Shortly before sundown on a Wednesday evening in July, drifting on a small boat down the Kunene river, which separates Namibia and Angola, I became aware that for some time not a single thought had troubled my head. Bee-eaters on the banks sought out supper, while the dish of a new moon floated in a burning twilight. An immense Nile crocodile with an ugly but good-natured face was taking a nap nearby. I looked fondly at her, and felt sure there ought to be something to worry about; but, summoning all my troubles, I discovered I couldn’t give two hoots about any of them. Was it possible, I thought (examining the situation like Carl Linnaeus taxonomising a beetle), that I was actually happy?
I’d arrived in Namibia five days before, to experience a series of lodges run by the eco-tourism operator Wilderness in three remote locations. The first of these was the Little Kulala, which sits 275km south-west of the capital Windhoek in the Namib desert.
We’d flown to an airstrip close by in a small plane from which I’d gaped in wonder at unimaginably vast reaches of unpopulated desert. Wind-smoothed dunes suddenly gave way to rocks forming pleats and folds and organ pipes as if the land were still under construction, before reverting abruptly to stretches of sand marked in places with fairy circles, or traversed by dried-out river beds where scarce trees hung valiantly on.
The journey then continued through the Namib by 4×4, and at closer quarters I found the land less bare than I’d imagined, if no less marvellous: low shrubs grew in flocks like mint-coloured sheep, and distantly small colonies of ostrich walked in single file.
When we reached the lodge — its appearance curiously both rugged and opulent — there was singing and a drum; staff evidently drawn from all quarters had come out to greet us. Soon I found there was singing on arrivals and departures and occasionally during mealtimes, and all so evidently customary that I asked the general manager how those steps and harmonies came so easily, and without embarrassment. “Well”, she said, with a suggestion of kindly censure, “we don’t all sit in our rooms alone staring at our phones. We get together and we tell stories and we sing.”
The singing done, we were handed scented flannels to wipe the sand and sweat from our faces, and one by one the staff introduced themselves and shook our hands. This was significant. I’d endured a distant unease at the idea of undertaking a kind of safari, a word holding for me such unpleasantly colonial connotations I pictured myself in a pith helmet sinking gin and tonic for the quinine. But quickly I began to feel the atmosphere was partly that of a superbly run hotel, and partly that of a home into which we’d been invited.
Five of Wilderness’s seven lodges in Namibia are on land leased from local communities, two are run as joint ventures with those communities. Conservation work includes collaborations with charities and non-profits such as Save the Rhino and the Desert Lion Project.
It seems vital to say here that I’m painfully conscious of the irony of having reached Little Kulala from London in three planes. How to reconcile the problem of eco-tourism’s dependence, in large part, on air travel — one of the causes of the very climate emergency that has made it necessary to save the rhino? I’m afraid I cannot.
The following day we set out for the dunes at Sossusvlei. “These are the dancing dunes,” said Markus Kaveto, our guide, a polymath capable of speaking at length on Namibia’s geology, flora, fauna and history, to say nothing of astronomy. And they do dance. Across the vast and gently curved surfaces, rising in places to more than 300 metres high, the light moves rapidly in shadow bands and hazy patches, giving the effect of a fluid not yet settled in its vessel. When the sun sinks, the red sand fades to pink, then improbably to mauve.
They call the largest of these dunes Big Daddy. Its peak may be reached by walking a long rising ridge of sand that first approaches the dune, then doubles back as if losing its nerve, before finally climbing to the summit in a steep slope. The way down is not back along this ridge. There is no track or foothold, only the plunging side of the dune, so vertiginous it must be descended by running through loose sand, ideally barefoot.
My companions were experienced travellers and seemed unfazed by the prospect. I, meanwhile, am well-suited to walking 15km on the flat in wet weather, but a childhood fright on Guildford High Street has given me a penetrating fear of ledges and steep declines.
Perhaps I ought to have mentioned this sooner than I did. At any rate, pride drove me halfway up Big Daddy, hands shaking and stomach turning, eyes fixed on the heels of the woman ahead. In the end I was taken by a kindly guide down a gentler slope, and from there we set out across Deadvlei, where the melancholy, sun-blackened corpses of camel thorn trees have stood for centuries at intervals across a parched clay riverbed. The red dunes, made redder by the white clay of the bed, appeared to ripple under the shadows of scudding clouds, as we watched the others — made of sterner stuff than I — fly down Big Daddy’s impossible incline with what looked like joy.
That night on the way to my lodge I had for the first time in my life a clear full view of the Milky Way. Without the interference of human industry or British weather, the sky seemed more light than darkness, and the Milky Way itself a bright spill curving slightly towards each horizon. I experienced then something like grief — I’d never seen such a thing before and perhaps would never see it again, but it was the rightful inheritance of every living thing on Earth.
Little Kulala supplies its guests with a bed outdoors, and a hot-water bottle was waiting for me there but, as it turns out, it is terribly difficult to sleep with the sublime pressed right against your nose; so I had half an hour of wonder, and went inside to listen to an Alan Partridge podcast and settle my nerves. When I woke early the following morning I dashed out to examine the alien southern hemisphere at dawn, and found Orion rising before six, and standing on his head.
With Sossusvlei sand still in our boots, we flew the next day to Desert Rhino Camp, and were greeted again by scented flannels and glasses of sparkling ginger drink. Setting out in search of black rhino — a critically endangered species — we were cautioned against too much hope: there was no more than a 50/50 chance of finding one. The trackers had gone ahead of us, and occasionally the radio in our 4×4 would crackle with news, until in due course our guide announced that fresh dung had been found: the signs were good.
And there it was — an encouraging pile of soft black faeces on a dried-out midden, and tracks leading from it. Hope rose. Soon we were setting out on foot, careful not to announce our presence with bright clothes, or to disturb the quartz-studded rocks at our feet. Then the trackers, some yards ahead, called a halt with a gesture and pointed. Never mind that I’ve seen rhino in captivity, or that this was the purpose of our visit: the creature that moved towards us with a kind of stoic solitary dignity seemed as marvellous as anything in a medieval bestiary.
He was not black, but rather a slate-grey, his skin draped like heavy cloth at the breast and drawn taut over muscled haunches and the immense spread of his ribs. His ears were perfectly round, and pinched into a pleat; his eyes and nostrils little perforations behind the towering, back-curved horns. I was relieved to see these, since we’d been told the rhino were frequently dehorned in a painless procedure to discourage poachers, a practice as dispiriting as I imagine it is necessary. We regarded him, he regarded us. Mutely, and without meaning to do it, I pressed my right hand to my heart and made a solemn bow, feeling I’d cheerfully murder any rhino poacher with my bare hands.
Then, as if hope had outweighed probability, we went on to see a further three rhinos, including a mother and her calf, to say nothing of five giraffes elegantly grazing in a valley. We sat down to lunch in giddy celebration, though truthfully it was such a meal I imagine it would have lifted our spirits had we been disappointed: a table beautifully set out in the shade of a mopane tree, with salads served on wooden platters, a chef in whites frying impeccable steak over a portable stove, and dishes of coconut ice coloured with berries. In keeping with the equitable spirit at Wilderness, the guides and trackers ate with us, evidently as delighted as we were by the morning’s sights.
Our final destination, Serra Cafema, required a lengthy flight in a single-propeller plane bearing more resemblance to a Fiat than an aircraft. “Welcome,” said the young pilot as we landed, “to the middle of nowhere.” This last Wilderness lodge is built on the banks of the river Kunene, in a green valley that, seen from a distance across miles of scorched desert, might be mistaken for a mirage. Seated at the foot of a bed swathed in dove-grey mosquito nets, I watched the sun decline above the Angolan mountains on the opposite bank and found the river mystifying: I’d been in the desert less than a week, but such a quantity of water already struck me as miraculous.
When that evening we set off downriver, pausing to cautiously admire its population of Nile crocodile and birds, we saw crops of squash and corn growing where Angola met the river, and families setting about their laundry, or idly watching children lark about in the way of children everywhere.
I was struck by shame that all my life I’d associated the nation of Angola with nothing but trauma, my perception shaped by years of the Angolan civil war, so that in my stupidity it came almost as a surprise to find ordinary life placidly going on there as it does in Prague and Windhoek and Milton Keynes. I suppose that is one of the moral functions of travel: to dismantle and replace idle preconceptions — too often associated with pity and suffering — with the human reality.
The following day, we briefly encountered other ordinary lives, and visited a small Himba village. On our several flights, I’d occasionally noted circular constructions I’d taken to be outcrops of rock. These in fact had been Himba homes, constructed from looped branches of mopane wood covered and sealed with clay, and arranged according to strictly regulated principles regarding sacred fires and ancestral worship.
Perhaps 50,000 Himba people remain in Namibia: they are semi-nomadic and adhere to a lifestyle that to a British observer of course appears thrillingly curious, but has been carefully and skilfully adapted to the demands of the land. For this reason it seems inappropriate to describe their homes and clothing, for all the world as if they were a species to be observed and marvelled over, but I’ll happily say this: as we climbed back into our vehicle, I thought how sickly we must have looked to the women and girls waving us goodbye, and how dismally dressed.
That was my last of Namibia. Now I am home, that astonishing week has already taken on the maddeningly vivid quality of an unattainable dream. “The views!” I find myself saying, “and the people!” How mortifying for a writer to revert to cliché! A friend texts sardonically: “Are you forever changed?” But what can I tell you? I never saw anything so moving or magnificent. Namibia is a country of such incomprehensible majesty, and Namibians such expert and joyful custodians of the land, that even sombre Orion, when he ought to be asleep, wakes early in the morning and turns a cartwheel.
Sarah Perry is the author of novels including ‘Melmoth’ and ‘The Essex Serpent’, and is chancellor of the University of Essex. Her latest novel, ‘Enlightenment’, is published by Jonathan Cape
Details
Sarah Perry was a guest of Wilderness (wildernessdestinations.com), which offers a six-night, fully inclusive Namibia safari (two nights each at Wilderness Little Kulala, Desert Rhino Camp and Serra Cafema) from £5,465 per person, including air transfers within Namibia, starting and ending in Windhoek
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