Here’s something I’ve not done before: climbed a dune and got into bed. My bedroom is called the NamibRand nature reserve, and it’s about the size of a biggish English county. I’m sharing it with a few creatures that are frightened of me (like leopards and cheetahs) and a few that aren’t (like weaver birds, which are now eating out of my hand). With me, spread out along the dune, are my wife, a few very engaging Italians, a cook, a guide, and the “housekeeper” Hans, who has a special talent: finding golden moles.
Of the guests, none of us had ever experienced anything like this before. After all, this is something of a unique, Namibian specialty; the Room with an Extra View. It also happens to be something the Namibians excel at; wild adventures without wild prices. If you’re prepared to do the driving, they’ll come up with the new ideas. Of course, in central and northern Namibia, they’ve been doing this for years. But we wanted to see what’s been happening down here. So, here we are, on a
12-day road trip, touring the sandy south.
Up on the dune, we know it won’t rain — this is hyper-arid desert — but it will get chilly. The temperature here doesn’t drop, it swoops. One minute, it’s a luxurious 25°C, the next it’s cool-box cold. That’s when we all zip ourselves up inside “swags,” or huge industrial duvets. To passing owls, we must be a startling sight: nine fat, green pupae, just too big to eat.
I wake once, partly from excitement. The sky is so clear it looks like a city at night. There’s Orion’s Belt, and Mars, followed more shyly by Saturn. I strain to listen but all I can do is see moonlight. Everything’s turned silver — the mountains, the thorn trees and the sea of sand. I half expect to see something Jurassic tottering over the plain, but — if it does — I’ve long since gone back to sleep.
Not so our wilder room-mates. Sunrise brings footprints, and news of another busy night. Almost everyone’s called by: beetles who gather dew on their backs; lizards that can plunge through the sand as if it were surf; prehistoric crickets, small harmless snakes, and tiny armored “sand lions” (insects that make booby traps for ants). But busiest of all are the moles. They’ve been swimming around under the sand, and — even though they’ve got no eyes and look like miniature orange tennis balls — they can cover up to 4.5km a night.
To me, all this is astonishing. But in Namibia, desiccation is a way of life. Some bits of the country get less than 2.5cm of rain a year. You either love the sand, or you shrivel up and die.
As one of our guides said, modern Namibia began about 300 million years ago. It’s been an extraordinary process. Imagine a country — about the size of Italy and France together — which has been buried in mud, baked, broken up, turned over, superheated, blasted with volcanoes and bombed with lava. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s now under attack by sand. Starting somewhere in South Africa, the bright orange grit is washed first into the Atlantic, and then up on to the Namibian coast. From there, it whips its way inland, sand-blasting everything it finds. After five million years, there’s no sign it’s over yet. Dunes many many square kilometers in size still roll around at the rate of 6m a year, and, everywhere you go, there are old houses flayed of paintwork and cars stripped back to the steel.
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