Natural Selection

If one has been weaned on the Zambezi Valley, or the Okavango, or acquired a taste for the Selous and the gorilla haunts of middle Africa, then the hostile landscape of Damaraland can take some getting used to.

It has taken this writer quite a while to feel at home in that environment. Intermittent forays into the desert vistas of Namibia often left me edgy and restless in the past. There were times when I wondered if I suffered from agoraphobia. But, I realised, it wasn't the space, being on the edge of infinity, the emptiness ... Perhaps it came from the lack of easily-seen wildlife. The night silence. Whatever caused it, on my most recent visit the edginess had gone, replaced by the feeling I always get in the bush, that of deep therapy. The desert had at last got me by the throat.

Damaraland is a hot, hard land. Especially when the sun is suspended, colourless, up there in the middle of nothing. In the uncompromising lunar landscape of Damaraland, with the granite massif of the Brandberg looming in the south, ethereal in the heat haze, amidst the wind-scoured stone plains and gaunt multi-hued desert buttes. It is another world. Time stands still.

Here in the wind-keening haunts of the desert a person gets an idea of what Planet Earth was like when it first coalesced. The summit of the Brandberg is the highest point in Namibia and it floats at the edge of your vision like some haunted Shangri-La as, insect-like, you and your vehicle toil across the desiccated land towards your chosen river-bed (the Ugab, or the Huab, or perhaps the Unjab), to camp for the night and look forward to the cool of evening.

It is in the early mornings and the last daylight hour that this environment really makes an impact, for this is when the changing light patterns bring a lump to the throat. In contrast to the colour-bleaching glare of the day, the shifting colours of last light - soft, subtle, many-hued, so pure that they have a life pulse of their own - are so compelling that any safari tasks slotted for that period of the day just have to be put on hold.

In the mornings it is the same. The bleak pewter pre-dawn light gives way to colours that shift and kaleidoscope in tandem with the new-day journey of the sun. An artist's palette of ochres and oxides, caramel and gold, ivory and maroon ... and everything in between. This, in a singing silence only experienced in the desert, in a place where time and space are fused. One can go into a kind of limbo in the desert, and a person has the time to take a long hard look at himself and wonder just where it is that he is meant to fit in, in the great scheme of life.

The hard beauty of the Damaraland region is itself encompassed by some rather special country, all of it adding to the desert wilderness tapestry that makes Namibia such an absorbing destination to visit.

Northwards there is the equally remote, sere Kaokoveld, along with the sun-dazzling 22,270km2 expanse of Etosha National Park - one of Africa's flagship wildlife sanctuaries. To the west there is the Skeleton Coast, where endless wind-sculpted sand dunes meet with the cold grey spume of the Atlantic Ocean. South is the vast Namib-Naukluft Park, with the highest sand dunes in the world. Eastwards, less enticing, is interminable scrubland, stretching away to become the Kalahari Desert.

What is the attraction of Damaraland? Perhaps it it its exquisite desolation, and the feeling that you're at last on your own in an increasingly frenetic world? Possibly, it is being where land and horizon blend into each other. Just as it has taken me longer than usual to have an affinity with this type of wilderness, so it is as difficult to put a finger on what force drags me back every couple of years. Certainly, the stark loneliness of the region is part of the attraction.

Whether one approaches from the coast or wombles through the dusty administrative centre of Khorixas, there are few hostelries to be found in this neck of the woods. Over the years I have sought out my own little havens in which to spend the night, revelling in the solitude and the fact that my small fire (the ashes buried deep the next day) was the only evidence of life around.

On my most recent sojourn, however, I had the pleasure of staying at the Damaraland Camp, a eco-friendly joint venture between the Wilderness Safaris and the local "Riemvasmaker" folk of the region. The rare enjoyment of living in the lap of luxury amidst the Damaraland rock desert was a treat indeed.

There is a caravan, chalet and camping facility in Khorixas, along with guest farm accommodation at scattered outposts. There is also the well patronised lodge and camping option of Palmwag on the route north into the Kaokoveld, where a cold beer in the noonday heat is balm on a dry dust-clogged throat.

(I should mention here that since Namibia's independence, Damaraland and Kaokoveld have been meshed into the political districts of Erongo and Kunene. However, the original names are still widely used.)

For anyone planning to sally forth into Damaraland the main attractions are the Spitzkoppe massif, way in the south of the territory; the petrified forest near Khorixas; Burnt Mountain; and the Twyfelfontein rock paintings - the greatest collection of Bushmen rock art in southern Africa. Here there are over 2,500 different rock paintings gracing a long hot sweep of valley rockwall, most of them depicting animals or other wild inhabitants of the region. Animals ... aah yes, this brings me full circle, to what I was saying at the start of this safari by osmosis.

The wildlife here is not an obvious presence, not if one has experienced the biomass of the Luangwa Valley, Mana Pools or Moremi. If you are used to lions grunting their presence just outside the wash of firelight, hyenas doing their banshee bit or hippos practising their tug-boat imitations, Damaraland will be quieter. Much quieter. To be sure, when the night fire is skittering liquidly in the desert breeze, the barking geckos and the occasional jackal serenade provide fine background music.

And, certainly, the desert has its own special brand of life. Springbok, giraffe, kudu, a lone oryx trooping resolutely off into the heat haze, mountain zebras standing stern-on to the sun, the ostriches pacing the Land Cruiser with ease - they are there to be seen. And, if you're really lucky, in one of the riverbeds amongst the Acacia albida groves, or on a distant sand dune as the morning mist lifts, or picking their way between the clumps of Euphorbia damarana on a red heat-shimmering boulder-strewn slope, you may see one of the megaticks of Africa, the desert elephant. Which is why I will be going back again, next year.

Keith Meadows operates safaris throughout southern and East Africa. He is the author of two books.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Four: Summer 1998. Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)