From Victoria Falls to the Skeleton Coast – Day 6: Getting fished out of the sand in Sossusvlei

When we arrived at our car rental at eight in the morning, I did not expect to leave a full hour later, but there were a lot of things I had to learn before I could be unleashed onto the roads of Namibia. Very patiently, the rental owner showed me how to change a tyre, how to deflate and inflate a tyre, how to unfasten the second spare tyre from the bottom of the car, and how to put together all the implements necessary for these operations. During the process, we found that the nuts on the wheels were tightened so fast that I could not budge them at all, so our first point of call was a service centre where we had an employee slightly loosen them. This way, if we needed to change a tyre, we would be able to do so.

We only left Windhoek at around quarter past nine, having refilled our gas tank before leaving the city. The road ahead would take us at least five hours, quickly switching from smooth tarmac to gravel. Still, we ploughed on without stopping for some two hundred kilometres until we reached the Spreetshoogte Pass with its scenic views of the Namib Desert and surrounding mountains. It was there we were told that we were riding with our headlights off, which is advised against in Namibia for reasons not entirely clear to me (I assume the lights make a car easier to see behind a pillar of dust kicked up the car in front of it). Other than this sight, the most interesting part of our journey up until that point was seeing a few baboons crossing the road.

Without breaking for lunch, we continued all the way to the small town of Sesriem, feeding ourselves on nuts, dates, and the snacks we had bought at Maun airport. It was around half past two when we arrived at the gate leading to Sossusvlei, where we paid for our entry and emptied our bowels. We were very conscious of the time: Our hotel was all the way back in Solitaire, which lay some two hours away from the farthest point we planned to reach in Sossusvlei.

As we rode farther and farther into the park, the ever-changing scenery became even more striking. The reddish cliffs that had welcomed us into the lowlands of the Namib Desert, sometimes streaked with darker colours and sometimes flocked by groves of trees emerging from the clumps of dry grass, gave way to huge red dunes that seemed to hang above the horizon like frozen waves. We could not tear our eyes away from our surroundings as we rode along the dunes, which turned pink as they receded into the distance.

Our moment of reckoning came when we arrived at the parking lot by Sossusvlei. This was where we would have to deflate our tyres to one and a half BAR, which we did by unscrewing the caps and using a little knob on the back of the barometer to press the centre of the tube. The task did not take long. Soon, we found ourselves riding on the sand and dutifully following the tracks of the vehicles that had gone before us.

There was another parking area just a few minutes journey from the entrance, from which a hiking trail of sorts led us over the dunes to the famous site of Deadvlei. Composed of the words “dead” and “vlei,” meaning “marsh” in Afrikaans, the name Deadvlei describes quite literally how this striking location came to be. The area is a clay pan that formed hundreds of years ago when the Tsauchab River flooded the valley, creating pools of water that supported a population of camel thorn trees. The marsh dried up some time in the thirteen or fourteen hundreds, which killed the trees, but due to the dryness of the local environment they did not decompose, and they remain as haunting reminders of the once lush countryside. Nowadays, one of the few signs of life that can be seen in Deadvlei are the Namib desert beetles, whose frantic scurrying leaves ladderlike trails across the dunes.

We left Deadvlei just before five, which we reckoned to be the latest time we could afford to leave if we wanted to arrive in Solitaire before the darkness closed in. However, this plan took a hit almost immediately when I picked the wrong trail in the sand and mired the car. We jumped out immediately and started frantically sweeping the sand from around the tyres with our bare hands, but it was of no use. On my second attempt at driving either forwards or backwards, the tyres ended up buried even deeper than they had been when we started.

Just as I began to reconcile myself with having to spend a night in the car, another vehicle drove past us. With that eminently useful female lack of inhibition about asking for help, Wei waved the car down before the driver could pretend that he did not notice our predicament. We were lucky that he was a local. He had just been driving two tourists to the dunes and made sure to make us understand that our distress was a matter of no small annoyance to him. He noted emphatically that the official price for towing a car out of the sand was 1080 Namibian Dollars, but when I asked how we could contact the park to ask for this service, he told us almost disgustedly that it was close to closing time, upon which he hopped into our car’s driver’s seat and started reversing.

Almost magically, by spinning the steering wheel from one side to another and back again, the driver managed to inch his way up and out of the mound in which I had buried the car. The process took no more than a minute. After he had driven over the section where I had gotten us stuck, he stopped and asked – in an almost refreshingly matter-of-fact tone – for a generous tip. He seemed to be well satisfied with less than a fifth of the official price for a towing. Heeding his parting words of wisdom, I did not repeat my mistake of driving through the sand slowly and cautiously but sped right across all the way to the first parking lot.

It was now at least twenty minutes past five and we still had to re-inflate our tyres. By the time we had almost finished our second tyre, a German tourist came up to us and told us that we ought to start the engine (which powered the pump), lest we kill the battery. We thanked the man profusely for his advice. The only thing we did smartly was counting how long it took to inflate the first tyre, and based on that, estimating how much each subsequent tyre would take.

It was a shame that we had to rush out of the park when we did, as the animals had just begun to become active again as the air cooled down. A herd of springboks crossed the road right in front of us between the dunes and the open fields, and a jackal loitered by the path just by the park gate. We also saw a gemsbok among the trees. For another half an hour after we left the park, the sky was reassuringly bright, but the night descended with an alarming suddenness, and we soon found ourselves in a terrifying darkness. It became challenge to find a path along the gravel road that did not make the car bounce up and down like the needle of a sewing machine, and when the occasional car went past us, the dust completely blocked out all sight of the road. Turning on some familiar music for courage, I drove on singing to myself, and we finally reached Solitaire without injury a little before eight.