Up the Skeleton Coast, Surfing in Namibia, Part One

Story and photos by Jon Bowen

"Namibia? Yeah, I'm up for that."

Having agreed to Stuart's email that I'm in for a trip, and persuading my boss to let me have three weeks off, I figured I'd better find out where Namibia actually is.

Ah Namibia. The Skeleton Coast. Famous for being mostly a big fuck-off desert, with diamonds, shipwrecks, icy seas and sharks, and almost no people. Oh good.

Right, so we'll have a decent 4x4 vehicle and the equipment for coping with the desert then. I mean, obviously. You can get lost and die in the desert, and the Namib is big. I've got my own GPS receiver so with a decent map we should have no problems.

Two weeks later we're sitting in a backpackers’ in Windhoek, Namibia's capital, waiting for our hire car to get delivered.

I'm playing with my GPS, working out exactly how far from Wetherspoons Curry Club night I actually am. 5500 miles to that chicken phaal.

"GPS? What the fuck do you need that for?" says Stuart.

Knowing what happened on Barbie's last desert trip, I'm not filled with confidence by this comment.

The car shows. A Nissan Almera. Oh good, we're going to drive across one of the most remote and desolate places in the world, on dirt and gravel tracks, in a bottom-of-the-range family saloon. "Where are we going?"

"Sesserim"

"Where's that on the map?"

"Oh yeah, maps. Don't forget we need to buy a map."

"What about water?"

"Oh shit yeah, that as well."

Barbie is the most experienced traveler I've ever met. There aren't a lot of places he hasn't visited. It's amazing he isn't dead.

After getting lost trying to find our way out of Windhoek, a capital city that's about the size of Torquay, we headed out into the bush. About two miles out of town, the tarmac road suddenly stopped and we found ourselves on a rough gravel track. It was weird to realise that this was one of Namibia's major roads. This loose gravel trail was the M4 of the country. We stopped to look around at the bush, and to get a closer look at the huge cricket-like bugs that were all over the road and which made sharp "pop" noises when we drove over them. A loud growl from the bush made us jump and a troop of baboons stared at us from a tree on the other side of the road. They were far more interesting than the bugs and we stared at them staring at us.

We had a map, and we were using it. Our map showed the whole country, and we assumed it didn't show all the roads in the country. In fact it did, it's just there isn't that many roads. It showed all the towns too, and it was a bit of a surprise to realise that what was "a town" and came with a respectable sized dot on the map, was in fact just two or three houses in close proximity to each other, stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The roads are mostly dead straight, and the mountains in the distance were getting closer and closer. We passed over the Spreetshoogte Pass, and the most spectacular view. From 250 metres up we could see across the gravel plains to the sand seas of the Namib in distance. The road we had to follow onwards then dropped that 250 metres down to the plain in a distance of about 3 kms on ludicrously steep gravel tracks, around hairpin bends, with unguarded sheer drops on one side. We raced across the plain on the road we had seen winding into the distance from the mountain behind us, while I suddenly had a unjustified panic that I'd left my camera at the top.

The next town, Solitaire, was our stop for fuel and a break. Solitaire gets a quite respectable dot on the map, but it's actually just a petrol station and a general store run by a slightly deranged but friendly chap called Percy. We bought some of Percy's "famous" apple pie and some of his "famous" bread. We strongly suspected that it was only famous because Percy told everyone who visited that it was, but it was pretty good and it did the trick of cleaning the film of dust out of our mouths. Solitaire is very "Out of Africa", and being the only fuel stop for a few hundred kilometres in any direction -- actually the only ANYTHING in a few hundred kms -- everybody stops here. Desolate and lonely and beautiful, with a poignant dead tree in front of the petrol pumps and a vista across the plains to the mountains in the distance. The window's of the store are plastered with stickers left by passing travelers and "local" safari companies, so I left a Localsurfer sticker, which the pump attendant happily stuck on a spare space.

The sun was starting to go down, and we had to get to Sesserim before sunset or they locked the gates to the campsite to prevent the wildlife blundering over people’s tents. Reservations were recommended too, it being the only campsite in the area, which we hadn't made. Percy cheerfully told us we probably wouldn't make it even if they did have space, and so we'd die of sunstroke. We had at least 150 km to go to get there. Added to the pressure was the fact that we were forbidden by the hire car company to drive after dark, as we wouldn't be insured if we hit an animal because it happens so often the insurance companies won't offer cover any more. Hitting a springbok at 80 kph wasn't a good plan.

We made it, passing herd of springbok and ostrich and the occasional oryx on the way, just as the gates were closing.

We put the tent up and admired the night sky. I'd always heard about how impressive the desert sky is at night, and I wasn't disappointed. The Milky Way is like a ribbon of glitter across the sky, and the stars looked like lanterns hanging in space. As if the sky was a black sheet with millions of holes in it showing a light on the other side. I'd also heard how cold the desert is at night, but this part of the Namib decided not to conform to that. The wind was picking up, and we hid the tent behind a large bush in an attempt to shelter from the warm wind and the dust blowing into our eyes, and then headed to the bar. After a day driving across the desert, with dust in our hair and on our skin and in our clothes, a bottle of ice cold Windhoek Lager went down very well. Or two bottles.

Next morning and we discovered that the dust is so fine it will blow through the wall of a tent. We woke covered in a film of grit.

It was still dark, we had to get 70 kms to a place called Soussevlei, famous for it's spectacular dunes. The road is closed at night, and it opens at 4.30 and we needed to get there by first light when the light is best for filming and photography. Heather, Stuart’s girlfriend, was driving and we headed off. Heather has the same attraction to potholes that Barbie has to landmines, but we managed to get to the end of the road without throwing a wheel. Soussevlei, Deadvlei, and the surrounding area is one of those places that looks incredibly familiar, mainly because it gets used as a backdrop for a lot of fashion shoots and film making, and you can see why. The sand dunes are the highest in the world, and a glorious copper colour, towering over a dried up lake bed. It was still cool, being early morning, and we all soaked up the silence of the desert, interrupted only by the occasional fly buzzing past our ears or a springbok bouncing across the lake bed, and watched the shadows move over the dunes as the sun rose. You have to walk the last five or six kms into the dune fields, unless you have a 4x4, and after a few hours the wind really started to pick up and the heat started to increase as the sun rose. We started to head back as the wind whipped up a mini-sandstorm. We fought our way back to the car as the sand stung our exposed skin and tried to blind us and our feet sank into the soft sand. It was starting to get very hot with no shade. The people who hadn't got up as early as us were appearing now in their 4x4's, driving over the sand and cheerfully waving at us from their air-conned Mitsubishi lumbar-support seated luxury without offering us a lift, while we considered what Pajero means in Spanish. Wankers. We drank a couple of litres of water each when we finally made it back to the car, and reflected on how horrific it would be to be really lost in the desert. Back at the campsite, the shower and swim in the pool felt fantastic.

Then we checked the time. We had to meet Saffa sponger Ian at Walvis bay in about 20 minutes.

"How far is Walvis?"

"Um, about 350 kms back across the desert."

"We're gonna be late aren’t we?"

"Possible."

Off we go, and another stop at Solitaire for a much-needed coffee and more apple pie. The Nissan was starting to make ominous creaking and banging noises from the rear left wheel, but we couldn't see anything wrong. It'll be fine.

Heading on from Solitaire we suddenly realised we'd got aclimatised to the place when someone commented on "all the traffic" after we'd seen three other cars in less than an hour. A figure appeared at the side of the road waving frantically. A hitcher, in the middle of the desert. Sounds like the start of a horror film, but we thought we'd pick him up.

Albertus Englander, 17 years old and on his way to visit his mum in Walvis Bay. We made his day when we told him that's where we were going. He'd been on the road for two days, traveling from Malthehoe in the south. How many lifts had he had? This was the first one, he'd walked the 200 kms to this point.

Albertus had nothing with him, no food or water, and had been intending to walk across the Namib like that. He was surprised when we thought that was insane, and casually mentioned he'd done it before.

He didn't speak very much English, but did speak Afrikaans which is close enough to Dutch that Heather, who speaks Dutch, could talk to him.

He was obviously dirt poor, but very polite and friendly, and he was thirsty and almost literally starving. He polished off a entire loaf bread, two packets of biscuits, half a dozen apples and a couple of litres of water, but wouldn't ask for anything. He obviously thought this bunch of weird white people were totally insane, incessantly offering him fruit, and couldn't understand at all why we wanted to stop every time we topped a hill to take photos of the incredible views. To him, there was nothing there but desert.

My conversation with him was pretty limited to grinning at each other and pointing at the wildlife photos in Lonely Planet.

We passed through more unbelievable landscapes, through canyons and around mountains, through sand seas and gravel plains and across dry river beds. Every time we crested a hill the terrain spread out before us with the most incredible views. The heat was getting bad though, and opening all the windows just filled the car up with so much dust that it became actually difficult to see across the inside of the car. Wind the windows up and we were in a furnace. We had no choice but to turn on the air-con in the car; something we had not wanted to do as it used so much fuel and we had no idea how far the next fill up might be. The dust level rose momentarily as the vents blew out everything that had accumulated in them.

Our priorities were changing with the desert: fuel and water were the two requirements, always at the back of our minds, that we knew we'd be in serious trouble without. Not to mention wheels. The banging rattly noise from the back wheel wasn't getting any worse, but it wasn't going away. Nobody tempted fate by mentioning it, and no one tempted fate by even thinking about what would happen here in the nothingness if the wheel came off. The mental equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting "NAH NAH NAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

The roads are so straight that, coupled with the gentle swaying of the car over the uneven surface, you can get almost hypnotised by the road. On the gravel plain, with no landmarks in the entire 360 degrees around you, you can fall into the illusion that you're not moving and that it's the road coming towards you. It's also very easy to accidentally start going far too fast for a gravel road, and hitting a sudden washout in the road at 100 kph brings you back to reality pretty quickly. Every slight bend in the road has a warning sign before it, so you don't suddenly fly off into the desert in your trance.

We were close to Walvis Bay and suddenly realised we had a bit of a problem. We were meeting Ian Kruger, a SA bodyboarder, at Walvis Bay Airport which is 40 kms outside of town. We were in a very full car, with four people already crammed into it. Where was he going to sit? We could of course leave Albertus at the airport after we picked up Ian, but it seemed a little cruel to take him so close and then leave him to it. We found the airport and found a very bored Ian, who'd been sitting chatting to the cleaner for the last four hours waiting for us to turn up. He'd just about decided to find a quiet patch of ground somewhere in the airport to put up his tent when we finally showed ourselves.

Ian has traveled with Barbie before, to Mozambique, and wasn't particularly concerned by our no show. He'd have been more surprised if we'd made it on time.

We somehow managed to cram everyone into the car, with Ian and Albertus stuffed into a quarter of the back seat and Heather sitting on my lap in the front seat. Albertus now must have definitively thought these English chaps were bonkers, and giggled all the way into town.

We dropped Albertus off, and from somewhere on his person he produced a silk shirt and put it on, smoothing it out to look good for his mum. The shirt looked great but the thick layer of dust all over the rest of him spoilt the effect slightly.

Walvis Bay is a very utilitarian sort of town, being the only real port within a thousand kms or so. A bit plain and industrial, surrounded by the sand dunes of the desert and not the most attractive of places. About 60 kms north though is the town of Swakopmund which looked a bit more attractive in the guidebooks. We headed north, and read on in the book to discover that 'Swakop' is the local tribe's word for "shit" due to the brown colour of the Swakop river when there is water in it, and "Mund" is German for mouth, as the Germans had founded the town. We were off to Shitmouth.

The road to Swakopmund follows the coast, and this was our first chance to check out the surf. It was getting dark, but we could see some swell coming through, getting bigger as we went further north and out of the lee of the peninsula that forms Walvis Bay. Quite spectacular too, with the yellow dunes on the right stretching off into the distance and the blue sea on the left. The signs warning about "sand" seemed a bit superfluous though.

We found a backpackers, The Villa Wiesse, with such a loopy girl booking us in that we weren't entirely sure that she even worked there, and turned in.

Next morning and we were off for a surf. Our sole topic of conversation was about sharks.

Heading to the beach the conversation carried on about sharks. How interested in us would a shark be ... on the one hand there is plenty of food here, no reason for them to go hunting that often. On the other hand, the water is cold here and sharks are curious. They won't be used to people in the water. What if one takes a bite to see what we are? And on and on we talked, alternatively convincing each other that we were either doomed or worrying over nothing. My mum always insists on making me taking a blood transfusion kit on trips, I'm not entirely sure why. I started wondering how it worked.

Driving on the coast road back toward Walvis Bay we checked out various little semi-points and peaks. All looked surfable, though not too great, but everyone was hesitant about going in. A few miles south of Swakop we saw something in the water -- a surfer. Bloody hell, he's in on his own so there can't be any sharks! Right, me and Ian piled in the slightly sloppy waves while Stuart took some shots. The water was a lot warmer than we anticipated, but still a lot colder than you would expect in the tropics -- about 11-12C (mid 50'sF) . We exchanged pleasantries with the local guy, but suddenly we didn't want to ask him about sharks in case he said something we really didn't want to hear. We were happy in ignorance.

After about an hour Ian and the local guy got out. Surfing on your own suddenly brings the "S" word back into the forefront of your mind, so I got out too in time to meet Stuart about to head in, with Ian in tow.

"I'm not bloody going in on my own, he said, "you two are coming back in."

we both saw at the same time a grey shape looming inside the wave coming towards us. A big grey streamlined shape. A dorsal fin broke the surface.

Later on we headed north of Swakop and found a little bay with some fat but fun waves coming in, and an OK looking point at one end. Ian headed for the point while I rode some of the fat ones. They were a bit boring and Ian looked like he was getting some barrels on the point so I paddled over.

We were sitting on our boards chatting and watching the occasional seal pop up, waiting for a set, when we both saw at the same time a grey shape looming inside the wave coming towards us. A big grey streamlined shape. A dorsal fin broke the surface.

"Oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck oooh fuck" The fear the fear the fear the fear.

Having absolutely no idea what the best thing to be doing was, and suddenly becoming incredibly aware of my own lack of maneuverability and speed in the sea, I just sat there and glanced at Ian.

"Ooooooh fuck!"

At which point the dolphin broke out of the surface of the wave and surfed in past us, then dove away out of sight.

"Fucking dolphins. I used to like those fucking things, but that fucker just scared the ....hey Ian, where are you going? It was only a bloody dolphin."

Ian was paddling full-bore back towards the other peak in the bay.

"Yeah, but Whites like to follow them!" Ian shouted over his shoulder. He's from Cape Town and knows about sharks.

I followed him, slightly less relieved about seeing the dolphin.

Getting out of the water we noticed a couple of guys getting into scuba gear. They were standing next to a van marked "Swakopmund Crayfish". Fishermen. They'll know the score on sharks around here.

Nobody wanted to ask them. What if they say it's teeming with Whites? We won't want to go in anymore. "You ask. I'm not bloody asking, you ask."

Ian asked.

"Aw yeah, there's blery thisands ov em," came the reply. Oh fantastic.

"Any Great Whites?"

"Yeah, but they stay out in the deep water, you won't see them. Inshore it's only spotteds and whalers. They'll come over occasionally but they won't bite. Well, they do sometimes, but they don't hurt."

Not entirely reassured by this answer we went looking for some food.

Next day we were thinking about heading north, but went looking for some waves in Swakop in the morning first. We met a local surfer in his "bakkie" or pick-up.

We started chatting about our newfound number-one subject.

"Blery millions of sharks. Specially up north." This guy was a surfer and had that "you-should-have-been-here-yesterday" gloat in his voice. He was either enjoying scaring us or was just winding us up. Or both.

"They don't attack, but they'll sometimes bump you pretty hard to see what you are."

"Um, really?"

"Aw yeah, I've been bumped a few times. Scares the blery crap out of you, yeah? Oh, and my mate got bit on the foot once."

"Was that up north?"

"Yeah, shitloads of sharks up there." He says something in Afrikaans to his mate and they laugh. "Good surf though."

It was with a bit of nervousness we hit the salt roads going north.

There are stops with areas to camp at intervals all along the road with a functional method of naming them according to how far from Swakop they are. A track led to the beach at Mile 14, and we headed off to look for waves. We found a small point with some crumbly looking waves trundling in, but the place was being fished and that made us wary of the sharks the fishermen were bound to attract. One group of fishermen about 50 metres away had something in the sand in front of them, being washed by the waves.

"They've caught a shark down there."

We had a look through the binoculars.

"Is that a shark or a tuna or something?"

"That's a bloody shark"

"Nah ... can't be."

"That is a bloody big fish though."

We walk over to take a look.

"What are you chaps fishing for?"

We're talking to a German, here on business who's come up with his colleagues for a spot of relaxation.

"Sharks mainly, we're using that small one as bait to attract bigger ones."

The "small" shark is about 1.5 metres long, and has been cut open along it's belly, spilling blood into the water.

We weren’t going surfing now, no bloody way.

"So, you caught anything?" asks Stuart, voicing the question none of us wanted to ask but we all wanted to know.

"No no, well, yes but only little ones."

"No big ones then?" We all relaxed a bit.

"Very small, only maybe three metres or so ... not worth it."

"Riiiight, three metres ... small ... yeah. And how far out do you cast? Where are the sharks?"

"Oh, well, they like to hang around about where you see those waves just about breaking now." He pointed to what would be a take-off point in the line-up. "They cruise around there."

We decide never to go surfing anywhere near anyone even looking at the sea while holding a fishing rod.