10.5 in a straight line – The Namib Naukluft Mountains.

A mountain is nature's way of saying take the long way round (Scenic route)

May 2012 (The following actually happened, I kid you not)

My head was stuck so deep in the map that I was closely analyzing that I hardly noticed when the car stopped, I kept staring at it as though a road to our destination would magically appear. “Why have we stopped, we’re not even a quarter of the way there?” I asked myself. No roads existed to where we wanted to go, just a frighteningly deep valley beyond the rocky hill where we stopped. As I got out of the car all I could see was grass, huge hills and the shadow of three big mountains on the horizon. I glanced at the GPS as I was lacing up my boots while Patrisia grabbed our back packs, what I saw hardly pleased me. “Agreed,” she said as she went left with her technician, and I went right with mine. We agreed to meet at the exact spot where the car was parked at the end of the day. 

“10.5 km’s to target,” my technician said with unrestrained confidence. I didn’t want to pop his bubble by pointing out that a GPS calculates distance in straight lines, it would spark another argument that I didn’t want to have, not today. Yesterday’s verbal spat over soccer teams whose stadiums we have both never seen the inside of was enough drama for one weekend. I knew we weren’t going to walk in straight lines, logic dictates that you walk around the side of a hill instead of over it, and every hill you walk around lengthens the journey. “How did I end up here? Why am I walking into the mountains, when I can see them fine from here?” I asked myself while coming to grips with the reality of how long this day was going to be. From afar the undulating hills and valleys leading to the Namib Naukluft Mountains looked manageable but as we got closer it become clear, we were in for it. 

We walked briskly along, fast enough to send sweat dripping down my torso but slow enough to conserve energy for the return. A cool breeze swirled around countering the dry sapping heat by evaporating sweat of my brow, was this a sign that God has a sense of humour? The rapid sound made by boots compressing dry grass underfoot with each step served as our sound track. The dry golden grass was deceiving, it made everything look flat and level. But the loud exhale that my Companion let out during every ascent up a rocky hill and a low grunt down every stream and valley said otherwise. No random combination or structured sequence of words could fully describe the untouched and pristine beauty of the place, something’s you have to see with your own eyes to fully understand. Humans had probably not ventured this far into the mountains since the nomadic Khoisan roamed freely, way before boundaries and National nature park fences existed.

“How did I end up here?” I asked myself at the bottom of a narrow ravine that cut deep into foot of the mountains, they looked smaller from the rendezvous point. The ravine was green and alive, in contrast to the dry grass above and around. I spotted a descending stream of water that was dammed up by some large boulders that looked like they fell from above. The short steep slippery climb up the mountain side was challenging. But there was reward, a larger pool of clear water, I dipped my hands into it and it was cold, chilled like it came straight out of the fridge. I licked the palm of my hand, I was not prepared for the devastating disappointment that greeted my tongue, I had my empty water bottle ready in one hand and the water was salty. Another sign that God has a sense of humour? The hind sight of having brought a second water bottle was justified, we had one last litre of drinking water left. The reflection of the sky on the surface of the water said one thing, we had less than three hours of decent sunlight left, we had to be getting on to the rendezvous point. I took it out, pointed and shot. “That big camera makes you look like a tourist,” said my companion. The pictures were beautiful, and the angle from the top of the ravine was great for shots of the view towards the rendezvous point. It still didn’t justify the insanity of traversing hills and walking across streams and valleys for a sample of soil, crazy what people will pay you for. It didn’t justify the insanity at all, the streams were filled with paw prints instead of hooves. Hooves belong to antelopes, paws belong to predatory cats. I would take an encounter with the creature that owns a hoof print over a potentially deadly struggle with a creature than owns a paw print any day. Every once in a while we would stop and crouch, then scan the hills for movement, I had never been more glad to see squirrels in my life before.

3 hours later I literally felt 5 kilogram’s lighter after I slid my back pack off my shoulders onto the back of our pickup. My trembling fingers unlaced my boots, I took a few steps, which turned into a short walk and ended in a stretch to loosen the tension in my body. The stiffness in my calves and hamstrings, a reminder of the softness of the sand in the valleys, how much energy walking on it requires and how size ten field boots can make it feel like quick sand. Even making short penguin like steps to spread the pressure over a larger surface area does not help. The aching in my arms, the result of the ill-advised decision we took earlier to challenge the steepness of the slope as we made our ascent out of the ravine. My dry cracked lips were rough on my tongue as I licked them, a reminder of why consuming most of our water before we made our way back to the rendezvous point was not particularly strategic on our part. To compound the misery, in our haste to make it back before sunset we abandoned our respect for the hills and decided to go over them, during the last 5 km’s I kept wishing the water we found at the foot of the mountain had not been salty. 

“Drained.” The only word Patrisia said at the rendezvous point, her face said the rest. Exhausted, finished, all words that reflected her facial expression. But a litre of water later and her face had more colour than the kaleidoscope of red and orange shades painted by the sunset. No combination of adjectives and adverbs can do justice to a sunset over the Namib Naukluft Mountains. For most tourists and adventure seekers coming to Namibia it is an experience of a lifetime, the rare sight of nature still untouched by the destructive hand of man. It presents a picture opportunity that is rarely found elsewhere in the world. Ideally I’d like to say that for us it was a chance we couldn’t pass up, an opportunity to brag that we didn’t just look at the Namib Naukluft Mountains but we stood on them. But for us it was just another day at the office, quickly forgotten because tomorrow we would go again, to the east.