Sunrise over the rocks
Wow, what a morning! George had offered us a ‘sleep-in’ — until 7am, hah! — but most of us woke up around 6:15 to go watch the sunrise. The campsite was surrounded by giant boulders, and we headed over towards them prepared to climb. Much to our surprise, there was a wooden walkway built with steps going up, and midway up we found deck chairs, picnic tables, and even a tiny swimming pool! We milled around, taking tons of photos and climbing over the rocks for a better view of the sun coming up in the desert. It was amazing.
Some of you sharper readers may notice that the title of this blog post is a repeat of the post from Uluru and King’s Canyon, Australia back in 2006. That’s no coincidence; the landscape and scenery here remind me strongly of the Australian Outback, and the boulders here are much like the ones found at Devil’s Marbles, for anyone who’s been there. I had a serious sense of deja vu as we watched the sun rise over the rocks, turning them beautiful shades of red and orange. Lukas, who likes to climb things, climbed all the way to the top for the best view of all. The rest of us headed back to the campsite, which we could finally see in daylight was even more beautiful than it had seemed last night.
Mountain passses and desert elephants
We hit the road mid-morning for our relatively short drive today. The scenery was stunning as we drove over the Grootberg mountain pass, winding our way over bumpy gravel roads through the desert hills. We stopped a lot for photos of scenery. We also saw plenty of wildlife as we went along, including desert elephants, gemsbok, desert zebras with their funny stripe patterns, and even giraffes. This isn’t a national park or anything; they just live in the wild. At one photo stop, a little kid from a nearby village came running up to the truck to ask for food, and George gave him some bread and fruit from the truck. This area of Damaraland is extremely poor, with very little water, so it’s a hard life for its inhabitants, and at every rest stop or roadside, there’s usually someone asking for money or food. It’s just part of travel in Africa.
There was a bit of confusion over our camping arrangements for the night, so we stopped for lunch at one campsite, expecting to be packing up and moving onto another. However, we ended up staying at the first site, since the second one apparently had an issue with its water pump. No matter. The campsite at Twyfelfontein is another commercial one, with facilities and more people around. The good news is, it also has a great bar area with an upstairs from which you can sip your drink and watch the sunset.
Because they didn’t have Facebook in those days
In the afternoon, we went for a guided visit to the Twyfelfontein rock engravings, a UNESCO world heritage site. More big red rocks to walk, step and climb over, but these ones were special. The engravings are estimated to be between 2,000 and 6,000 years old, and most depict various animals and wildlife pretty clearly.
Our local guide was a young kid who was picking up some seasonal work before starting his studies in university in Windhoek; he wants to do a diploma in tourism and ultimately get a job as a tour guide. We’ve heard that a lot; Namibia’s main industries are farming, mining and tourism, and it seems that everyone is after those elusive guide jobs. Anyway, he was from the Damaraland area, and when we asked him to say something in the Damara language, he was happy to oblige for the cameras. The Damara language is one of the so-called ‘click’ languages, and sounds really impressive to hear spoken. He tried to teach us a few basic words, but nobody could quite get the hang of sounding out the click noise and the word syllable smoothly.
Chillin’ in Twyfelfontein
We went back to the campsite for dinner. After five days with nobody but our little group for company, I think we were all feeling a bit starved for more socialization. I spent some time chatting with a South African couple who were staying a couple of campsites down with their three kids; they were on school holidays, and had driven this entire way. Meanwhile, Paul and Lynn made friends with a young couple from Oregon who were doing a 3-month self-drive trip all over southern Africa. They later came back to our campsite to pick George’s brain for tips about Namibia; in exchange, they offered up some wine, so it was a bit of a party.
The wind picked up by evening, and the weather turned colder than it has been all trip. We all stayed by the fire as long as we could before curling up in layers and blankets to sleep.