to get a permit beforehand in Swakopmund, and we didn’t want to get busted.  On our way out, passing along a much shorter, more accessible route, we realized that the welwitschias were everywhere around us, and that we hadn’t needed to make a 100-kilometre round trip to see them.  We drove into Swakopmund through a bank of coastal fog and found a place to camp at the almost-empty Mile 4 Campground, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  Sundowners, a delicious stir fry and an early bedtime followed.

Cones of a female welwitschia
It took us absolutely forever to leave town the next day.  Terri had business to do that required an internet connection, and we had errands to run in town:  refilling our big LPG cylinder, getting phone credit, buying groceries, refilling Stanley’s diesel tanks, getting extra drinking water for the desert.  We also thought that we had to get permits for our drive north along the coast, but after searching out the NWR office and finding the permit office closed for lunch, one of the employees heard our lamentations and stuck her head over the balcony to tell us that we didn’t need permits to go as far north as we were planning.  It was 1:30 pm before we finally started rolling north along the “salt road”, a dirt road made almost asphalt-hard by mixing the dirt with brine from the salt works at Walvis Bay.  We could roar along at 90 km/h, and soon enough Swakopmund’s built-up areas fell away and we were out on the emptiness of the Skeleton Coast.

The wreck of the Zeila, Skeleton Coast
Our first stop was to see the Namib Desert’s other big botanical attraction, its black lichens.  We poured a bit of water on them and within seconds they were unfurling, exposing their green photosynthetic surfaces that they had hidden inside them, transforming from black to green in front of our eyes.  From there we continued north to the wreck of the Zeila, one of the many shipwrecks along the treacherous Namibian coast.  It had been colonized by dozens of cormorants who adorned the superstructure, making for good photos as the Atlantic rollers crashed over the deck.

Cape Cross sea lion colony
The main attraction of this long, empty stretch of barren coast is fishing, and every second pickup truck that passed us had a selection of long fishing rods stuck into holders on the front bumpers.  Everyone seems to have their own favourite section of the coastline, and pickup trucks dotted the beach all the way up to Cape Cross.  Cape Cross isa nature reserve set up to protect Cape fur seals (they’re really sea lions, rather than true seals, as we had learned during our voyage on the MV Ushuaia back in 2015), and they seem to be thriving under this protection.  The cape (named for a cross erected by Portuguese sailors searching for a route to India back in the 1400s) is absolutely awash with sea lions, and the air was filled with the sound of their newborn pups and the stench of their droppings.  There’s a fenced-off boardwalk for tourists to use, and it’s a strange sensation, as the sea lions are everywhere around you as you walk, even underneath the wooden boards under your feet.  

Baby sea lion, Cape Cross
Given that sea lion males tend to be aggressive about defending their territories, it was a slightly uneasy feeling to be so close to them.  There was a picnic area for humans, but it had long ago been overrun by sea lions.  Out at sea the waves were dark with bobbing shapes, and the beach was full for several kilometres.  It must be one of the largest sea lion colonies in Africa, and made us realize that to the south of the dark, heaving sea lies Antarctica.  As we walked back to the car, Terri pointed out that I had left the gate ajar to the boardwalk, so I went back to close it.  As I left the gate a second time for the car, a male sea lion nearby decided that I was a threat and began chasing me, making good time on his front flippers over the open ground.  I yelped and ran for it, and eventually the sea lion gave up, but not before giving me a fright and Terri a fit of the giggles.

Perfect Desert Isolation:  Damaraland

Ruppell's korhaan
We drove a bit further north along the coast in the late afternoon before striking off inland along a main road, the D2303.  The Skeleton Coast, for all its mythic quality among Namibian and South African travellers, is a bit bleak, windswept and barren for my taste, with not a scrap of vegetation bigger than the tiny lichens we had photographed, and a cold marine fog hanging over it most of the day.  It felt good to leave this behind as we climbed gently away from the sea, through a desert that was almost as devoid of vegetation, but which had hills, mountains in the distance and a cloudless sky which gave the place a reddish late-afternoon glow that was immediately appealing.  There were subtle variations in texture and colour on the gravel desert and the hills behind, and after a while we saw welwitschia plants appearing on the desert floor; that detour along Welwitschia Drive was looking less necessary with every passing day.  A new bird species, Ruppell’s korhaan, a medium-sized ground bird, made an appearance here and there beside the road, as did a solitary springbok.  

Our first desert camp in Damaraland
Damaraland sunset
We had planned to drive as far as Rhino Camp, on the Ugab River, but since the landscape was so intriguing and Martian, and since it was devoid of settlement or even traffic along the road, we decided to camp wild.  This was, after all, one of the appeals of Damaraland, the area we were now entering:  the freedom to camp just about anywhere, since the area has no commercial farms, almost no local inhabitants and no fences to constrain you.  We picked a spot not far from the D2303, but behind a small rise, and set up camp.  It was really quite windy, so we used Stanley as a windbreak for cooking and sitting.  The wind died down at dusk, making for perfect stargazing conditions, and we sat out until 9:30 looking for meteors and satellites and using Terri’s binoculars to look at some of the big star clusters in the southern heart of the Milky Way.

Tiny desert bush in a desolate gravel plain
Damaraland desert:  can you spot Stanley?
We slept soundly in the profound silence of the desert, and were up just in time for a pretty sunrise over the mountains inland to our east at 7:00.  We had a quick bite to eat, then went for a morning walk to check out our surroundings.  We headed towards a valley that cut into the low hills to our north and were rewarded with views of dramatic rock strata and hardy desert vegetation, along with a new bird species, the mountain wheatear.  We realized that the gravel plains were solid enough to drive on, and that we could have driven a lot further off the road and out of possible sight and parked up for a few days of perfect isolation; we vowed that we would come back to this area in the future to do just that.  We strolled back towards Stanley, who looked very insignificant in the immensity of the desert, did some yoga and then rolled off in the direction of Brandberg West.  Our mechanic in Windhoek had highly recommended a route from Brandberg West to Twyfelfontein, and we were keen to try it.  Our GPS system was less keen, trying to send us the long way around on main roads, but we didn’t pay it any attention; we knew where we wanted to go, and no well-meaning machine was going to stop us!

Dramatic rock strata near Brandberg West
In retrospect, the GPS might have had a point.  It was a tough drive ahead of us, and we didn’t know how tough it was going to be.  On the other hand, it was one of the highlights of Stanley’s Travels in terms of scenery and isolation, so on balance we made the right decision.  Just before Brandberg West the well-made gravel road reached a T-junction.  To the right was the long way around, while to the left was a distinctly less well-maintained jeep track.  We turned left, past an abandoned mine, and bumped our way slowly to the Rhino Camp, run by the Save The Rhino Trust, on the bank of the Ugab River.  It looked like a nice place to camp, but I was glad we had been completely on our own the night before.  The caretaker gave us a photocopy of a hand-drawn sketch map of the route to Twyfelfontein and watched to make sure we didn’t get stuck in the muddy bed of the river; with all the recent rains, the Ugab was flowing much further towards the sea than usual, but with 4WD engaged, it was pretty straightforward. 

The river track from Brandberg West to Twyfelfontein
That was the last straightforward driving of the day.  For the rest of the afternoon Terri steered Stanley up river canyons, over steep rises, around trees, between massive rocks and through a landscape that looked as though it had hardly been touched by man.  We were now a bit further from the dryness of the coast and there were more substantial bushes on the landscape, but it was still a dry, unforgiving place.  Amazingly this rockscape supports the largest free-ranging black rhino population left in the world; some 150 individuals range over a huge area of unfenced land between the coastal desert and the commercial farms of the central plateau.  Unlike rhinos in many of the national parks around Africa, these black rhinos are not constantly followed by dedicated anti-poaching units; they are protected largely by their isolation and by community-based conservation and tourism outfits like the Save The Rhino Trust.  We began to see the milkbushes on which the rhinos browse, and occasional droppings, but no rhinos themselves.  The semi-desert supports elephants as well, but they’re even harder to spot than the rhinos, so although we kept a hopeful eye posted, there were no charismatic pachyderms to be seen.

Getting a bit steep in the canyon!
Pure freedom
It took us a long time and some very concentrated driving by Terri to wrestle ourselves through the canyon that led us uphill away from the Ugab.  No sooner had we emerged onto flatter ground than we managed to shred a tire on a razor-sharp rock that was sticking up.  It took over an hour in the heat of day to wrestle our spare tire off its mounting below the back of the camper and put it on.  As we worked, Terri spotted a small lightning-fast snake zooming around the rocks, looking for something to eat; I was amazed that it could find enough prey to stay alive. I was also glad that we had a second spare just in case, as there were plenty of other sharp rocks around!  We continued up a wider valley and then across rocky highlands into another, much broader valley.  We slowly gained altitude until we debouched out into a beautiful wide-open plain.  We were still 33 km from Twyfelfontein and had only covered 63 km that day, but it had been very slow, demanding driving and this was a pretty place to make camp.  We drove up onto a rise, turned Stanley to act as a windbreak again and settled in. 

Passing through the milkbushes, wondering where the rhinos are
Compared to the previous night’s campsite, this was a positively lush area.  There were welwitschia plants all over the hillside, along with some hardy bushes and small trees and lots of dead wood.  We gathered together enough for a decent-sized fire and grilled lamb chops on the coals along with peppers and onions.  It was one of those perfect evenings that we had come to crave over the course of Stanley’s Travels:  a clear star-filled sky, a roaring fire, delicious food, red wine, lazy conversation and then, after dinner, guitar music beside the fire in the flickering red glow of the flames.  We could have stayed there for days.

Instead, after another night of sound sleep, nestled under our down sleeping bags against the desert chill, we got up for the sunrise and then went off for another exploratory morning hike.  This time we headed south, towards an intriguing canyon that cut into nearby mountains.  We walked past endless patches of welwitschia and down into a broad gorge that must flood occasionally; big trees and dense bushes flourished in the bottom of the gorge, presumably drawing water from not too far below the surface.  There were rhino droppings absolutely everywhere, and lots of animal tracks, but again no rhinos.  I think that if we had camped there a few days, we might have gotten lucky, as the valley was clearly a big transit route for animals.  We were keen to move on, though, so we made our way back to Stanley to head to Twyfelfontein.

The track did not become significantly easier that morning, and it continued to demand total concentration from Terri at the wheel as we navigated steep hills, rock fields and tricky drop-offs.  The hardest driving was always the steep headlands between valleys.  Not far from Twyfelfontein we stopped at a solar-powered waterhole that was absolutely surrounded by rhino tracks and droppings.  These desert rhinos are nocturnal, spending the day in the shadow of milkbushes, so we weren’t surprised not to see them walking around, but it was amazing that they could hide so successfully during the day in what was a pretty open landscape.  Looking at some of the milkbushes, they seemed crushed on one side, as though a large animal had been sheltering from the sun by lying on the outlying branches.  It was encouraging to know that, in a world in which rhinos are being slaughtered at such a high rate, these rhinos were still surviving and thriving in this empty desolation.  On a mountain top overlooking the waterhole we spotted the remains of what had once been a tourist lodge; it was hard to imagine that there have ever been enough tourists in this area to support a lodge.

Hartmann's mountain zebra
The last few kilometres out to the main road at Burnt Mountain were among the toughest so far; it was as though the track had been left in particularly miserable condition to discourage the unprepared and unwary from trying to drive on it from Twyfelfontein.  One highlight was spotting a Hartmann’s mountain zebra, a distinct subspecies with different stripes, a completely white belly and stripes all the way down his legs to his hoofs.  He wasn’t very close by and seemed skittish, so we didn’t get great photos, but it was great to tick another animal off our mammal guide.  At the end of the track, we bypassed Burnt Mountain and the Organ Pipes; Burnt Mountain we could see from the road (a rather unimpressive black-sided mountain), and Organ Pipes was a long hike in and we had to pay an entrance fee.  Twyfelfontein lay only 6 km up the road (we were back on a proper gravel highway) and we were keen to see its San petroglyphs.

Twyfelfontein petroglyphs, including Lion Man
As Namibia’s first UNESCO WorldHeritage site, Twyfelfontein draws in the crowds.  There were quite a few cars in the parking lot, as well as a big tour bus that had just arrived.  Terri hustled us along ahead of the bus tourists (not hard, as they were pretty elderly and moved slowly) and got us going on our tour.  Unlike at many of our other rock art sites, we had to take along a tour guide, so we didn’t have a chance to sit and try to sketch what we were seeing.  On the other hand, it was remarkably hot at Twyfelfontein, and it wasn’t the sort of day to sit around in the sun.  The site consists of a horseshoe-shaped cliff with lots of fallen flat chunks of rock at the bottom.  On some of these rock chunks San hunter-gatherers have, over the centuries and millennia, carved petroglyphs depicting animals and hunters.  We had mostly seen painting sites before, although Phillip’s Cave had been a mix of paintings and petroglyphs, and it was fascinating to see such a huge collection of carved hunting scenes.  As the biggest collection of San petroglyphs, Twyfelfontein has attracted lots of scholarly speculation as to the meaning of the art.  The most famous carving at the site, the Lion Man, is cited as evidence that the art commemorates the trance state that tribal shamans enter into; the lion has five toes on each foot (real lions have only four toes, while humans have five), and its unnaturally long tail ends with a human hand.  Other depictions are more natural, and include just about every animal hunted by the San, as well as seals and penguins they must have seen during trips to the coast.  It was a quick tour, but gave us a good flavour of the art to be found in this Neolithic Louvre.

Dassie rat, Twyfelfontein
After our tour, we sat and rehydrated (did I mention that it was hot?) and watched a dassie rat scurrying around under the table; he looked uncommonly like an oversized gerbil.  We also topped up our drinking water supply before driving along the main road towards Palmwag.  We were back in populated country, with Damara villages dotted here and there across the landscape.  Palmwag Lodge is the entrance point into an enormous private safari concession which extends over 450,000 hectares, with black rhinos as their star attraction.  We spent the evening camped in the rather pricey main campground (N$ 410, or nearly US$ 30), where we took advantage of having running water and electricity to have much-needed showers, wash clothes, bake bread, pre-cook delicious baked beets and Bolognese sauce as well as some fine chicken curry.  That evening as we prepared for bed, a loud snuffling sound just beyond our campsite had the hair on the back of my neck standing on end:  it sounded big and near, and I wondered if a hyena was sniffing around for food scraps.  Instead our spotlight picked out a new animal for us:  a porcupine.  He was enormous and comical, with his quills sticking straight up off his back like a Mohawk, and a shuffling, hesitant gait to go along with his loud sniffing.  Two new animals in one day!  We went to bed happy.

The rugged track through Palmwag Concession
The next morning I rolled our flat tire over to the tire repair shop at the lodge.  As I had feared, since the rock had punctured the sidewall, there was no hope of patching it.  Instead we bought a new tire and spent some time reattaching it to the underside of Stanley.  Before driving off, we walked around the grounds of the Palmwag Lodge, a beautifully landscaped spot looking out over a dry riverbed that’s apparently a favourite among desert elephants.  We saw lots of familiar bird species, and then retreated to Stanley for a delicious meal of roasted beets and potatoes.  We then packed up, bought a permit for camping in the back country of the Palmwag Concession and drove into the concession for an overnight exploratory drive.

Perfect campsite in Palmwag Concession
The landscape was rugged, red and unrelenting, making for driving that was of a similar difficulty to what Terri had driven over the two previous days.  We took lots of smaller tracks, looking for game, but we saw little other than one tiny steenbok and a hardy gemsbok.  We stopped in at Van Zyl’s Gat, a scenic gorge in the dry river valley, and then continued along to the “campsite” at the confluence of the (dry) Barab and Awab rivers.  It was just a point on the map, with no facilities, but Stanley had full water tanks, a full larder drawer and a full refrigerator, so we were completely self-sufficient.  It was a very pretty spot to camp, and we relaxed in the shade of an enormous tree, out of the harsh sun, before Terri kindled a roaring fire and we cooked up spaghetti Bolognese on our gas stove.  The campfire was perfect, and we looked forward to exploring the river bed on foot the next morning.  I pulled out my faithful Martin Backpacker guitar for some tunes, but discovered that after 16 years of faithful, intensive service it was failing; the glue that holds it together was dying in the dry desert air, and the soundboard was cracking; as a result the neck had twisted and it was no longer possible to tune it in such a way that all chords sounded good.  I improvised by tuning it to sound OK in E and transposing all the songs into E, but it was clearly nearing the end of its useful life.

Desert wood, Palmwag
There were rhino droppings everywhere on the ground, so we were hopeful of spotting a black rhino.  Just before we went to bed, we couldn’t resist the urge to experiment by burning some of the rhino poo; after all, in other treeless areas of the world, like Tibet, dried herbivore dung is burned as fuel.  It burned well, but it definitely had a fairly rank odour that lingered throughout the night, much to Terri’s annoyance.  We chalked that up as an experiment that was worth trying once, but only once.

We slept well in the chilly silence of the desert, disturbed only by the nearby yipping of jackals at 4 am.  The following day we woke up to windless loveliness at our campsite, and went out for a walk along the riverbed.  It was once again a perfect setting for a walk, utterly isolated from other humans, full of birds and rhino tracks and poo.  Unfortunately the lack of wind attracted flies, and they latched onto us as the only nearby source of moisture and food, so we ended up cutting short our walk and retreating to Stanley.  We drove up the Barab River, through stark, rugged, beautiful landscape.  It was non-trivial driving for Terri, with plenty of technical challenge, but we were rewarded with a lot more wildlife than we had seen in the last few days in the arid areas.  We spotted a small herd of kudu making their way across a gravel plain, a large herd of springbok and several scattered gemsbok.  We also spotted a couple of ostriches and two magnificent giraffe; search as we might, there were no elephants or rhinos to be seen. 

Desert totem, Palmwag
The Palmwag Concession is supposed to be home to the majority of Namibia’s free-ranging rhinos, and they run an expensive high-end camp, the Desert Rhino Camp, in the southeast section of the concession; they seem to have very good luck in spotting the rhinos, but we had looked at prices and decided that we weren’t ready to shell out that kind of money.  Another thing that puts Palmwag on the self-drive 4x4 map is its access, at the northern end, to the Hoanib River, a well-known dry riverbed that provides a test of 4x4 driving ability.  Since we had unexpectedly just had a similar experience a few days before, we didn’t feel any need to try again, especially with rumours of further rain and flooding coming.

By 1:40 we had looped back to the exit from the concession and regained the main C43 gravel road.  Drained by another two days of hard off-road driving, Terri gladly handed over the wheel to me and let me cover in 90 minutes the same distance we had done in two days.  As we drove along the road, the landscape changed subtly, becoming slightly less arid.  It was still very dry and dusty, but now settlements and villages began to pop up along the road.  Our perfect desert isolation was over.  We were now leaving behind Damaraland and entering Kaokoland, the home of the Ovahimbapeople, the most colourful of Namibia’s ethnic groups.

Kaokoland:  The Himba Heartland

Desert giraffe, Palmwag
It was at this point that our lack of in-depth research cost us.  We drove along the main road towards the turnoff to Sesfontein, and then turned right, away from Sesfontein, on a direct route towards Opuwa and Epupa Falls.  As it turned out, this route lies too far from the coast to be through uninhabited arid land suitable for wild camping.  Looking it up afterwards, we would have had a better chance of finding wild places to camp had we turned left, driven past Sesfontein and towards Purros, much closer to the coast.  On our chosen route, there were villages every few kilometres and herders driving cattle and goats everywhere inbetween.  We were crossing the Joubertsberge, a highland area, and it was difficult even to see where it would be possible to drive off the road in most places.  Keeping our eyes peeled unsuccessfully for wild camping spots, we ended up driving all the way to Opuwa, where we arrived in the late afternoon.  After days of passing through bush and tiny settlements, Opuwa was a shock, a big town, regional capital and service centre to the surrounding Kunene region.  We were filling Stanley’s tanks with diesel when I suddenly wondered why we were tilting to one side.  I walked around behind Stanley and found one of our back tires almost flat.  I asked to use the gas station’s air compressor, only to find that it was out of order.  I pulled out our small compressor and refilled the tire, but the sound of air rushing out convinced me that we weren’t going to get far on this tire. Luckily there was a tiny tire repair joint across the road, and after some hard bargaining we got the gash repaired.  We both wondered, only half jokingly, whether the tire repair people spread tacks across the road just outside town; our flat tire had clearly happened not very long ago, and the repair shop was doing a very brisk business.

We had given up on wild camping for that evening, and sunset was drawing near, but Opuwa didn’t appeal to either of us as a place to spend the night.  We drove off towards Epupa Falls, looking for wild camping possibilities (it was too densely settled) and following a GPS suggestion that there was a community campsite ahead.  We found it (despite a distinct lack of signs) at the Ovahimba Living Museum, about 45 km from Opuwa.  It was after sunset and the campsite was devoid of other customers, but it turned out to be an inspired serendipitous choice.  The young Ovahimba man who ran the place, John, was engaging and funny and full of information.  We fired up a campfire to sit around after dinner and were just settling in for a good chinwag when the skies opened up and sent Terri and I scuttling back to Stanley and our bed.

Owl droppings, full of tiny bones and claws
The next morning (Monday, February 27th) we woke up to a beautiful setting, with dense bush spilling down the slopes of a large hill and a big cave right behind us.  I woke up early to the sound of birds, but despite some assiduous searching, I found it hard to spot anything.  Eventually, though, I was rewarded with my first spotting of a Damara hornbill high in the trees.  We walked up to the cave with John in search of San paintings.  There are a few, but they’re chipped, faded and blackened by smoke.  On the positive side, though, the setting and the view from the cave are magnificent, and the cave is also home to a resident owl and several bats.  We didn’t spot the owl itself, but we found its droppings, full of tiny bones and claws from the small nocturnal animals it hunts.  We returned to Stanley for breakfast and to pack up, then went across to the Living Museum itself, another project started by the entrepreneurial John. 

Himba baby
We found a small village of wood and adobe huts, lived in by maybe 10 families.  John was quite proud of the fact that the people in this village wear traditional clothing uncorrupted by cheap Chinese textiles.  We paid a fairly reasonable admission price (N$ 250, if I remember correctly) which paid for a song-and-dance show.  I am often not a big fan of this sort of cultural tourism, as it often seems staged and artificial, but this was different.  There were five Ovahimba women, magnificent with their ochre-and-mud plaited hairdos, their bare breasts and their babies on their backs, and four Ovahimba men, athletic and tough.  They stood in a semi-circle, slightly self-conscious as they sang and clapped, and after a while one or two of them would detach from the group to dance.  Terri and I both got invited up to dance, and it really was a lot of fun.  After a while, as the dancing died away, we walked around the village, chatting (through John) with the women.  It was neatly kept, and as John pointed out, there was no plastic rubbish littering the ground as is so often the case in Africa.  




The project seems to provide an economic basis for these villagers to continue living their traditional lifestyles with their goats and cattle and maize crops while generating enough cash income to function in the modern economy.  We were impressed by the pottery that the village produced, and the potter, the oldest female dancer, posed proudly with her creations.  On a sadder note her son sat beside the village in a wheelchair selling souvenirs and handicrafts; he had been injured in a car crash months earlier and was finding it difficult to get any medical care, even in the town of Opuwa.  His condition was apparently improving, but only very slowly, and he clearly would have benefited from proper physiotherapy.  Seeing cases like this makes you realize that access to medical care, like access to decent education, is one of the key drivers in the great wave of urbanization taking place all over the world.
John and the man he's trying to help


Dancing at the Ovahimba Living Museum
We drove away from the Ovahimba Living Museum pleased with our luck in having stopped there.  There were no other commercial campgrounds to be seen along the road, and very few wild camping chances as the countryside continued to be fairly populated.  We drove 145 km north along a decent dirt road, gradually descending from the plateau towards the Kunene River which forms the northern border of Namibia with Angola.  It was dry, dusty country, but the dryness and dustiness was increased by the obvious overgrazing by goats.  We found ourselves longing for the unpopulated wilderness of a few days previously.  By 2:00 we had arrived in Epupa village.  After looking through all 3 of the main possibilities, we settled on Epupa Camping; since we were planning to spend a couple of nights, we wanted a good location, and Epupa Camping, despite the above-average cost of N$320, offered the most isolation and the best views.  We chatted with our neighbours, went for a run (Terri was finally able to run on her injured leg for the first time in 5 months) and had one of our best-ever sunsets.  However as we polished off the end of our spaghetti Bolognese it began to rain and we took shelter under our awning, glad that we had upgraded from our previous toy awning.

Epupa sunset
Epupa Falls:  the main cataract
Tuesday was the last day of February and it was a delightful day of no driving.  We lazed over breakfast, then walked along the Kunene River downstream to the falls themselves.  Namibia is a country almost without rivers; other than the Caprivi Strip, its two permanently-flowing rivers are theKunene, forming the northern border with Angola, and the Orange River, forming the southern border with South Africa.  After weeks of driving around the country without seeing flowing surface water, it was a bit overwhelming to see the volume of flow surging over the falls and plunging down into a narrow cleft in the rock.  The Kunene is fed by rainfall in the highlands of Angola, and looks strangely out of place flowing through the dry semi-desert of northwestern Namibia.  We picked our way downstream, getting different views of the falls; like Iguazu Falls in South America, it’s composed of perhaps a hundred separate waterfalls spaced out over a length of a kilometre and a half, and it looked very different from every spot we stopped for photos.  We had a good hike and spotted lots of birds.  As an oasis of moisture in a very dry part of the country, the Kunene River attracts a lot of birds not seen in the rest of Namibia, and lots of the tourists at Epupa Falls were keen birders.  I found it equally alluring to gaze across the river at forbidden Angola and wonder what it would be like to explore.  We had found a year before that as non-residents in South Africa, the Angolans wouldn’t give us a visa in Cape Town; if we ever do want to drive Stanley north into Angola, we’ll have to get visas ahead of time in Canada and New Zealand (or the Netherlands and Switzerland?).  We walked back to our campsite, lunched and then spent the afternoon running, reading and sorting photos.  As we went to bed after eating the last of our curry (that one night at Palmwag Lodge campsite had produced a lot of food for the following days), it began to spit rain again.

An overview of Epupa Falls
Wednesday, March 1st we woke up to grey skies, and after a quick breakfast of muesli, it began to rain a little more seriously as we packed up.  We were driving upstream along the Kunene on what had once been a hair-raising 4WD track; it had very recently been improved into a proper gravel road, and what had once taken 2 days was over in two and a half hours, as we rolled into the small town of Swartbooisdrift after 80 fairly uneventful kilometres.  The new road was in great shape and led through pretty country right beside the river, dotted with tiny Ovahimba villages.  It was just as well that the road was good, as it started to rain harder.  We congratulated ourselves on having survived the worst stretch of road and continued driving along the river towards Ruacana Falls.

Epupa Falls
The self-congratulation was rather premature, as it became immediately clear that the work crews had not yet gotten to this part of the road.  There was no gravel base and no drainage, and with the heavy rain the clay surface of the road was as slippery as a skating rink.  It was only 35 km to the end of the track and the beginning of asphalt at Ruacana and it took over 3 hours of white-knuckle 4WD work by Terri.  We spun sideways half a dozen times, and once or twice began to slide sideways on the slight camber of the track straight towards a drop into the river.  The absolute worst, though, was near the end when we had to drive down a steep hill on slippery clay; we were in low-range 4WD and still nearly ended up facing backwards in the ditch.  It was an impressive tribute to Terri’s driving skills that we arrived in one piece at Ruacana Falls.  We had planned to camp there, but it was still bucketing down rain and we decided to use up the poor weather in travelling, rather than camping in a downpour.  Ruacana Falls had apparently once rivalled Epupa for its awe-inspiring beauty, but a huge hydroelectric dam now diverts most of the flow through turbines. 

Along the Caprivi Strip

Himba women with spectacular hairstyles
At the town of Ruacana the road finally pulled away from the Kunene River and entered into the flat, rather dull agricultural heartland of Namibia.  Namibia is divided in two by an agricultural fence, the Red Line; to the south of this line there are big commercial farms, and to the north lie communal lands.  Since the commercial farmers are mostly white and the communal farmers are almost entirely black, that Red Line is sort of the boundary between the white and black areas of the country, although there’s no formal apartheid-style separation of the races like that.  The area through which we were passing, the home territory of the Owambo people, is not inherently interesting, so we wanted to zip through at speed on the way to the Caprivi Strip.  However, the upshot of being north of the Red Line (we had passed through it just outside Palmwag) was that there are very few fences around farms, leaving cows and goats to roam freely across the road.  Between the cows and the continuing rain, we made slower progress than you might expect.  We ended up camped in the junction town of Ondangwa in a “rest camp” that was really a big muddy parking lot around a loud restaurant.  There had been so much rain there that day that Stanley sank right into the ground and we needed to engage 4WD low range to get him out again.  We were tired and settled for a pizza at the restaurant before collapsing into bed, where we tried to sleep through the racket being made by our drunk neighbours.

Me with two of the Himba dancers
The next day was not one of the finest days of our trip.  We were on our way towards Livingstone, Zambia, for the last time on this trip to do some work at Terri’s school there, the Olive Tree Learning Centre.  It was a long, long drive, so we made decent kilometres that day along a monotonous road full of straying livestock and not much else.  It had been raining heavily over the previous few days and the ground beside the road was saturated and full of puddles.  (Two weeks later this area would completely flood as a pulse of water draining from the Angolan highlands arrived downstream and overflowed the banks of the dry river channels.  The El Nino drought is most certainly over in most of southern Africa.)  Partway along the road we noticed that our indicator lights were behaving strangely, sometimes not going on, sometimes going on but not flashing.  We decided that this was the sort of thing that traffic cops would fine us for, so we thought it would be a good idea to go to an auto electrician to get it sorted out.  The sizeable town of Rundu seemed like a good spot to do this; looking for campgrounds on our GPS and our Kavango tourist map, we found a few likely-looking camps just west of Rundu and set course for them.

The Kavango River, better knowndownstream in Botswana as the Okavango River (as in the Okavango Delta) joined us from Angola not too far west of Rundu, and since it is a legendary fishing and birdwatching river, its banks are dotted with campgrounds.  The first one we tried, about 50 km outside Rundu, was impassable thanks to flooding; we tried to drive in, but the water and mud just kept getting deeper and deeper, while a sign recommended driving along a nearby road and then taking a boat.  We gave up and decided to stay right in Rundu town, which turned out to be a very expensive mistake.  The first campground we looked at in Rundu was rejected because it looked run-down and a bit too much like the municipal campground in Upington where our chairs and table got stolen.  Instead we opted for the Sarusungu River Lodge on the outskirts of town, right on the banks of the Kavango River looking out towards Angola.  We found a pretty site on the lawn and set up camp.  There were plenty of birds to look at, and the rain that hit just as we arrived had stopped in time for a nice campfire and braai.  We sat outside eating, drinking wine and enjoying the atmosphere.

A proud potter and one of her pots
As we were going to bed, we couldn’t find Terri’s binoculars, which I had put inside the cab of the truck just before dinner.  We didn’t think too much about this, but the next morning, as we were cooking up a feast of bacon and eggs, I had another look and realized that not only were her binoculars not in the cab of the truck, neither were my binoculars nor my camera bag.  With a horrifying sinking feeling, we realized that while we were eating the previous night, someone had sneaked up behind the truck, opened the driver’s side door and grabbed what he could from the interior.  My camera equipment, which had served me so well for a decade of travel, was gone.

The rest of the morning was a complete write-off.  We told the hotel manager, who (only now!) told us that there was no night security guard, an absolute necessity at any well-run campsite.  He called the police and after a long wait some detectives came out to investigate.  They struck me as pretty competent, so I had some faint hope that they might eventually recover the stolen gear, but our experience at the police station in town, where we had to go to open the case officially, put an end to this fond hope.  We stood in line (if a milling scrum can be considered a line) while the desk officers kept their heads down and studiously ignored everyone.  After an hour and a half, we only got served because one of the detectives wandered by and we collared him and enlisted his help.  A very bored female officer filled out the form and gave us a case number and we were finally free to go.

The great irony is that the only reason we wanted to stop near Rundu was to get the indicator lights seen to, and as we left town, the only auto electrician we could find online was nowhere to be found in the physical world of Rundu.  We drove off, materially poorer and with malfunctioning indicator lights, not in the best of moods.  We looked in at River Dance Lodge as we continued east along the Kovango:  it was a soggy 4WD slog to get there from the highway, and while it was pretty, it was pricey (N$600 a night for the two of us, or nearly US$ 45, just to camp) so we turned it down and continued along the road towards the junction town of Divundu.  We picked another camp along the river, Ngepi Camp, from our guidebook, plugged it into the GPS and drove along as the afternoon turned to evening, looking for it.  It was about 10 km down the road towards the Botswana Border and 4 km along an exceedingly muddy track decorated with very amusing road signs.  We pulled into camp in complete darkness and had dinner at the restaurant before setting up camp and retiring to bed.

Amazing hairdo!
We discovered in the morning that we had chosen well.  Ngepi is an oasis ofbeauty along the river, well run and cleverly designed, with lots of quirky, amusing names and structures.  The toilets and bathrooms each have great views, usually over the river, and each campsite is nestled beside the river, sheltered from its neighbours by generous stands of trees.  The place is a birdwatcher’s dream, with different sets of species in and around the river, in the dense riverine thickets and in the grasslands further inland.  The camp sprawls a long way along the river, but never feels overcrowded, even when a big overland truck pulls in (they have their own separate part of the complex).  There are fairly luxurious riverside cottages and “tree houses” for those who aren’t camping, and 22 campsites for the likes of us.  It was a beautiful place to unwind and to try to forget the theft.  We had a long, leisurely breakfast of pancakes and bacon, went for a few exploratory walks, ran, did some yoga beside the river and then sheltered from another torrential downpour in the later afternoon.  We had some penne with a salmon and cream sauce (we were trying to eat our way through our dry food and tinned supplies) and then sat around a fire once the rain had abated, sipping fine pinotage wine and enjoying the sounds of the night, including the nearby splashing and grunting of hippos and the sound of elephants across the Kavango River in the national park.

It was such a lovely place that we resolved to return to stay there in a few days as our farewell to Namibia.  We were down to very few days left on the continent; it was now the evening of March 4th, and we were flying out of Windhoek on the morning of March 16th.  After a year of travel, being down to 12 days on the clock was a bit sad, and we wanted to make sure that we made them all count.

A Zambian Sidetrip

On Sunday, March 5th we had a long day of driving to get to Livingstone, Zambia.  We drove to the eastern end of the Caprivi Strip, then southeast into Botswana at Ngoma Bridge.  We cut across Chobe National Park on the transit road (on which you don’t have to pay park fees); we spotted a few baboons and impala, and a magnificent male sable antelope.  From Kasane, at the eastern end of the park, we continued to the ferry at Kazungula, where we crossed into the unpleasant chaos of a Zambian border crossing; after the orderly, organized border crossings in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, it was a rude return to reality.  We fought our way through the chaos, paid our extortionate visa and car import fees (they added up to over US$ 150 between the two of us) and drove the final 60 km into Livingstone.  We headed directly to the calm of Olga’s Italian Corner for a celebratory meal, then set up camp at JollyboysCampsite, where we had spent two weeks back in August.

Himba singing
The two full days we spent in Livingstone were, in fact, full, packed with errands and jobs to do.  Terri wanted to make sure that Olive Tree Learning Centre (OTLC), the community pre-school and primary school that she has supported and worked with and fundraised for over the past decade, was on firm financial footing.  In 2016 the last-ever group of students from Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), Terri’s school, had come for 10 unforgettable days, having raised a bumper crop of donations.  Much of that was spent on building a new school building that allows OTLC to go up to grade 3 this year and grade 4 next year, as well as providing space for a library, computer classroom and space for income-generating activities.  Terri spent a lot of time getting the banking and bureaucratic details of running the school sorted out, and we got to see the new building in full use.  Terri even bought a sit-down toilet for the school latrine for the teachers and any future volunteers to use.  I was amazed at the atmosphere of calm, studious activity that we saw at the school; the various teachers have grown and matured into their roles and now lead their classes with great confidence.  I always feel proud of Terri’s accomplishments when I see OTLC, and never more so than on this visit.  I hope that OTLC continues to grow and thrive while giving hundreds of young Zambians a chance to get a solid educational grounding for their futures.

At the end of the second day, we went out for one last sunset at the Royal Livingstone Hotel, where our trip began almost exactly one year earlier.  As usual there was a dramatic sunset over the Zambezi River that lit up the plumes of water vapour rising from Victoria Falls.  There was a sense of closure, of completing a year-long circle, as we sat there basking in the last embers of the gloaming.  From now on, everything would be backtracking back to Windhoek.

Wednesday, March 8th found us retracing the day-long trek back across Botswana to the Caprivi Strip.  Once again the Zambian side of Kazungula was a disgraceful mayhem, with a mafia of touts and would-be car-watchers, liars and scam artists besieging the border crossers.  It felt good to roll off onto the other side into the calm of Botswana.  We had a series of slight delays that all added up to us rolling back into Ngepi Camp well after dark, where we took the most distant and isolated of the campsites, number 22, which we had scouted out during our previous visit.

The Final Days:  A Charmed Existence

We spent four delightful nights and three indolent days in Ngepi, watching the river flow by, sheltering from the persistent rain (it finally let up the day before we left), trying to fish (I managed to lose all my remaining hooks and sinkers, along with a rather nice lure borrowed from the camp office, on snags.  No fish were harmed in my attempts to fish.)  Terri and I, acutely aware of how little time we had left, savoured every evening with its campfire, braai, wine, stars and sounds of hippos.  It seemed as though this past year had been leading up to this, camping in an area of great natural beauty, watching birds, cooking, eating well, going for runs in the bush, talking with interesting fellow travellers (a couple from Martha’s Vineyard were particularly interesting; he is a scuba instructor who has worked all over the world, further firing my desire to do the same over the next few years; they are travelling with a drone, and had some great footage of hippos taken over the river), and generally relaxing and drinking in how fortunate we have been to do such a wonderful, life-altering trip. 

Stanley at our first desert campsite in Damaraland
Despite our complete lack of binoculars and camera, we still managed to tick off a few new bird species:  the chirping cisticola, the grey-backed camaroptera, the yellow-bellied greenbul and the African barred owlet.  I was particularly proud of our spotting of the owlet, as we heard it calling in the night while we were sitting by the campfire.  We recognized it as an unfamiliar call, and thought it sounded owl-like, so we sneaked up on the source of the sound quietly until we could see it silhouetted against the moonlight, then turned on our spotlight and saw it very clearly for five seconds before it flew off in annoyance.  The majority of the South African and Namibian tourists at Ngepi were there either for the birding (there were some very serious twitchers around) or the fishing, so we felt we were making the most of the opportunities for both.

Our last night at Ngepi, Saturday March 11th, was almost elegiac, as we had so few nights left inside Stanley.  We had had our first rainless day in a long time, and I braaied some luscious lamb chops over the embers of our wood fire before we stoked it up again into a roaring inferno.  That was the night that we tracked down our owlet, and we basked in the glow of our achievement as we sipped our crisply chilled Sauvignon Blanc and followed it up with the last of our Bowmore Black Rock single malt, which we had been carrying around for a couple of months.  The moon was almost full and lit up the ripples on the fast-flowing Kavango, and we heard the hippos splashing disconcertingly nearby.  It could not have been a more fitting ending to the outward leg of Stanley’s Travels.

We still had a long drive back to Windhoek, and we did it in one long day (515 km) to near Grootfontein, and two shorter days (343 km and 260 km) to Otjira Lodge and Trans-Kalahari Lodge.  Leaving Ngepi, we were awoken in the pre-dawn by hippos who had been out grazing and who were snorting directly beside Stanley; we were glad to be sleeping well above ground level!  Then as we made breakfast we could hear a distinctive animal sound from across the river, like a handsaw cutting through a log; the owner of Ngepi was passing by from his house (just beside campsite 22) and told us that it was a leopard.  We had a prolonged look across the river, but although the sound continued and moved upstream, we never spotted the leopard.  We drove to Rundu and stopped in briefly at the useless police station, where we got no help at all on the case of the stolen camera, then angled south towards Grootfontein.  We passed through the Red Line at a veterinary checkpoint (as usual, no meat and fresh animal products are to be taken from the communal farming area to the north into the foot-and-mouth-free zone of commercial farms to the south of the fence) and suddenly the landscape was transformed.  Gone were the sprawling villages and livestock standing in the middle of the road; in their place were huge, almost empty tracts of commercial farmland.  Just before Grootfontein we turned off towards Bush Baby Lodge (not to be confused with the lovely spot we camped near Hluhluwe National Park over New Year’s Eve) and camped in a sadly neglected campground there.  It was a lovely setting, and we had the obligatory campfire and braai, grilling up a boerewors, the delicious farmer’s sausages to which we had become addicted over the past couple of months.  It was the last full moon of the trip and it peeked out briefly between clouds before we retired to bed.

Monday, March 13th we continued south to Otjiwarongo, where we did our last grocery shopping of the trip, then visited the amazing AfriCat foundation south of town.  A jovial ex-teacher named Johan, whom we had last seen as the temporary manager of Trans-Kalahari Inn a month ago in Windhoek, had just started working as the educational outreach officer at AfriCat and Terri was curious to see the operation and to investigate the possibility of having a group of overseas students come and do a few days at the educational camp.  AfriCat is doing for leopards and cheetahs what Moholoholo is doing in South Africa for all sorts of wildlife:  providing a place to rehabilitate big cats who are involved in conflict with local farmers and villagers.  It was a beautiful place, and we are both keen to go back sometime leading a school group, as it would be an unforgettable experience of a lifetime for high school students.  Bidding a fond farewell to Johan, we drove back towards Otjiwa Lodge, a place we had stayed at a month previously on our wayback from Etosha.  We camped again in campsite 10, the furthest removed from the lodge and from other campers, and had our last night in Stanley.  Luckily the weather was perfect, the campfire blazed merrily and we had a claret sunset that took our breath away, even after the hundreds of great sunsets we had seen over the previous twelve months.  The just-past-full moon rose in the east an hour later in a blaze of orange glory just as we were tucking into some sosaties (skewers of meat, vegetables and other goodies) and the best baked sweet potato either of us had ever tasted.  We lingered beside the fire as I played tunes on the hopelessly out-of-tune cracked ruin of my Martin guitar, reluctant to say goodbye to an outdoors lifestyle that we had been perfecting right up until the end.  Finally, though, we crawled up into bed to sleep on our ridiculously thick and comfortable mattress, lulled to sleep by the now-familiar sounds of the African night.

And then, suddenly, shockingly, it was over.  We drove into Windhoek the next morning and stopped to spend N$ 150 (US$ 11) to get Stanley thoroughly washed and cleaned, inside and out.  We made it to Trans-Kalahari Inn in the early afternoon, just ahead of a tremendous rainstorm, and had a long afternoon siesta, suddenly tired now that all the travelling was over.  Terri cooked up the last fabulous lamb stew of the trip and we struggled with poor quality internet, trying to arrange our post-Stanley travels and lives.

Wednesday, March 15th found us busy all day, cleaning, packing and putting Stanley away.  We pulled out almost everything from inside, cleaned what we could with a shop vac and lots of soap and water and elbow grease, then packed away everything that we weren’t taking with us.  It was a lot of work, but worth it.  By the end of the day (which was mercifully sunny and dry) Stanley was spic and span and ready for a year (or two) in storage.  We had decided in the end to store him at Trans-Kalahari, since Ondekaremba seemed to have security issues; after the debacle in Rundu, security was paramount in our minds.  There are a lot of vehicles stored at Trans-Kalahari, many of them Dutch and German and Swiss; their owners have mostly shipped them down to Walvis Bay and fly down once or twice a year to do a month’s travelling.  

We paid our fees (at N$ 6000, or US$ 450 for a year, it’s a relative bargain) and on the morning of Thursday, March 16th we drove Stanley into one of the huge hangars on the property, handed over the keys and caught a lift to the nearby airport.  A blur of flights (Windhoek-Johannesburg-Dubai, where Terri and I parted ways after 19 months of being almost inseparable, then Dubai-Auckland for her and Dubai-Toronto-Thunder Bay).  Eight and a half months of overland travel around southern Africa, some 35, 178 kilometres, were at an end, but already we were thinking about where we want to go the next time we fly to Windhoek to start Stanley’s Travels 2.0.  (Spoiler alert:  Damaraland and the Kaokoveld figure prominently in these plans!) 

It's only been 4 weeks since we left Namibia, and already it seems a lifetime and half a world away. It's astonishing how quickly we adjust to another mode of existence!  Stay tuned for a few more blog posts and an updated Google Map over the next few weeks as I try to tease out the absolute best places and experiences from what has been an amazing trip in every respect.