Namibia: Gocheganas to Sesriem

After leaving Gocheganas, we drove through Rehoboth, the town of Basters, where we stopped to refuel. The houses are not the nicest, but people seemed really friendly. We noticed an interesting pattern of building fences in Namibia, with some of the metal poles being only half-height. We’re not sure why, maybe for the wild animals to be able to see them?

Lunch was at an interesting place not far from Klein Aub, Conny’s coffee. The coffee is not brewed by Conny, but by Gunther, who knows and loves good coffee. Slow cooking and slow life is his motto, after years spent at a different pace. He grows his own vegges and cooks using traditional methods using sun and wind energy only – including slow-cooked meals made in a sun-oven. He is also keen to share stories about his life in Namibia, including how he was taught German and then South African history in school, and not much Namibian history.

After this interesting lunch, we took off again and continued driving for another three hours through some amazing scenery that changed from moon-type desert with some scrubs every here and there to bare hills being overtaken by the red sandy dunes.

We saw lots of fairly large nests that we later learned to belong to sociable weavers – amazing birds that live in colonies in these nests that also have good temperature control.

We stayed at the wonderful Sossuvlei Lodge, where we enjoyed spectacular views towards the sand dunes, with a couple of oryx antelopes roaming about. The gardens were quite nice – desert gardens of course with acacia (lots of mokala or camelthorn trees that had the green ear-lobe shaped pods), aloe, cacti etc, nicely manicured and cared for.

The lodge has a nice terrace above the bar and also a tower that gives beautiful views across that whole area, especially in shades of sunset light filtered through the ubiquitous sand grains.

We had an amazing experience on this terrace. We stayed to watch the sunset, but got a much more impressive show with the Moon rising exactly opposite to the Sun going down.

Once everybody was back from their daily wanders, buffet dinner was served with a nice selection prepared and served by staff who seemed very happy to be there.

A short video with some of the roads we drove on today can be found here.