Life in Nam: Week 7ish

In search of the desert elephants...

Damaraland, Vingerklip, and Twyfelfontein: places that sound, and look, like fairy tale locations. Damaraland is in northwest Namibia, about 6 to 7 hours from Windhoek. Named after the Damara people (and geographically designated as their "official" home, during apartheid), the region is sparsely populated and in parts, seems completely uninhabitable. At every turn, the landscape is distinct - canyons, sedimentary rock mountains, hills covered in boulders where the earth was flipped inside out. At points we were only 60km (as the crow flies) from the Skeleton Coast. Yet a drive to the coast on gravel and salt roads would have taken hours. (note: of the 35,000km of roads in Namibia, only 5,000km are “tar roads.”)

So the real adventure of the weekend (fortunately, not more car trouble) was finding a rare herd of desert elephants near a natural spring on the Ugab River. Sigi, our guide, is a South African who has devoted his life to being in the wild. He had been following these particular dozen elephants for over eight years and came to know them so well, that he witnessed the birth of lucky number 13: a tiny baby elephant born on July 23, 2011. Driving through the bush and subsequent stargazing, it was clear that Sigi knew the terrain and the southern night sky like the back of his hand.

In Namibia, what you lack in GPS you make up for with a cooler full of beer to toast a successful elephant sighting.