Tsau ǁKhaeb (Sperrgebiet) National Park

Fairytale Valley, a floppy-eared hyena and the forbidden coast

“Mooi klip”, pretty stone. Those are the words history gives Zacharias Lewala, a labourer shovelling sand off the railway near Grasplatz station in April 1908. He had worked on the mines at Kimberley and knew what a rough diamond looked like. His foreman, August Stauch, was a Thuringian railwayman who had come out a year earlier because a doctor thought desert air would help his asthma. Stauch dragged the stone across the glass of his watch. It cut.

What the pretty stone did to two men

Stauch had the find confirmed by a mining engineer called Sönke Nissen, and the two of them pegged a claim at Kolmanskop. That September the German government closed the coast from the Orange River north for some 360 km, and 100 km inland. Stauch became a millionaire, ran one of the big mining companies, then lost nearly all of it in the crash of 1931. He died of stomach cancer in Eisenach in 1947, back in the Thuringia he had left.

About Lewala the record goes almost silent. A writer in the German magazine Der Spiegel put it bluntly: the name survived and little else, because nobody paid him for the find or thanked him. Where he went afterwards, and when he died, I could not find recorded anywhere. If you take the tour out of Lüderitz, remember that the story you hear at each stop rests on a man the paperwork forgot.

The valley they worked on their stomachs

Pomona, south of Elizabeth Bay, had a mining history before any of this. In the 1860s two men, Aaron de Pass and Captain John Spence, got mining rights there from the Nama chief David Christian. Then Stauch went prospecting south with the Berlin mining professor Robert Scheibe and came on a valley where diamonds lay on the surface. He named it Idatal after his wife, Ida. Everyone else called it Märchental, the Fairytale Valley. Two more valleys got his daughters’ names, Barbara and Marianne, and another went to Scheibe.

The tale told about it is that the stones were picked up at night, glittering in the moonlight, by men crawling across the gravel on their bellies. Believe the detail or not, the output was real: over a million carats came out of the Pomona field between 1912 and 1914. To serve it the company built a 119 km narrow gauge railway from Kolmanskop through Pomona to Bogenfels, electric, in a desert with no water. It took four years to finish, in 1913. South African troops wrecked it two years later. One magazine writer who did the trip in 2022 found tools still scattered around the 1911 pump station at Grillental, and at Pomona only rust-coloured lines on the ground where the track ran. Pomona had a school and a bowling alley. It has a cemetery too, and the Rough Guide describes a graveyard out here that the sand is slowly taking.

For all that effort only about a twentieth of the park has ever been mined. The rest was simply left alone for a hundred years, which is the real reason to come.

Mosul, Pisa and the seals at Baker’s Bay

The animal that belongs to this coast is the brown hyena, the strandwolf. The Brown Hyena Research Project, run from Lüderitz by Ingrid Wiesel, has followed them since 1997 and reckons Namibia holds 800 to 1,200, about half of them along the coastal Namib. They can walk 40 km in a night.

What they eat is seal. At the Baker’s Bay colony the researcher Marie Lemerle sat for some 450 hours in her first months in 2020 and 2021, sunrise to sunset, and identified 22 different hyenas by leg stripes and torn ears. The two clans that own the place come only after dark. Outsiders, some of them living more than 50 km inland, come during the day, probably to avoid a fight, which is why the project calls Baker’s Bay one of the best places anywhere to watch brown hyenas in daylight. December, when the pups are born, is the busy time, and three or four hyenas may be on the colony at once, with jackals taking newborns alongside them.

The regulars have names. Mosul, first photographed at Van Reenen Bay in 2010, would kill a pup, eat, then sleep against the rocks for hours. Pisa, whose left ear is flipped backwards, never ate at the colony. He carried what he got a few hundred metres off, hid it in a bush and came back for more, about three times a visit. His daughter Little Pisa has the same ear, one blind eye and a habit of going for other hyenas, her own clan included. At Elizabeth Bay the old female Obelixa, collared in 2009, lived to about 15. The clan’s breeding female now is Ellis, who rests in the old buildings of the ghost town and had a cub, Mangeni, in March 2025.

Now the honest part. Baker’s Bay is closed to the public, so you will not see any of that. Your chance is a guided trip to Elizabeth Bay, which the researchers sometimes join if asked, and even there the project says plainly that sightings can never be promised. On the long drive to Bogenfels what tour write-ups mention is oryx, springbok, ostrich and jackal. If you do meet a hyena, it is shy and no danger. Keep calm and give it room.

Older things under the sand

The name Tsau ǁKhaeb is Nama for deep, soft sand, and the sand hides more than diamonds. At Grillental, where the tour stops for the pump station, the river beds are about 21 million years old and have given up fossils of a sabre-toothed cat, a hyrax and a python-like snake from a time when rivers ran here. Further south, some 80 km north of Oranjemund, a meteorite punched the Roter Kamm crater about five million years ago: 2.5 km across and 130 m deep, its floor under at least 100 m of sand, and a long way from any of the day routes out of Lüderitz.