Namibia is a unique land on the African continent. Predominantly dry, unrelenting desert, it is dotted with mountain constructs along its spine and humid wetlands in the northeast. Settlements are disparate, low key affairs far smaller than their prominence on the national map might suggest. It is the second least densely populated country on earth and contains incredibly inhospitable regions barely explored but home to a wealth of wildlife and landscape treasures.
As South West Africa it was for many years a proxy police state and military training ground governed in brutal fashion by the white supremacist regime of South Africa. Turbulent independence wars culminated in its 1990 freedom when the country was christened 'Namibia' by then leader Sam Nujoma in honour of the sweeping Namib Desert dominating the western portion of the country.
The country enjoys exceptional growth, stability and personal safety on a continent very short on similar stories and has fashioned an incredibly potent tourism industry drawing campers, explorers, bus tourists and safari aficionados from all over the world. South Africa remains the most lucrative vein of tourist gold for Namibia, but its old colonial connections and German language links provide for reliable tourist air links to Germany and the rest of Central Europe.
So it was we traveled to Namibia through the bustle of Frankfurt-am-Main on a delayed, aging plane that sat waiting to be de-iced for a couple of hours on the tarmac during blizzard conditions then engulfing Germany - a far cry from the thunderous blazing temperatures of midsummer Windhoek awaiting us down South, where rain had struck the country in earnest for the first time in years.
Eventually the plane soared from the mundanity of industrial Germany and with it my heart rose. We were returning to Africa for the first time in years; a painful wait given the old, and completely true, adage that Africa never leaves you once you've been. It's pull is incessant, gnawing and constant. Many have written on it before of course, but perhaps it is that it is Earth's wildest inhabited continent, where the rules and soft norms of home are simply meaningless. For all its many, many problems the romantic perception of the continent is at least partly true, some of the time.
The route to Namibia from Europe takes one over the Sahara and down Africa's turbulent Central West coast. Weather dependent, one may drift further inland or out over the Atlantic, though the incredible billowing thermals rising from the montane rainforests of the Congo make air travel over Central Africa particularly uncomfortable.
Clouds obscure the view for most of the journey, but even from a great height one can appreciate the crumbling coastal settlements of Nigeria and Cameroon, down to the open air rubbish tip fires of the Congo and the sprawl of Luanda and Huambo fighting back against the desert envelopment of the Angolan coast.
As the sun came up we crossed over the Namibian border and the clouds broke revealing a lime green and orange sand semi-arid land recently drenched in torrential rains. The valleys north of the capital were radiant as we touched down at the perfectly suited Hosea Kutako airport outside Windhoek. We were soon in a minivan bouncing along the potholed roads to our first night's rest and recuperation stop at Ondekaremba east of the city as solid blue and grey sheets of cloud charged low across the landscape bringing vicious bolts of lightning at random.
After a welcoming conversation at reception we piled our kit over to a comfortable room - our last for a month - and instantly fell asleep beneath the mosquito nets. The sleep was blissful and I awoke to the sound of a screeching Go-Away bird right outside the door. In the distance a baboon barked and springbok edged quietly through the yellow-flowered canvas of the Namibian rainy season. We were back.
In the morning we were to collect our off-road camping vehicle for a photographic tour de force over the Central Plateau, through the wilds of Damaraland and down the Skeleton Coast to the desert jewels of Sossusvlei and the wider Namib. We had the afternoon and evening to explore the calm, vegetation rolling hills of Ondekaremba.
Thunder and lightning still roamed over the land in a highly unpredictable patrol of Windhoek's highest points, but periodically a vicious, instantly burning sun broke through the clouds and betrayed Namibia's legendary heat. We donned boots and wandered off on the eclectic trails spanning the reserve, eager to sight anything from the array of Namibian wildlife.
Shrikes and cuckoos were the first to show themselves, a whole host of them at that. A fork-tailed drongo flitted from tree to tree as we spied antelope prints of all sizes in the soft damp sand. Devil's thorn sprawling across the ground were in full bloom dotting the landscape with unexpected yellow flowers as far as the eye could see. On the horizon a distant watchtower served as our goal and we plodded through the sharp bush.
Most vegetation in Southern Africa's bush wants to hurt you. Thorn acacias and needle-strewn plants catch at clothing on anyone straying too close. Many trees are poisonous and unpleasant to handle. Even the grass and weeds growing in the sand would scratch the tips of your toes off if you failed to don hardy footwear. Ants spewed out of disturbed mounds of sand, crawling over the ground and our shoes in all directions.
In good time we reached the watchtower; a clanging metal green affair and surprisingly high. On every step baboon poo was piled indicating we weren't the only ones to value the vantage point. On a distant tree a huge troop of Namibia's characteristic dark grey Chacma Baboons could be seen, along with a brief sighting of a rusty red antelope unfamiliar to me.
Rivalling the enormous catalogue of birds endemic to the region, mammal lovers visiting Sub-Saharan Africa should try to get grips with the enormous variety of antelope that are found in each country. Namibia is no exception, and though picture-postcard tourist shots rely heavily on the country's iconic Gemsbok and desert Springbok, other species are popular sightings out here.
Heading down the tower, we arrived at a low key hide overlooking a waterhole. Unnecessary in the rainy season, waterholes are visited far less during this time. We caught sight, however, of a pair of Black-backed Jackals darting through the bushes, following a springbok as it pronked out of harms way. Observing from a distance was a second rusted red sentinel; another of Namibia's antelope, less famous than the first two mentioned. This was a Red Hartebeest.
Hartebeest have an appearance somewhere between the Tsessebe seen grazing in the Pilanesberg caldera and especially across private reserves in South Africa's Northwest and Mpumalanga Provinces, and the Topi beloved of the BBC's incredible lion and cheetah takedown footage of late out on the Serengeti. Narrow-faced, curling thick set horns and a stocky dense body makes them powerful adversaries for would be predators.
A diverse range of species exists, fragmented, across the wilds of Africa. Many are in captivity or in private reserves, particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe. A few extraordinarily rare and critically endangered species, such as Tora's Hartebeest of the Sudan and Swayne's Hartebeest of the Rift Valley, are all but lost to the world now, but thankfully the Red Hartebeest is on the rise thanks largely to conservation efforts in Namibia.
We watched a pair of them stand, edgily, peering through the dense greenery of Namibia's new-found wet landscape. Quietly they sulked away and out of sight as we caught sight of a rainfrog buried in the dirt. Tracking wildlife through bush in the rainy season is challenging - the spindly thorn and twigs are replaced by thick leaves and huge ever waving grasses, obscuring even elephants and rhinos with relative ease.
Enthralled about the adventure we were about to embark on, we headed back to take stock of our equipment and get an early night in anticipation of the wonders that awaited. And wonders awaited. Namibia is a place that meets and exceeds any and all expectations you can possibly imagine. Lions, elephants, giraffes, leopards, zebras, warthogs, rhinos, ostriches, jackals, chameleons, flamingoes, baboons, antelope of all shapes and colours, insects and birds that put the rainbow to shame all awaited us, as did the desert environ in which to show them all off.
Fragments of that adventure have already been detailed, but as we rounded the last bit of the circuit back into the capital a month later we were faced once again with a wall of torrential water soaking out the paved roads from Rehoboth up into Cimbebasia on the southern outskirts of Windhoek. Dropping the truck off at a razorwired forecourt in the city centre, the vehicle was immediately doused in antiseptic and we drenched our hands in alcohol gel. Things had changed.
A nervous driver took these two potentially infectious Europeans in the back of his off-roader and drove us east again, back to Ondekaremba for the night's rest before the flight out of Namibia the following morning. The Otjiherero language radio thumped out home-made oviritje beats interspersed with local news fragments. One word was repeated again and again: coronavirus. Namibia was poised for lockdown.
We traveled the dirt road back down to Ondekaremba's rest area, crossing the washed out river and unloading our soaked kit into the reception office. No less welcoming, but there was a tension in the air about what the future would bring. Our signal, two weeks cut off from civilisation, finally returned and we endured a flurry of increasingly panicked texts and emails. The last to pop up was a message marked urgent from the car company, sent three days prior and advising us to leave Namibia that day or be stuck indefinitely.
The night unfolded in a surge of drama totally at odds with our pacified month away from all this nonsense. We quickly learned all flights had been cancelled, that our closest embassy was in South Africa where borders had already been sealed. The airlines were beyond useless, no doubt suffering a deluge of calls worldwide. We interspersed frustrating phone calls and hold music with wanders outside amidst the butterflies and ground squirrels that decorate Ondekaremba's lush landscape.
We eyed our options. My wife scouring video-heavy airline websites on the cripplingly slow rural Namibian internet, searching for possible ways out of the country. Me, I was already planning our stay in the desert - planning to find work as a veterinarian in the capital. Maybe build a practice and start the life in Africa we had considered years prior. Before that set in motion, a ticket out to Johannesburg the next day and on to Britain popped up and doubled in cost with each page refresh.
We bit our tongues and booked the flights - eyewateringly expensive as they were. Hours later we realised the only seats out of South Africa were business class - a new experience for us, but under the circumstances actually appreciated as we were sealed off from the rest of the aircraft. How lucky we were to be able to do this when, upon arrival in the UK, row after row of passengers from the lower deck were quarantined.
A stressed division of equipment and repacking for an unanticipated trip through Johannesburg ensued. Air travel through Gauteng sadly comes with a very high risk of baggage theft, perhaps not as bad as it used to be but enough to be frustrating nonetheless. Doubly frustrating when coupled with the fact that O.R. Tambo airport has some of the best music shops in the country covering everything from Maskanda and Kwaito to Cape Jazz and South Africa's legendary homegrown Mbaqanga ("Um-ba-kanga" - click your tongue on the k if you can!) - worth a trip all by itself. Moral of the story - pack plain and put literally nothing you'll miss in your case. An Oryx beer and some biltong flakes later and we fell asleep again beneath the familiar mosquito nets.
Our flight didn't leave Kutako airport until the afternoon, so we somehow lazed around in relative peace given the circumstances. To stop any pacing we took a wander back out to the hide we had seen the Hartebeest at when we arrived. To our surprise, a larger herd was present this time and we whiled away one final safari photoshoot in amid the chaos. Even the Hartebeest seemed a little wary of the world this time, but we caught the classic profile evidencing their unusually narrow heads.
Juveniles joined the fray and, rather than bounce off in a fit of concern for pursuing predators, they lingered and mimicked their parents poses before wading off to the waterhole to quench their considerable thirst in the rising late morning sun that threatens hydration across Namibia. A quiet glance back through the thickening vegetation and they paced away.
We turned, left our footprints in the muddy earth as we wandered back to the taxi to head over to the nearby airport. Trouble reared its head again after reports of planes being sealed off and turned round at Tambo. We never saw such things; only deserted halls and silent desks in Africa's busiest airport. Late that evening we boarded a packed flight to the UK, one of the last for some time. Home was calling, in an altogether harsher and more menacing cry than anything the African wilderness could summon.
All photography © Chris Milligan Photo. All views are my own. Seek local recommendations before photographing or approaching any wildlife.
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