The Oldest Desert In The World

Thursday 11 april 2019

On Thursday we left our comfortable guest house in Windhoek and made a long drive to Sossusvlei, in the Namib Naukluft national park. According to my pre-trip studies, the Namib desert is the oldest in the world. It extends inland along most of Namibia’s Atlantic (western) coast.

We started the drive on a nice two-lane road, but shortly after leaving Rehoboth we turned onto dirt roads. Sometimes they’re OK: often they’re what our guides called “corrugated.” It’s noisy, dusty, and hot, but the trusty Toyota Land Cruiser’s air conditioning helped. We stopped to look at and photograph various interesting sights, including this vehicle which our guides called a Kalahari Ferrari.

We also stopped for our first oryx sighting:

As I write this, we have now seen so many oryx that we barely remark on it. We have also seen many ostriches, but I don’t have any good photos of them.

We had lunch in a place that our tour leader says is like Bagdad Cafe, the fictional setting of one of my favorite movies. She’s right about the location (“a desert road from Vegas to nowhere”), but there’s no gas station and the food and (especially) the coffee are much better than in the movie. That’s a solar oven in the foreground, and its grill surface was way too hot to touch.

I knew that weaverbirds make interesting nests —call them single-family homes — but I just learned that there are very social weaverbirds that make huge apartment buildings, shared by many residents. This one isn’t even very big, but if there’s ever enough rain to soak it, the tree branches will break under the weight.

Then there are others that don’t depend on trees.

We arrived late in the afternoon at our desert camp, run by Wilderness Safaries, the organization that provides our vehicle and excellent guide/driver. Each guestroom is a separate small building with bedroom and bath. Here’s mine:

Fortunately there are no annoying or dangerous insects here, at least at this time of year, but I’m happy to be introduced to the mosquito net.