Diary

Namibia

Well, we got back from Namibia the other day and seem to have brought a considerable portion of the Namib desert back with us in our bags, clothes, hair, under our fingernails and inside the lens mechanism of David's camera. Namibia is an amazing country and we recommend everyone goes there. And if you do, definitely do some trekking if you can - if you go on a sightseeing only tour, you will spend hours upon hours in a bus travelling across a country four times the size of the UK, on gravel roads that will rattle your bones until your whole body aches.

We had decided to start our trip with a few days at a game reserve to give us time to relax and see some wild African beasts before getting our walking boots on. This turned out to be an excellent decision. We stayed at a brilliant little place called the Auas Game Lodge, about 40 minutes' drive (some of which was even on tarmac) from Windhoek airport, and spent two days wandering through some of their 50,000 hectares seeking out (and finding) oryx, giraffe, wildebeest, baboon, springbok, jackal, waterbuck, ostrich, kudu, warthog, zebra, hartebeest, and a hoard of exotic birds and insects. Most of these we saw on a game drive organised by the lodge (the animals seem to be much less wary of a safari truck than of a few pedestrians) and were even lucky enough to catch the resident leopard at feeding time. When we weren't spotting the game, we were eating it: we were fed a tasty blue wildebeest steak with sauteed mushrooms for lunch on the first day and an oryx 'weiner schnitzel' the next evening along with a couple of lovely bottles of South African wine.

In our less active moments we were soaking up the sun by the (ice cold) pool - the boys even took a dip, albeit a brief one - and sipping chilled bottles of Tafel while watching the local ostrich couple get frisky and a particularly dim hornbill fly bill-first into a glass patio door for a good half hour. This was also where we encountered Namibia's ubiquitous giant crickets. Long-legged, prehistoric-looking and cannibalistic, they'd accompany us for the next two weeks in their hundreds and we would learn to live with their high-pitched shrieking and tendency to creep up your trouser leg or into your tent.

Namibia's population is one thirtieth of the UK's, despite it being four times the size, so once we had left the lodge, met the other eight people in our group at the airport, and set off into the wild, we saw very few people from then on.

Our first stop was in the Naukluft mountains, where we set up camp at the first in a string of well-equipped-to-the-point-of-luxury camp sites (compared with previous experience). We did our best to ignore the baboon and big cat prints in the dust around our tents - we'd learnt to recognise them at the lodge, but ignorance might have been preferable. We did two treks here: one of 17k up into the mountains where we tested our thigh muscles for the first time since our Atlas Mountains trek last May, and added a few animals to our repertoire: mountain basi rats, clipspringer, black eagle, rosy-faced lovebirds and flocks of the sociable weaver, which build enormous communal nests and would later help us clean the cattleguard of our bus when we got caught in a locust storm.

The second walk was through a very picturesque gorge with spectacular rippling rock formations around every corner. We crossed one particularly narrow ledge with the aid of an iron chain. The gorge eventually opened out into more exposed, grassy terrain, and one final climb to a hilltop where we were buffeted by the wind (and terrorised again by the giant crickets) during lunch before beginning our descent to the bus (and a few beers) and setting off for Camp Agama, our base for the Sossusvlei Dunes.

The Namibian Government, in an effort to cash in on the growing tourist industry, has recently increased the taxes on the campsites at the edge of the Sossusvlei National Park by 300 per cent. In practice, this means that very few people can now afford to stay there. We had a 5am start in order to reach the dunes for sunrise, and thankfully sped straight past the tourist trap that is Dune 45 to head into the desert proper. Again, the total change of terrain brought with it new flora and fauna in the form of black breasted snake eagles, sidewinders, ostrich lettuce, devil's thorn and prickly melons. Charles, our tour leader, took us up a first mini-dune and showed us how to run down the other side by digging our heels in and doing a sort of slow motion canter. We must have done ok, because he then offered to take us up 'Big Daddy', the tallest dune in the world - something that definitely wasn't on the itinerary. We jumped at the chance and started the hour-long slog up the clean knife-edge ridge to the top, 350 metres up. Needless to say the view from there is stunning, particularly of the immense 'Dead Vlei' with its petrified acacias. We think we may have interrupted a marriage proposal at the top - sorry if that was you! And of course, coming down was a whole lot of sandy fun...

Having emptied our boots, we walked back through the long dead (450 years or so) acacias that lack of moisture in the air has prevented from decaying, and started the long walk back to the bus, while Charles ran ahead to get lunch on (!). Once rested and fed, we stopped on the way back to Agama to take a quick look at Sesreim gorge before heading back to camp for wine on the lodge roof-terrace to watch a simultaneous moonrise and sundown (the lack of light pollution in Namibia means a full moons is amazingly bright, to the point where it can even stop you from sleeping).

Next morning, we had a 6am start for the six-hour drive to Aus, the coldest place in Namibia, and managed to smash a window of the bus en route. The journey from then on was quite chilly until David devised an isolation system using two mattresses and some bunjee cords. Once we set up camp, we had a few free hours before taking a short walk to watch the sun set over an apparently Martian landscape. That night was freezing cold and we woke up to find ice on our tents. Our next walk was a rocky ascent to the 'eagle's nest', a viewpoint accessible via a steep final climb. I would have been less keen to get up there had I known that we would be coming down by the same route!

It's fairly obvious the itinerary had been specially planned to prepare us for our four-day Fish River Canyon trek. Each day our muscles felt a little more tender, and we progressively fine-tuned our ascents, descents, rock-hopping, sand-walking, and so on. We camped again at Klein Aus before travelling even further South to Vogelstrausskluft , which is barren and flat even by the rest of the country's standards. Here we had a first go at packing our backpacks for the canyon, as we had to carry everything we needed for four days, including sleeping gear, warm clothes, food and cooking equipment. We were allocated the packs of dried food that we'd be living off, and had a small, slightly anxious swapping party. Our minds were soon taken off our newly acquired packets of soya mince by dinner at the stunning lodge (Kudu), along with a few bottles of red, and for the first time in days, we went to bed after 7.30!

The following morning, we packed up camp and got our bags ready. We were to be joined on the trek by two local guides, Spiker and Nikolas. The apprehension in the camp was palpable as we all quietly thought about what essential items we'd chosen to leave behind and which ones would weigh us down for four days and never be used. But we were quickly distracted trying to find a seating position that offered some shelter from the wind blasting us in the open safari trucks that took us to the starting point of our trek. And we even managed to forget the cold when our driver, Spiker, attempted some unbelievable moves over the gulley-filled terrain that, in places, looks like no vehicle has ever attempted it before. At times, I thought we'd finally reached the canyon's edge, until Spiker nonchalantly sent us over the edge to face another chassis-scraping escapade. Hours later, we finally reached our starting point.

The section of the canyon we trekked through was actually different from the official itinerary (Exodus, communicate please!) as water is too scarce on the 'traditional' 85k trek through the deepest part of the canyon and a group had to be evacuated by helicopter last year. We did a slightly shorter and more northerly section, with two full-on eight-hour days of walking, and two half days getting into and out of the canyon. We crossed the Fish River approximately 17 times, taking our boots off to do so (after an initial bad experience), taking our 12-15 kilo backpacks off to remove our boots and string them round our necks, putting our packs back on to brave the icy fast-moving water and ultra-slippery rocks, taking the packs off to dry the feet and put the boots back on, etc etc. Needless to say this slowed our progress. Sometimes the paddle was a welcome and refreshing break from trudging through sand or hopping between rocks in the midday heat. At other times I thought I might lose some teeth or break an ankle.

The scenery in the canyon is well worth the effort of sleeping out in the open, eating dried food, drinking chlorinated river water and smelling for four days. The silence is eerie and you can have quite a bit of fun with echoes. In one moment of fatigue-induced delusion, we were convinced a group of baboons high up on the canyon wall were laughing at us. You're also very well placed for star gazing (though the moon will be unbelievably bright if it's full). I have never seen the milky way so clearly and we did quite a bit of satellite and shooting star-spotting.

We later discovered that our guides had protected us from a few alarming sightings, including fresh mountain tiger tracks through our 'camp site' one morning, and a black cobra which they disturbed while deciding which route we should take.

On the fourth morning, we made our (sharp) ascent to the plateau, which is covered with a thin layer of black rock, that millions of years of weathering has turned into a kind of crazy paving with sponge-like imprints. Anna, who had decided not to do the canyon trek, met us with a cool box of very welcome chilled beers at the top, and then we made our way back to the lodge and the relative luxury of the camp site. We had lunch and dinner at the lodge, and set off the next morning for Keetmanshoop, the capital of South Namibia, which it took us all of 20 minutes to walk around (even then we were pacing ourselves) before hopping back on the bus to go to our campsite 15k out of town. We had time to relax, play some cards and drink some beers before watching the four resident cheetahs being fed (a few of us even got close enough to stroke them) and then taking a short walk through the 'Giant's playground' for our last African sunset. The playground is actually 18,000 hectares of incredible balancing rocks (another feat of millions of years of erosion and weathering) interspersed with quiver trees - a perfect setting to watch the light fade in eerie silence on our last evening.

Over our last supper of barbecued lamb à la Charles, we thanked our four guides for their dedication, incredible knowledge and delicious cooking, and made our way to bed early yet again to prepare for the seven hour journey back to Windhoek the next day. We managed to squeeze in an hour of shopping in the capital to pick up any essential souvenirs before we were due to make our way to the airport for our 5.30 flight. However, once back at the bus, Charles announced that our flight was delayed until at least midnight, and so we made our way to the Wild Dog Tours office for showers and a few beers with another stranded tour group of Brits, before spending the rest of the evening in Joe's beer house, where we feasted on more African game and chilled out until 11, when we regrouped at the bus to make our way to the airport.

Once air-side, we found other less fortunate (or less well-informed) passengers strewn across the floor of the departure lounge, and waited until 2.30am before we could actually board. We were all exhausted enough to actually get some sleep on the plane...