Namib-Naukluft National Park

The patrol that found Sossusvlei dry, and the men who hid here

In February 1909 a German lieutenant called Walter Trenk rode out of Sesriem with 15 mounted troopers to settle a rumour. Somewhere down the Tsauchab River, people said, lay a “Bushman Paradise”. The patrol left on the 9th and followed the riverbed. On the night of the 11th something spooked the horses and they scattered, so the men spent the next morning on foot rounding them up. That evening they reached the place where the river simply ends against the dunes. There was no water in the pan and nobody living there. The only sign of people was a patch of !nara bushes with ostrich wings laid over the fruit, which Trenk took for scarecrows. At midnight he turned for home. His report, printed in the colonial gazette the following year, is the first written record of anyone visiting Sossusvlei.

Peter Bridgeford, who dug the report out in 2011, points to one detail you can still check from the tar road. Trenk noted dead camelthorns about 35 km below Sesriem, and they are still standing.

Trenk was unlucky with the water, but so is nearly everyone. The Tsauchab gets as far as the pan about once a decade. Photographs posted by a 4x4 forum member in late January 2022 show it holding water after heavy rain near Sesriem.

Otto, the carp and the unlicensed dog

The park’s best story belongs to the north, in the Kuiseb canyon. Henno Martin and Hermann Korn were German geologists who had arrived in 1935 and made the first geological maps of the Naukluft. In 1940, facing internment, they loaded a lorry and drove into the canyon with a dog named Otto, chosen, Martin wrote, because the name looks the same from either end. They stayed about two and a half years.

Martin’s book, The Sheltering Desert, is worth reading before you drive the Kuiseb road. They named their first home Carp Cliff after finding fish in a canyon pool, built a wall to keep the west wind out of the overhang they lived under, and sowed radishes and carrots in a damp sandbank. Korn insisted on a bed of tobacco. It came up as acacia seedlings. Their rifle had been handed in when war broke out, so they hunted with a pistol and a shotgun. A wireless brought them the air battles over Britain. Martin lay out two nights by the carp pool to shoot the hyaena that kept stealing the fish.

It ended in 1942 when Korn fell ill with what turned out to be beriberi. Martin drove him out to a farmer they knew, Korn told the police where his friend was, and seven armed officers came to fetch him. The charge sheet included failing to pay the dog licence. The magistrate handed down small fines, and before the war ended the two were picking well sites for the government. Korn was killed in a motor accident in 1946.

The Naukluft has an older war. Hendrik Witbooi fought the Germans from these mountains after their attack on Hornkranz in April 1893. He surrendered to Theodor Leutwein here on 15 September 1894.

The beetle everyone gets wrong

Oryx are the safe bet. More than eight in ten travellers who log sightings with Expert Africa report them. One camper at Sesriem wrote of gemsbok walking between the pitches.

The famous fog beetle is harder than the brochures suggest. The behaviour was first described in 1976 by William Hamilton and Mary Seely. In night fog Onymacris unguicularis climbs the slip face of a dune, stands on its head and lets droplets run down to its mouth. Some take on a third of their body weight. A 2010 study tested four Namib beetles and found it was the only one that did this. The species usually credited with the trick did not. Gobabeb, the research station on the Kuiseb that Charles Koch first ran in 1962, gets fog on about 94 days a year, and you would have to be on a dune in the dark to watch a beetle use it.

Look up along the Tsauchab instead. Lappet-faced vultures build on the tops of trees, and volunteers have been ringing the chicks since 1991, in October. In 2014 they ringed a record 100, the hundredth in the Tsauchab on the way to Sossusvlei.

Horses at Garub, jackals at Sandwich

Far to the south, 20 km west of Aus, the park takes in much of the range of the Garub wild horses. In 1915 some 10,000 South African soldiers and 6,000 horses were based here, and a German aircraft bombed the camp and scattered the animals. The herd stood at 286 after the rains of 2010 and 2011, then drought and spotted hyaenas cut it to 77. Researcher Telané Greyling counted 100 horses killed by hyaenas in 2013 alone, half of them foals, and for five years almost no foal lived. The ministry shot three hyaenas in February 2019, which angered conservationists, because spotted hyaenas are a vulnerable species here too. The horses drink roughly every 30 hours in summer and every 72 in winter.

Sandwich Harbour, south of Walvis Bay, is a record of failed businesses. A meat cannery opened in 1890 and was abandoned five years later when the lagoon mouth sanded up. In the 1930s there was a scheme to build a guano island with sand pumps shipped from the Netherlands. Jackals walked across at low tide and chased the birds off. Further down the coast the steamer Eduard Bohlen ran aground in thick fog on 5 September 1909, seven months after Trenk’s ride. She now lies about 400 metres from the sea.

What campers say about Sossusvlei is plainer. Ask for a pitch away from the road at Sesriem, because passing vehicles (one camper blamed the lodge and balloon trucks) cover the nearest sites in gravel dust. Be off the dunes well before midday, when the sand gets too hot to walk on. One family ended up carrying their children back from Deadvlei.