North Namibian Safari - Night Train through Namibia
Created | Updated Oct 20, 2008
There's an old maxim that I'm sure you've heard.
I disagree. When a man is tired of London he's tired of the grime, the dirt, the rain, the cramped tubes, surly commuters, ridiculous crowds and the extortionate price of everything from half-decent housing to half pints of over-priced Belgian beer.
So, with this in mind and a break between jobs I decided on a trip to Africa, and more specifically: Namibia. I'd landed there once before, three years ago, en route to South Africa, and was struck by its wide open spaces and more importantly its emptiness. Empty of commuters, empty of dotcom start-ups, empty of pollution and floods and the other perennial English afflictions I had struggled with for most of the last few years... I knew I'd be back from the first moment I had seen the sun-bleached grasses and the red-desert sands - the airport is 50 km from the capital and so you land pretty much IN the desert.
With Lonely Planet Guide in hand I boarded the Air Namibia flight to Windhoek - Capital of Namibia and the starting point for most of the Safaris and tours that explore the wealth of scenery that is at the heart of Namibia's charm.
Namibia gets its name from the Namib desert, thought to be the oldest in the world, that stretches pretty much from its southern extreme to the border of Angola in the north.
Basically Namibia can be divided into four main areas:
The North and East : including the justly renowned Etosha National Park, the Caprivi Region - an eccentric hang-over from colonialist gerrymandering, the Brandenberg Mountains which form the highest peaks in Namibia, and Epupa Falls on the border with Angola.
The Skeleton Coast: the desolate northern tip of the Namib, inhabited mostly by seals and the shipwrecks which prompted a journalist in the 1920s to give the region its haunting moniker.
The Central Namib: including the breathtaking sand dunes at Sossuvlei and Swakopmund - long-time playground and popular gateway to big game fishing for Namibians, South Africans and Germans alike.
The South: comprising of the mighty Orange River, the even mightier Fish River1 and its awesome canyon (second only to the Grand Canyon in size and majesty), and ethereal Luderitz - a Bavarian bastion and diamond mining town in the heart of the Southern Namib.
Even in 3 weeks I didn't manage to cover all these areas, but I opted to get cracking the moment I arrived and found myself on the overnight Trans Namib Express to Ketmanshoop - gateway to the Fish River Canyon.
As it sounds, this is pretty normal. However, by the time I had hauled my atlas-sized rucksack down the road and arrived at the strangely Bavarian-styled architecture of the station itself it became clear that I had done something out of the ordinary. There's only one way of putting this – I was the only white face on the train and on the station.
Remember I'd just set foot in Africa for only the second time and was still fighting off the jetlag – I suddenly felt right in the heart of a travelling 'experience' and one that I wasn't that comfortable with. I mean I was about to spend the night on this train hurtling headlong through the sweltering Namibian night. What if I'd just broken some local code or what if they were all laughing through their teeth 'stupid traveller boy – we'll soon see to him when he's asleep' and then proceed to steal my biltong/beer/walkman/camera/clothes/passport.
Of course this was all paranoid bullshit – all that did happen was an offer of marriage, some serious snoring, painful seats in the laughingly-called first class carriage and some very weird 1970s movies on the VCR.
I'll cover all these if you will, but firstly I have to defend my slight malaise with this trans-desert trip as I had just read the Private McAuslan series by George McDonald Fraser and there was a particularly memorable story regarding when he was Officer in Command of the train from Cairo to Jerusalem just after the Second World War. The heat and the dark and the fact that as a nation Namibia had only relatively recently stopped being part of South African-dominated SW Africa – the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) had fought regularly with the South Africans on the Angolan border supported by Cuban forces to achieve this end – all unnerved me a tad.
In the end, the overnight Trans Namib served only as a reminder that there are slower and more uncomfortable train journeys than even a London commute. Taking a little over 14 hours to travel a little under 600 km, the dilapidated passenger coaches rocked and bumped through the night, packed with itinerant workers and families swathed in patchwork blankets and discoloured duvets. The passenger coaches seemed to take a fairly secondary place to the freight cars, which were alternately dropped off and picked up through the night adding lurch after lurch to the already uncomfortable sleeping environment.
The VCR crackled throughout most of it and when I could hear above the snores it didn't seem to make much sense anyway – it may have been dubbed into Afrikaans but I think it was just a set of very old tapes! One film stuck in mind though – a Western called Thomasine and Bushrod; a sort of blaxploitation spaghetti-western from the 1970s. It served to add to the surreal surrounds as the desert slowly clanked by outside the window and made me wonder if the indigenous tribes thought that this was an accurate portrayal of what happened in the Wild West.
Anyway outside of Mariental I leant out of the first class compartment for a smoke – read the bit at the front where the train guards slept as well as some of the passengers and whose seats were marginally less closely packed together. This seemed to attract some local women several feet below the footplate who gestured at me and generally smiled and laughed. Unluckily/fortunately once you get outside of Windhoek the black populace basically speak Afrikaans rather than English. If they are half-caste, or 'half-nijke' in the local parlance (not a great Arikaans word to be honest sort of means half-f***ed) they might speak English, but more readily it's German. I think in the end she was offering to marry me but it could have been that she wanted another beer (I already gave her the one I had) or was she just trying to sell me her friend? I was none the wiser and defaulted to polite-Englishman-Caught-in-the-middle-of-the-desert-at-midnight-in-a-railway-siding which roughly translates to grinning a lot, going red and trying to get back to my seat and look sheepish, as fast as possible.
Somehow, in the unbelievably uncomfortable seats, I slept, but it took a while to drop off – it now dawned on me that I had been allowed to sit near the front as the arm-rests were stuck and couldn't be moved up, out of the way for comfort, which meant I had them digging into the small of my back while I lay across them for most of the night.
All this aside, once the sun was up and we proceeded to stop at every crooked piece of wood indicating some sort of dwelling, the Namib desert and the surrounding plains gave one a real impression of the size and other worldliness that lies at the heart of Namibia's charm and I started to relax into my African journey.
Several hours later, as I stumbled out into the bright sunshine and along the platform, it dawned on me that I had no idea where I was and who I was meeting - if anyone. I seemed to remember that there had been talk of a pick-up but none was apparent... Determined not to panic or be phased by this fact, I moved to the outside of the station to light up a cigarette, only to be accosted by a bearded, smiling guy who was munching his way through a pie. This turned out to be my host - Louis Fourie - who bundled my belongings into the back of his bakki (a kind of dilapidated 4x4) and took me back to his house in Keetmanshoop to get some supplies and a badly needed coffee.
Within the hour we were sweeping through the dry, alien, deserted wilderness en route to his farm in the Fish River Canyon. The lodge and farm are immediately adjacent to the National Park and comprise of some 50,000 hectares or, to get this into perspective, an area bigger than Guernsey!
Pretty soon, the roads turned from the clean well kept tarmac of the Trans Namib Highway and became the gravel and dust wide track that is typical of most of Namibia. Basic rules for driving this are to keep to the middle and look on the horizon for the tell-tale dustcloud that signifies an approaching car. Passing the Nautedam, Louis excitedly told me about the uncharacteristic numbers of snakes on the road and sure enough before I could voice my near phobic fears of herpetology we had come to an abrupt halt next to a sand coloured, fairly inert looking 3m long Cape Cobra.
I have to say that it didn't remain inert for long and after some fairly tentative attempts by my new found friend to 'wake it up' which culminated in a rather hefty stone being thrown at it, it did indeed 'wake up' and proceeded at top speed to come towards me! I managed to get a photo of the dread beastie before dashing inside the car door and we drove off at high speed in reverse... only to find that the snake had disappeared! Suddenly an icy hand gripped my heart as I realised it must have got in the bakki with us. Then I heard a clank and the serpent dropped off the underside of the car where it had done a fairly good job of holding on by the skin of its teeth I should think.
When we finally arrived at Louis' farm, I had a breakfast fit for a king, with free-range eggs and Russian sausages (a curiously South African delicacy it turns out!) and then saw the magnificence that was the desolate, empty, haunting but above all beautiful Fish River Canyon. Almost immediately the grandeur and splendour of the surrounds drained out the last vestiges of London-life and I realised just how far you could 'get away from it all', and within 72 hours as well. I thoroughly recommend it - although the Fish River2 did have a few more surprises, and snakes, in store for me yet.
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