Sossousvlei, Solitaire and Struedel
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
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11
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Trip End
Sep 28, 2007
Sesreim, Namibia
Thursday, September 20, 2007
"Where are you going?" We were just heading to Walvis Bay, we said, just thirty minutes' south of Swakopmund. "Why are you going there?" rejoined the officer. We were going there to meet up with friends, one of whom was a tour guide. We eyed his own friend cautiously. "What is your profession?" asked our rather too-curious inquisitor. We're just students, we replied, here on a scholarship study abroad program. "Why aren't your lights on?" demanded the officer. We thought they were, said we, and we apologized up down and sideways for mistakenly only turning on our parking lights, promising to leave our real lights on forever (now that we knew where they were), if that's what it took. Finally, resignedly, the officer wrote a ticket, tore it from his pad, and instructed us to drive into Walvis Bay to pay it. Fifty U.S. dollars, all for failing to dicern between parking lights and driving lights. What a crock. We disregarded the parking ticket and went on our merry way.
In reality, we weren't headed to Walvis Bay (more famous, unbelievably, for the Jolie-Pitt birthing extravaganza staged there than the parking light injustice that befell us); we were bound for Sessriem and Sousussvlei, home to the oldest and tallest desert dunes in the world. We weren't meeting friends; in fact, we weren't planning on meeting anyone. And no, we weren't students on scholarship; we were professionals running away from desk jobs who were only too happy to flash the student ID card if that would keep us out of trouble.
Speeding out, with lights forevermore on, we headed southeast into the Namibian interior, over the Namib-Naukluft mountains, a rather odd-looking smattering of craggy peaks and valleys now part of one of the world's largest national parks. The park is home to leopards, zebra and kudus, so Steven's eyes were firmly trained to the landscape, even though he was stationed in the right-hand side driver's seat. The drive was uneventful but long, due in part to the stultifyingly slow speed limit of forty-five mph, so we stopped a few times, once just to gaze upon the rare quivering tree, which is not a Harry Potter oracle but rather an aloe that can grow up to eight meters high, can store massive quantities of water in their trunks, and boasts lightweight branches used as quivers by the native San hunters.
A few hours' journey more brought us to the small outpost of Solitaire, population about five hundred. A more authentic wild-west, roadhouse, Route 66 joint you will not find, even along Route 66 itself. Solitaire is home to one "country lodge," one campground, one gas station cum restaurant cum general store, a few small houses that lodge locals, and a dilapidated airfield that certainly hasn't seen an airplane land in more than twenty years. The town is surrounded on all sides by a ring of distant rising mountains, filled in by scrub brush, snakes and small rodents. We expected to see tumbleweed blow through accompanied by eerie shoot-out at high noon tunes, but nothing materialized.
We did find Moose, longtime resident and owner of the gas station (who must be making money hand over fist as the only purveyor of petrol within a two hundred mile radius but who nonetheless refuses to air-condition his sweltering general store). For a dollar or two, he dished out a heaping plate of genuine apple strudel, German-style. We ate the strudel in the store, which is plastered, as you might expect, with rusty, beat-up old license plates, cluttered with old-fashioned car parts, other sundry machines and coca-cola memorabilia, and illuminated only by the glow of the soda refrigerators, humming noisily along under the prodigious effort of keeping even just a few bottles slightly cooler than room temp. The strudel went down surprisingly easy and fast, given the searing heat in the general store, but we opted to take some home-baked bread (fantastic, even though it probably never saw the inside of an oven - the yeast likely rose there in the roadhouse) back to the comfort and relative cool of our hotel room.
We stayed over in Solitaire that night, primarily because there was nothing more proximate to Sessriem even remotely within our budget or remotely available to people, such as ourselves, who choose to make arrangements at the last minute. But it didn't matter. Sessriem was just an hour and a half drive down the road, and we were well versed in the art of driving before dawn, albeit usually with the objective of making first tracks on ski slopes. So the next morning we hit the road an hour prior to dawn, mostly because we understood that something akin to the Oklahoma land grab occurred every morning when the gates to Sessriem opened. As we drove the night gradually gave way to the indistinct shapes of dawn, the stars lost their gleam, and a cool blue morning crept up on us, backlighting the silhouette of mountains we didn't even knew existed just minutes before. We arrived at the gate to Sessriem just as the sun was about to crest the horizon, but we nevertheless claimed pole position at the gate, our competitors having snuck in a few more winks than we. But the gatekeeper kept us waiting for another ten minutes while cars impatiently lined up behind us before allowing the pent up flood of visitors through.
Sessriem is a small collection of hotels, park service buildings, and campgrounds, and it was brought into existence by the park service to administer and serve as a gateway to the national park lands. Beyond Sessriem, a paved road stretches fifty miles or so westward, into dune country, eventually petering out into a sandy road. And, from the end of the paved road, you can catch a four by four vehicle to transport you over the last four treacherous miles to the mouth of
Soussusvlei, which is the most famous of several enormous ephemeral pans surrounded by a sea of red dunes stretching hundreds of meters high.
At any rate, this whole process of queuing is a weird incident of some stupid Namibian national parks policy designed to enrich the national park service, of course, but also a few select concessionaires that probably paid a pretty penny to secure that status. It turns out that most people prefer to visit the dunes and vleis (dry lakes) either very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon when the sun is most angled, the shadows most interesting, and the light playing off the red dunes most brilliant. Because the afternoon is often so stinking hot, however, the morning is THE preferred time to go and, hence, the mad rush to get in the park when the gate opens at dawn. But the select few who plan years in advance to camp in the park service campground or who can afford to pay the exorbitant sums required to stay in the concessionaire's hotels, however, get a "head start" in racing off to the dunes well before the rest of us get a shot at it. The notion that nature's beauty is somehow related to a bonanza-type foot race or may somehow be incurably marred by the early arrival of someone else is an odd one, to say the least, but it is infectious, and we fell prey to the mentality to the same extent as the others lined up almost pushing to get in.
Well, the sun finally advanced high enough in the sky to satisfy Mr. Gatekeeper, who opened the gate and allowed us to go through. And the horses were off. The ribbon of tarmac (ironically, the first we'd seen in the country since Swakopmund, three hundred miles earlier) wound through a large valley surrounded on both sides by fields of dunes stretching onward for miles. These behemoths towered over us, some two to three hundred meters overhead; their fall lines snaked skyward, delineating darkened slipfaces in shadow from the leeward faces gleaming ochre, maroon, peach and rose in the sun. Occasionally, we'd pass by the lone oryx, foraging for tender shoots among the sand granules. Forty five kilometers down the road, we stopped at Dune 45 to go looking for the famous interplay of light, shadow and color, parking our car at the base of the dune and beginning the long, arduous two-steps-up-one-step-sliding-back hike up the sand. A hundred meters up, we began to notice the elevation and suddenly realized that a misstep off the side of the fall line wouldn't end prettily. Steve decided it was time to try his hand at sledding down the dunes, whipping out the plastic luggage bag he'd been hauling around since we'd left DIA four weeks before. He positioned himself on the forty degree pitch downward, scooted to the bottom of the bag and pulled it up around his chest, took a big breath, and shoved off, careening down the sand about...four inches. Another repositioning, another big breath, and this time he took off...another two inches. Four more failed attempts followed. It seems the sand sledding wasn't meant to be, at least not in a large plastic luggage sack marked "Baggage" across the top.
Returning to our chariot, we emptied about a pound of sand out of each of our shoes and then pressed down the road in the hopes of laying eyes on the legendary Sousussvlei. A few kilometers down the road, we came to the car park, where we waited for heavy-duty transport over thick sand roads the last couple of miles to Soussusvlei's jumping-off point. Transport wasn't cheap - we shelled out about ten dollars per person for an eight mile round trip ride (nothing like a captive audience and an entrenched state-sponsored monopoly to jack up prices). But we finally boarded the bus and were deposited in due course at a small clearing, where we were unceremoniously shunted out of the bus and pointed in an ambiguous direction to Sousussvlei.
The crowds trickled over a sandy rise to the east, so we wandered that way, noticing, as we did, the startling rise in temperature that had occurred in just the hour or two we'd been in the park. A few more minutes' walking brought us face to face with Sousussvlei - an enormous chalky expanse of a dry lakebed, punctuated with husks of dead trees. Ruddy dunes rose behind the pan, creating a stark, striking effect. But in the end it was a panorama that we found, after snapping the obligatory pictures, rather disappointing - a classic case of overhype. Perhaps we'd been jaded by our earlier experiences with dunes in our own state; perhaps we just aren't terribly sandy people; perhaps we've become a tad jaundiced in our world-wanderings. Whatever the case, though, we agreed the time, effort and money expended to get down to Sousussvlei was hardly worth it; the site certainly didn't qualify in our minds as Namibia's number one travelers' destination - Etosha holds that title in our opinion. So, after a bit more walking, some liters of water, a few more pictures, and a wild goose chase wherein Steve attempted to photograph a sand beetle who'd escape his paparazzi onslaught by burying himself in the sand, we called it a day. We turned tail and headed back to Solitaire to wait out the heat of the afternoon, certain that, at a minimum, we'd not be disappointed by another serving of Moose's strudel.
