AMICK’S AFRICAN ADVENTURES
I was on the trip with Wayne and a really nice, interesting married couple in their early 30’s. The guy is Irish, but has been living in Japan for about 10 years, and the woman is Japanese. They’ve been traveling around the world for 16 months, and are planning to keep going for another 6 months or so. How cool! We started our trip with a night at Augrabies Falls National Park in South Africa. The trip was a participatory camping trip, which basically means that we had to pitch our own tents and help with the cooking and dish washing. We camped at Augrabies Falls and then took a quick hike to see the main waterfall in the morning. The water is pretty low since it’s been so dry here, but there was still quite a large amount of water rushing through. Later in the day, we left to cross the border into Namibia and to drive to Fish River Canyon. It’s a beautiful canyon, and is the 2nd largest in the world. Unfortunately, they’ve had some people die from falling over the edge recently (it’s really loose rock), so they don’t allow people to hike down into the canyon for day trips. Instead, we took a short hike along the rim for the sunrise and to see the views over the canyon, and then broke camp again to head to Aus, Namibia.
I should mention that Namibia has a very small population, and lots of open, undeveloped spaces. We spent lots of hours driving along without seeing any other people, or just seeing local people riding in carts pulled by donkeys. It was a nice change from Johannesburg! Also, while the roads are in surprisingly good condition, they’re almost all gravel or dirt roads. We would see men in bulldozers working on the roads every now and then. Apparently, they do ongoing maintenance year round.
We used a campsite in Aus as our base for a couple of days. We did a couple of hikes in the area, some of which turned into off-trail rock climbing. I was wearing my sandals again, but somehow managed to keep my face off the rocks. 🙂 We also went to the coast to visit the town of Luderitz and to drive to Diaz Point. From Diaz Point, we saw seals and dolphins playing out in the waves. It was a nice area, but super windy and cold! We also visited the ‘ghost town’ of Kolmanskopp. It used to be a fancy diamond mining town in the 1920’s, but has been mostly abandoned for areas with better mining. The desert is slowly taking over the houses and buildings again – many of them have sand dunes inside them up to the ceilings!
Our next drive was to Sesriem, where we stayed for a couple of days to visit the Sesriem Canyon and Sossusvlei sand dunes. This is the area that you see on lots of guidebooks, etc. for Namibia – huge sand dunes with bright orange sand. It’s a pretty amazing place. We climbed one of the big dunes (very tiring!) to watch a fantastic sunrise, and spent 4-5 hours that day climbing some other dunes and hiking in Sossusvlei flats (which sometimes have water, but were huge, dry areas of cracked, white ground while we were there).
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