We left Donkerhuk Farm on April 3rd for Wolwedans Dunes Camp in the NamibRand Nature Reserve. We ended up choosing Wolwedans at the last minute (literally the last minute!), based on recommendations we got from staff at Onduli. I’m really glad we adjusted the itinerary and visited this beautiful place. It was amazing to see the sand-swept desert up close during the day, and the stars and Milky Way at night. A couple of cloudless nights we sat with our drinks on the back deck looking up at the sky. We watched as the sky grew darker and the stars brighter, as the Milky Way eventually unveiled itself in the late night in the middle of hundreds of thousands of stars. It was stunning.
When we were in Namibia before, we were always a bit further inland on the C14 with the rockier parts of the desert and the able-top mountains. We had missed the stretches of sand and the towering dunes of the coastal reaches of the Namib Desert. I’m glad we got a chance to see them this time. The Namib sands are like the moon. They’re a completely different landscape that hasn’t changed in millions of years. These vast stretches of time and history fascinate me, and in the geology of Namibia you encounter these old places a lot. The desert here was formed 50-80 million years old, and it’s probably older than any land formations I’ve ever seen. For us, this was yet another side of Namibia’s wild that we got to experience and I feel very lucky.
We arrived at Wolwedans in shoulder season when temperatures in the desert were still sky high during the day. For us, that worked out great. We only shared the camp with a few other people and had a guide all to ourselves.
Over the days and nights we were there, I was struck by the silence and endlessness of the place. One day our guide took us out to an abandon house far off in the desert and utterly isolated, abandoned and in disrepair. We had lunch on the old deck and listened to the silence of the desert. The remoteness and complete quiet would probably make you mad after a while, though there are actually sounds, not that I heard them. Several musicians and researchers and others who are interested have come to the area to record the sounds (and silences) of this desert, especially the singing sands. One musician had been to this exact house a couple of years back to record sounds and create his compositions. He wrote about his Namibian sound recordings online.
We had dunes, but not like the dunes you see at Sossusvlei, which are the famous ones. Our dunes were high, but we had long stretches of valleys, too, and sandy plateaus off to the eastern horizon, then endless flat sand and rising dunes stretching out toward the north and west. Small trees, mostly camel thorns, dotted different areas of the reserve toward the south. Along with the trees, there were a few small bushes here and there and some dry grasses. It is incredible that animals survive in this environment, especially the big animals like oryx and zebra, which we saw regularly on our guided drives. These desert animals have evolved to go without water for extended times. When the sea mist rolls in and the plants get a damp dew, the animals use this as a source of water, as well as water contained within the plants themselves. Near our camp, at the base of the dune, the lodge also built a small watering hole that is a gathering place for the oryx.
Some of the animals we saw…
We also saw animals that we have rarely seen, like bat-eared foxes, and we saw one animal we had never seen before: the African wild cat. I tried to get a picture of the wild cat, but it ran off fast and then sat looking at us from too far away to get a picture. At Dunes Camp, we had a bat-eared fox that lived under the deck of the main gathering area. We saw him a couple of times. I wish I had gotten a good picture, but it was always too dark when he came out.
With the animals (and scorpions) we learned not to leave things out on our deck at night, especially shoes. The jackals, we were told, loved to run off with things. One morning as we had breakfast, we watched one of the staff members who was far off in the sand on the hunt for someone’s shoes.
We also saw fairy circles, which are everywhere in this part of the desert. There has been mystery and theories abound hypothesizing the origins and causes of these perfectly empty circle formations. People have guessed aliens, gases, termites, and many other things as the cause. It’s still up for debate.
The sands and dunes…
Solitude…
