Steve and Cathy's Blog

Welwitschia

Our excursion today has the intriguing title Moon Landscape and Welwitschia. We meet in Insignia Lounge at 9:30 and are assigned Bus 24. We were trying to be on the same bus as our friend Paula, but she ended up the last one for Bus 23 and we were the first for Bus 24. We have to work on coordinating better with our friends of we want to hang together on a tour.

Our bus isn’t as luxurious as yesterday’s but it is another good one from Springbok Atlas Luxury Charter. And we have a great guide named Gideon (he gives us his African name too, but I no way can understand it or spell it. My bad.) The tour is to last four hours.

Our first stop is good old Dune 7. Apparently, every tour stops at Dune 7 at some point. Our guide explains that there are red dunes and white dunes. The red dunes are older, and also do not move around as much as the white dunes. The white dunes are nearer the ocean. The redness in the red dunes is iron oxidization, which takes years and years to occur, and this iron oxide makes them heavier and thus less subject to movement from the wind.   Dune 7 is definitely red.

We are next headed into Namib-Naukluft National Park. Namib means “open space” and this description certainly fits. This is the world’s fourth largest game park, contains the Namib Desert, the oldest desert on earth, and encompasses 19,216 square miles (or about the area of New Hampshire and Vermont combined). Two inches of rain fall in the average year; in fact, the desert creatures have adapted to receive their needed water from the fog that rolls in from the Atlantic, not from any other source.

We turn off the main road into the park heading for an overlook where we can view the moonscape. The road, such as it is, is awful. “Welcome to Africa” yells out Gideon. After a fifteen-minute bone-shaking journey at around forty miles per hour, we arrive at our destination. Indeed, the view is surreal. It looks like absolutely nothing could survive there, but our guide says that it hosts a thriving ecosystem, where all the plants and animals have adapted to the dry environment. [Cathy: It looks like we are in the Twilight Zone, and aliens are going to appear out of nowhere and beam us all to some other planet.]

To hear our guide tell it, this valley was formed when the continents of South America and Africa were separating. The volcanic activity that resulted caused magma to come to the surface. It cooled faster on the surface than below, forming this volcanic surface that indeed looks extraterrestrial. We take dozens of photos, pile back in the bus, go down the road to another overlook, jump out of the bus, take photos, hop back in the bus and are off to the main road. Gideon again apologizes for the rough ride, and explains: “There is a shortcut, but the road is worse. Too rough. Too much ‘African Massage’!”

We are next headed twenty minutes farther away from the main road, this time to view one of the most remarkable examples of natural adaptation in the world. We are going to meet Welwitschia, the national plant of Namibia. Gideon called it The Plant.

Here is how our guidebook describes it: “Perhaps the world’s ugliest plant, it resembles wilted lettuce and produces only two leaves in its lifetime, which can last up to 500 years. Locals call the welwitschia ‘two leaf, can’t die.’ These leathery leaves lie on the ground and over time, are often shred in to ribbons and become very ragged looking.” The moisture it needs it receives from ocean fog, and it germinates by way of pollenization from insects it attracts. Our guide stated that the plant can actually live up to 2,000 years, and specimens have indeed been found to substantiate this fact. [Cathy: I couldn’t decide if it looked like something from Star Trek or Dr Seuss]

Gideon, our guide, gives a very good lecture on this most impressive plant. It’s hard not to marvel at its adaptation to such an environment, and to contemplate that some of them live millennia.   After our plant visit, we head back through Swakopmund and into Walvis Bay via the coast road we took yesterday, and Gideon keeps informing us more about his country.

• The desert is host to aurochs (the national antelope), springboks and elands (other antelopes).   One of these species receives its needed water by climbing a dune where it faces in the direction of the ocean when the fog rolls in. Its mouth and nostrils are designed to collect the moisture from the fog, and it can receive half a liter of water that way. Amazing.
• Mining: Gideon mentions two other commodities being mined: gold (in the center of the country) and diamonds.
• Electricity is generated by many means. Coal is used in the center of the country; power is imported from South Africa and Zimbabwe, and there is hydroelectric generation in the northeastern and southeastern regions. Recently, a proposal to build an enormous solar farm is in the works as the sun shines an average of 80% of the time.
• As we drive down Sam Nujoma Avenue in Swakopmund, we find out that it is named after the first president of the country after independence, and he is now known as the ‘founding father.’
• Gideon very proudly tells us that the country is heading in a good direction because of the political stability since independence in 1990. He says that there are “only” eight or nine tribes, and everybody works together; “teamwork” he says.
• Close to Walvis Bay, we pass an enormous housing project, and are told that this is in response to the great need for public housing for the poorer people of Walvis Bay. This is all subsidized housing, but it is still a problem because many of the people that are in need of it cannot meet the loan requirements due to their education level and, therefore, their inability to get a job that would earn enough income to qualify for a loan. In other words, this is a hangover from the apartheid period when South Africa controlled the country, and it will be some time before it is solved. But at least they’re working on it.

We get back in time to eat lunch, even though it is 2 PM, the ship keeps the buffet open if people are still out. The service is amazing. And then we have quiet time, our euphemism for a nap. By the time we wake up, the ship has steamed out of Walvis Bay, has made the turn to the south past Pelican point, and we are on our way to Cape Town. It has been a real awakening for us. When we hear the name Namibia from now on, our reaction isn’t going to be “Oh, that must be some tiny nation in Africa,” but “Oh, this bustling nation with the fascinating topography on the southwest coast just above South Africa.”