It began with the four-day weekend that honors Namibian Independence. If I were a true cultural observer, I would have stayed at home and seen what Namibians do on this day. I asked what Namibians did to celebrate, and the answer was, “Not much.” As a result, I felt free to join my friend Ant and three of his friends on their adventure. Ant is a short, stocky Yorkshireman with an easy laugh and a hard accent. There’s a picture of him pretending to dive into a pool of flooded water somewhere earlier in this blog. Rose, his friend and future travel partner for his trip home, bubbles with stories and humor in an archetypal Irish fashion. Laura is a tall, blond Dutch woman whose thin lips easily break into a smile or compress into disdain. Edna, a short Canadian, is the quiet one in the group – she would rather read her book than even watch the scenery out the window.
Part of the motivation for this trip was for Ant and Laura to test out their vehicles, both 4x4’s which they claimed yearned for the unpaved road. Ant has a cherry-red Jeep Wrangler, the consumer version of the Army jeeps which plied the roads of Europe during WWII. Laura had a little Suzuki 4x4. In the past, I had always thought that people who went “Off-roading” as a leisure activity were just silly, and that it was just a wasteful motorsport. I still do, but now I’ve learned it’s a hell of a lot of fun too.
The first day’s drive was easy – just about three hours on tar roads and ‘good gravel’ to the city of Opuwo, the jumping-off point for the Himba hinterlands. We camped that night at a beautiful lodge in Opuwo, where a kidney-shaped ‘infinity’ pool overlooked the spartan, dusty mountains of the Kaokoveld. With the sun setting over these hills, a pool in front of us, a casual game of scrabble going on and a drink in hand, there seemed no better place in the world.
The next day we headed off for Epupa Falls, a waterfall on the Kunene river 75 miles north of Opuwo. Driving those miles took seven hours. The first 30 miles of the trip were on relatively decent gravel roads despite a light rain. About 10 miles out of town, we picked up a Himba man who had been walking on the road for over three hours already, and took him the next 10 miles to his destination. He was quite lucky that we picked him up; he told us that in three hours, only two other vehicles had passed by. Even by Namibian standards, we were on a very infrequently used road.
First, a few words about ‘rivers’ in Namibia. If you look at a map of Namibia, you will see that it has no rivers that run permanently through the country. There’s one, the Kunene, that divides Namibia from Angola. Another, the Orange River, divides Namibia from South Africa. That’s it. However, if you look carefully at standard road map, you will see faint, dashed blue lines all over the country. These are ephemeral rivers, which usually flow for a few days on and off during the rainy season. Some of these rivers, especially in the dryer part of the country to the south, may flow only every few decades. Because the rain is so infrequent, no bridges have been built. When it does rain, however, the roads can become impassable for hours or days. During my first year in Namibia, even during the rainy season, I never saw an ephemeral river with water in it.
After an hour we reached Okungwati, a medium-sized village with several shops and a school. It lies at the foot of a large ephemeral river, but there was nothing ephemeral about it now. A wide, sandy plain, perhaps 30 metres across, was covered by 3-6 inches of flowing water. Standing in the river was perfectly safe, but the wet, heavy sand was a car killer. To the side of the road, a huge overland vehicle listed like a sinking boat in the sandy muck. These trucks are ex-military transport used for the tourist trade, with tires four feet tall and engines strong enough to win a tug of war with elephants. When we came upon the truck, a crowd of Namibians with shovels were trying to dig it out, and two of its wheels were completely buried in the wet sand.
Now, sensible people would have seen this as a bad omen and back-tracked to dry land. Not us. Armed with the confidence that comes from naivete, we plunged ahead. Laura’s car bogged down almost immediately, but fortunately we were in a town. All the local men and boys who had been working on the truck ran over and pushed her little SUV out in just a few moments. So, no problem.
As we continued north, however, the road deteriorated. We had to climb over small rocks in the vehicles and pass through several lightly-flowing rivers. Most of them were no problem, which bred overconfidence. With just about 18 miles to the campsite, we finally hit our nemesis.
At yet another unnamed river, I drove Ant’s car through it first. Driving in first gear the whole time, never slowing down for fear of losing momentum, his little Jeep did fine. Laura’s car, however, bogged down right in the middle of river. No problem, we thought, because we had a tow rope. I backed Ant’s car up to Laura’s and he attached the tow rope. Then, with one car on damp sand trying to pull out another car on damp sand, I put the Jeep in gear and it promptly sank six inches into the muck. Both of the vehicles were stuck. We had just learned our first lesson in backcountry driving: never, never endanger your second vehicle to rescue the first.
We spent a good three hours in that river, trying to find a way to free the vehicles. This was one of those situations where the ‘A’ that you get for effort is completely useless. We jacked up the car, and the jack sank down in the mud. We dug out underneath tires to lay stones underneath the treads, and the car sank even further. We tried to dig a trench to siphon water away from the car, and quickly could see why building large canals costs thousands of lives and millions of dollars. After two hours, not a single car had come by, and I started to think of our alternatives. We had about two and half hours of daylight left. I could run to the campsite, but it was 18 miles away and I couldn’t get there before dark. We did have our tents, however, and there was water nearby to drink.
Fortunately, before we had to put any of those plans into action, the cavalry arrived. Coming over the rise of the next hill, a pickup truck laden with Namibians slowed down as it approached the river. The men piled out, and with fifteen bodies pushing, we freed both vehicles quickly. We gave the men some money and bread, and watched as they all walked across the river and let the pickup drive across with a light load. Lessons number two and three about backcountry driving: there’s safety in numbers, and lighten your load before crossing a river. After that, we made the final 18 miles to the campsite without incident.
The next day, after hiking up and around to see the waterfall, we returned down the same road. We picked up as many hitchhikers as possible to have extra manpower in case we got stuck. Before each river, all the passengers piled out of the cars. The river that had foiled us the day before proved no problem just 18 hours later. We were learning our lessons.
Halfway to Opuwo, we turned toward the east and began heading along a rutted, wet, muddy track to the Kunene River Lodge. In this normally dry section of Namibia, the desert was blooming. Flowers were everywhere, and the air was laden with humidity. Brown plains had turned lush and verdant. Occasionally, a springbok or other antelope grazed off in the distance. For an hour’s drive, green replaced brown, water replaced sand, and the hills in distance looked inviting, not menacing.
We reached a section where the road crossed a wide river, perhaps five times wider than the one we had been stuck in previously. Daunted by the size of the crossing, we took no chances. We unloaded the heavy items from the vehicle. We positioned people along the route, a few feet from where the car would go, ready to run up and push if need be. But before we tried our longest river crossing yet, in typical tourist fasion, we decided that we should document the entire event on video. Unfortunately, the video was lost when my computer was stolen. I’ll do my best to paint the pictures, however.
The first video was Ant’s version of a BBC African Safari documentary. Camera in hand, he walked the entire route that the car would take, narrating which parts were sandy and which were rocky, and describing the strategies that I would use to drive across. Then, Ant placed himself right in the middle of the river to film the car’s progress. Inside his Jeep, I took another camera and strapped it to dashboard with tape, so we could have a ‘cockpit’ view. Then, we were off.
Ant’s video shows his car starting on a hill about 10 feet above the water. My video captures the nerves in my voice as I talk to myself, prior to putting the car in gear. The car plunges into the water, and the outside camera captures the powerful arcs of water as the wheels plow through a flowing river. Inside the car, the camera rocks crazily as the car bounces from rock to rock, yet I never slow down. Outside, Ant is audibly praying “Come on, Josh. Come on, Josh!” The car slows a bit in a sandy patch, then rushes past Ant’s vantage point in the center of the river. Hitting harder ground, the Jeep begins to climb toward the opposite shore, and I keep up the speed until it is safely on solid land, 15 feet from the water. On the inside camera, I warble a nervous “Woo-hoo!,” while the whole crew cheers on the outside camera. Success! We made it!
After Laura drove her car across, a convoy of five vehicles approached to cross the river from the other direction and to burst our bubble. These were the serious off road vehicles: LandRovers with snorkels for driving through four or five feet of water, Jeeps with extra tanks of gas hanging off the sides, and Toyota trucks with clearance so high they could leap small buildings in a single bound. These guys slowed down for about ten seconds, looked at the river from the height of their big rigs, and then just drove on through. So much for walking each crossing first!
Nonetheless, after a little more gnarly driving, we finally reached the campsite along the overflowing banks of the Kunene. After two days of hard driving, none of us really felt like cooking, so we took advantage of our hosts’ dining room and a well-deserved treat.
By the end of the trip, we had covered over 500 miles on rocky, sandy, flooded roads. It was wasteful, noisy, messy, and bad for the environment. Unfortunately, it was loads of fun too. I know that I shouldn’t, but if a chance for a 4x4 trek comes my way in the future, I’m in.
