Hardap Game Park

Hardap, the dam that keeps flooding its own town

In 1897 a German hydraulics professor named Rehbock looked at a farm on the Fish River and decided it was the place for a storage dam. Nothing was built for more than sixty years. The colonial government weighed up four dam sites in the territory, looked first at the neighbouring farm Komatsas, and in 1913 the parliament in Berlin voted money to survey the whole Fish River basin. Then the war came. When the idea was picked up again, the sums showed that a wall of the same size on Hardap would hold far more water than one on Komatsas, and it was built there in the early 1960s.

The name is Nama and means nipple or wart, for the low cone-shaped hills around the water.

What the dam was meant to be

A South African water history calls Hardap the third-largest storage dam in Southern Africa on the day it was completed. It was built to water about 2,000 hectares of smallholdings below the wall, and it came with a small hydroelectric turbine and a primary school for the settlement. The administration also planned a training farm where prisoners would be taught agriculture.

The town downstream

Mariental sits on the Fish River below the wall, and the dam has not kept it dry. On 16 March 1972, about ten years after the wall was finished, what was then called the biggest flood in living memory hit the irrigation settlement. Water came again in 1974 and 1976, in 2000, and in February 2006. On Friday 24 February the dam stood at 82 percent and the gates were opened. Rain that night pushed it to 110 percent, and by the next day the western side of town was under water. About 2,000 people were displaced and insurers counted more than N$80 million in losses. The following year the insurers’ association said it would no longer cover flood damage below the dam.

The argument afterwards was about the riverbed as much as the rain. An opposition MP told the National Assembly that the channel could once carry about 2,000 cubic metres a second and now managed 450, and the municipality blamed the reeds growing in it. The flood task force answered that clearing them would not keep the town dry. The water minister had a blunter point: before the dam existed, the Director of Works had advised against developing the land west of the railway line because it would flood.

What came out of 2006 is a rule that decides how much water a visitor finds. Once the dam passes 70 percent the sluices open. That is the level the town asked for, and the irrigation farmers wanted 80. In wet years the gates open again and again (three times in two months in early 2009). In February 2020 the level fell to about 6 percent, reported as the lowest in the dam’s history, then more than tripled in a week when the rain arrived.

Counting pelicans

The great white pelicans nest on islands in the dam. Counts published by Travel News Namibia show how much the colony moves: 800 birds in 1999, 4,024 by early 2003, then 1,522 for the 2007 to 2012 period. Chicks fledge here in most years. What a dam at 6 percent does to an island colony I have not found recorded, and it is the first thing I would ask at the office.

Hu Berry, who put the first leg rings on Namibian pelicans, tells a good story about how far these birds do or do not travel. Ring H1024 went onto a chick at Walvis Bay on 30 December 1972. About 36 years later the same bird was photographed some 12 km from where it hatched. Berry wondered where it had gone to breed in between, to the islands in Hardap Dam or to Etosha Pan. Nobody knows.

What you will see, and what you will not

Oryx are the safest bet. When the government listed animals for sale during the 2019 drought it put Hardap’s oryx at about 780, which is a lot for a park this size, and offered 65 of them. Springbok are plentiful too. About 150 were marked to be shot here in 2013 for drought relief meat, and in 2019 another 150 were put up for sale from Hardap and Naute between them. Black-backed jackal are around, and the resort’s own list includes giraffe, which the operator’s page for the park leaves out.

Do not plan a stop around the rhino. They are kept to the northern section, only about 1,848 hectares, and even there the resort operator calls a sighting very rare.

Leopard are here but you are more likely to read about them than see one. A few weeks after the 2006 flood, Mariental was full of talk that four lions had escaped from a game lodge and were loose on the river. Ministry staff went to look and found the tracks of two leopards instead, most likely animals from the park or the farms around town. People fishing the river between the dam and Mariental were told to keep their eyes open.

Since 2018 the resort has had a 45-seat boat on the dam, so the gravel roads are no longer the only way to look for birds and game.

Sunset and a rebuilt camp

Little has been written by people who have stayed here, which says something about how many drive past. Two accounts agree on the light at the end of the day. A family heading for Etosha with a five-year-old and a two-year-old wrote about the sunset over the water, and a Travel News Namibia writer went out on foot at the same hour for the blue of the dam against the hills. The same family found no cutlery in their self-catering unit, so pack your own.

The resort itself spent years shut. A fire in the restaurant kitchen in 2010 was blamed on an electrical fault, and by the middle of 2012 the place had been closed for a year with no building work begun. Competition anglers who used to book the chalets had to stay in Mariental instead. It reopened at the end of 2015.