The highway remained paved for a few dozen very enjoyable undulating kilometers through the dunes. We followed this for half an hour without a single patch of green, then without warning, a vast sea of vegetation appeared below us as we arrived at a vineyard oasis in the midst of a sea of sand. A vast grey shantytown just beyond housed the workers, and past that, the endless orange resumed. The pavement ended and shortly after we reached an intersection with a large "Road Closed" sign blocking our onward progress. With no other redress, we turned and headed towards the hot springs and Fish River Canyon viewpoint instead of following our intended route through the national park.
The first section was a very fast, very scenic dirt road through a game reserve, but turning towards Ai Ais, we met with patches of deep sand. Having dirt biked since his childhood, Matt was usually completely unphased and continued in fifth gear along roads that brought me to a 10kph crawl. In one particularly bad patch, whilst barely moving, I lost control and toppled over, and bent my shift levers, foot peg, kickstand and side mirror; my speedometer and odometer never moved again (hopefully having only 1300km on the dial would increase the resale value). Our cheap Chinese bikes, unlike the light Hondas I'd dropped at considerably higher speeds in the past, were clearly not meant for even this light abuse. We stopped briefly at the springs, found them to be overdeveloped and overpriced and rode on. We encountered plenty of corrugated sand sections and other nasty features, and had to swerve to avoid a giant monitor lizard and an ostrich that darted across the path, but we rode into the evening with no further wipeouts.
At dusk, we came across the Canon Roadhouse which had one campsite remaining; it was a steep 120R for each of us, but since there was nothing else for a hundred kilometers and we had no desire to ride those roads after dark, we ponied up the money. Our campsite was already occupied by something called a Rotel, a monstrous German touring contraption composed of two buses; one conveyed the tourists during the day and one provided sleeping quarters in small compartments each night. It was reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode where Cramer starts a hotel for Japanese businessmen in his dresser. We would see plenty more of it as the trip progressed, but encountering the Rotel for the first time, I felt a bit like a Bushman who first approached civilization and was left in complete bewilderment by a mode of life utterly beyond him. We set up our tent in the dry riverbed, hoping the cloud-free skies wouldn't unleash an unexpected early winter storm, and heated up a delicious pot of bread and vegetable curry mush that would become one of our regular staples. We followed a series of cairns that we hoped would lead us to an elephant nesting ground on top of a nearby butte, but we found nothing of the sort and got quite lost on the walk back. Getting lost in the desert was to become a common theme of the trip.
We headed onward to the Brukarros Volcano where we planned to hike and camp. Our book and the sign at the gate reported that the fee for camping was 50R, but as far as we could gather, no other living person came within twenty kilometers of the place for the duration of our stay. The lower campsites were accessible by a friendly dirt road, but naturally we chose to stay instead at the higher sites reached by a very difficult 3km 4wd track up the slope. Our bikes survived the ascent but we spent the remainder of the evening and the next morning in mortal terror of the return trip to the base.
We followed an overgrown trail through a boulderfield, up a dynamite-blasted cliff face and into the crater. The crater floor bore the appearance of a sort of lost world with four square kilometers of seemingly untouched green forest and a river running through the center. Matt proceeded to the floor while I ascended to the rim. Reaching the top, the trail abruptly disappeared and so I attempted to follow the ridge back to our site. At the end of the ridge, our tent was in plain view, but between myself and it lay a treacherous dry waterfall; it looked like there could quite possibly be an easy scramble all the way down, and if, by chance, there were not, there should have been enough daylight to climb back up to the rim and find the original trail. It turned out to be mostly fourth class scrambling, but included two terrifying fifth class downclimbs; the second required that I jam my hand in a crack, and with no footholds, swing out over a twenty foot drop and find another hand jam, then two more to lower myself to the floor. From the top it looked as if the lower section would be a cakewalk, and only a series of small hillocks would separate me from my goal; however, these hillocks turned out to be massive boulder-filled ravines, and I narrowly escaped being crushed by a rolling 500 kilo boulder and found the trail just before nightfall.
I had expected to find Matt waiting for me back at camp, but he would not show for another 2 hours - only a half hour shy of the time appointed for learning how to call Namibian 911. He had apparently meditated on a rock for a while then followed much the same route as me, but had wisely decided to turn around and follow the same trail back.
Departing for the day's ride, we were under the mistaken impression that if only we made it down the volcano, our worries would be over. We would shortly discover how wrong we were. We had previously been told to backtrack and take the paved roads, but we decided to double-check with the gas station attendant in Beseba. He claimed the district roads to the west were fine, so we set out without hesitation. The first road quickly devolved into a terrible rocky track that dropped our speed to under 20kph and surely inflicted upon us some adult variant of shaken baby syndrome. Towards the end of this stretch, we reached a closed gate with a 12-foot electric fence. There was a moment of horrific expectation as Matt approached the gate to check if it was locked, and if we would be able to continue on or return back the way we had come. It was open and we continued into what we could only assume was some sort of velociraptor preserve.
The road which followed, after giving us a few decent kilometers, dropped into a two-foot deep rocky river. We removed all our gear and very carefully pushed our bikes through the shallowest section along slippery boulders. This would be followed by around fourteen other such crossings, and at each we wondered whether the next might be the one we couldn't cross, meaning that we repeat the arduous journey all the way back to the highway. I had removed my shoes for one of the crossings and attempted to strap them in my cargo net; like the Fanta bottle before it, one of my shoes was soon lost, but I failed to realize this until three crossings later; I debated riding the rest of the way one shoe short and buying a new pair in the next town, but ultimately turned around and repeated the process twice more. At one crossing, Matt's kickstand slipped in the wet sand and his bike fell over, breaking off the clutch lever; this made shifting more difficult for a time. We encountered a gang of young farmers and inquired as to how many crossings remained; the disturbing reply was "many more".
As luck would have it, all the crossings were passable and we made it to the tiny town of Helmeringhausen which had a petrol station, hotel, and beer garden. Pushing on, we came across a Cairo-Cape Town cyclist; he was on his ninth and final month; despite all our struggles to that point, he handily put our endeavor to shame. We made it to Betta a record hour before dark and set up camp at the town's sole business, a general store/petrol station/campground. We tried to convince some travelling insurance salesmen to take us along to the German castle 20km down the road, but they wouldn't go for it.
Before they set out for the morning, the South African evangelists at the next site over told us they had been praying for us and would be waiting in Sesriem. It was a hard but beautiful 150km ride through a private game reserve, where hundreds of springboks dodged out of the way as we raced through. Matt got the first and only flat of the trip, presumably from roadside thorns, but speedily fixed it with a can of fix-a-flat. We opted to ignore the 'this is only a temporary fix' mantra and ride the tire til it exploded. At Sesriem, we caught up with our neighbors and added half a liter of oil to replace what my bike had apparently burned off. Upon inquiring about repairs for Matt's bike, we were directed to a luxury lodge where the on-call mechanic picked up a clutch lever from the local junkyard and threw it on for free. It turned out that the mechanic would soon be driving his pickup to Walvis Bay (where the paved road resumed) and would've happily taken us if he weren't already hauling a bed full of cargo. After days of very questionable roads and several hundred kilometers left on more of the same ilk, we were quite keen on finding a vehicle that could drive us and our bikes to asphalt, and we would half-heartedly continue our search for the remainder of the day.
At the park office we discovered that a law had passed in the last year which prevented any motorcycles from entering the park. Since we had gone several hundred kilometers out of the way on terrible sand roads to reach this park, we found this a tad frustrating - particularly given that the reason for the law was to prevent bikes from driving on the dunes and this was more or less the last thing we wanted to do with our poor little abused cruisers. We waited at the permit desk and begged every group that came through - until an Israeli/Hungarian couple volunteered to let us ride in the back of their truck (which conveniently only had one small side window). The four of us drove the 63km out to Sossusvlei and hiked the kilometer-long trail to Dead Vlei; the couple gave us each a beer, and given that I hadn't eaten or drank anything in hours, this was sufficient to send me scrambling up the tallest dune in the area.
From the top of the dune, I watched as the couple wandered around the giant dead lake. Matt was nowhere in sight. At one point, they started moving rapidly in the direction of the car, and I bounded diagonally down the dune to catch them. I struggled to keep up as they raced back; we were one of the last groups and they were pretty anxious about incurring the 500R late exit penalty. They had less than an hour left to reach the distant park gate; for my part, I was less concerned - since Matt and I weren't camping, our deadline was an hour earlier and we should have already exited the park. Matt was nowhere to be found and I offered repeatedly to stay by myself and wait for him - we had nowhere to be that night and I figured we might as well spend it walking briskly, observing the nocturnal wildlife by the light of the full moon - but they refused to leave us behind. We finally spotted my wayward companion several hundred meters off and yelled that he must run the final stretch (he was understandably reluctant given that he had already jogged the last kilometer through deep sand).
When we reached the 4WD staging area, we found that one of the tires wouldn't inflate back to street levels, and the couple gave this to a passing ranger as an excuse for their tardiness; there was nothing that could excuse myself and Matt. At the entrance we were informed that we should be fined but wouldn't be; this was good news, and with some negotiation, we even managed to talk them into opening the gate so we could leave. The security guard at the nearby campground informed us that it was full, so we drove 500m down the road, pushed our motorcycles into the bushes, and camped on a sandy patch surrounded by large burrows.
I had a very vivid dream where we were discovered by a local farmer, apprehended by the police and thrown into jail; it felt as if days played out, and it was no small shock to awake at 1:30 and find that we had never left our tent. Around 4:30, something nipped at Matt's head. It turned out to be a jackal, and it was not the least bit afraid of us. We armed ourselves with our tire levers and stared at it for the next hour to make sure it didn't attempt a second attack. He eventually grew tired of us and our headlamps and wandered off to find easier prey. At sunrise, we raced to the bikes, clutching our irons in one hand, strapped on our stuff, and made a speedy getaway.
Before leaving town, we stopped at the service station/campground up the road for breakfast, and the owner, after hearing that we had spent the night in the bush getting assaulted by jackals, casually mentioned that he often let overlanders like ourselves camp on his property for free; we sat in silence for a moment as we reflected on how unfortunate it was that he had not better conveyed this policy to his night watchman. As a consolation for our lost sleep, he gave us half-price breakfast sandwiches.
The route to Solitaire was a really excellent dirt road, and we optimistically began to calculate how long the day's ride would take if we could continue on the whole way at 80kph. As we zoomed along for another hundred carefree kilometers, we began to feel really good about our prospects. But entering Gaub Pass and transitioning from hard-packed dirt to endless rows of loose sand, all our hopes instantly came crashing down. The stretch that followed was fantastically scenic but all our attention was on the road and trying not to wipe out or careen into oncoming traffic.
While the general convention in this part of the world is to drive on the left, we rarely confined ourselves to any particular lane on the untarred roads, and, more often than not, it seemed the best riding was found on the right side. This was not so much an issue in the southern desert where we never encountered more than a handful of cars in a day of riding, but the road connecting Solitaire to Swakopmund was a main tourist artery and there seemed to be another overlander truck waiting for us as we crested each hill and rounded every blind corner. Drivers in southwestern Namibia are surprisingly tolerant of motorbikes arbitrarily swerving across the whole of the road, and will almost universally pass on the left or on the right shoulder without so much as a honk.
As we reached the gate for Namib-Naukluft National Park, the abysmal sand road was abruptly replaced with beautiful new pavement, and I was filled with a euphoria that transcends my power of description. The only point of comparison that comes at all close would be the feeling a child feels on Christmas morning - times a factor of 35. I accelerated to 80, zipped around the corners, and soaked in the fantastic granite canyons through which the road wound. After a kilometer, I came to a sign announcing that there would be curves for the next 40km, and my elation rose as I assumed that this implied that the road would continue in the same way for that distance, but as I reached the crest on which that sign sat, I had to slam on my brakes to avoid wiping out in the thick sand that immediately followed. The road from there on out was every bit as bad as before, and my profound feeling of well-being was replaced with an equally profound sensation of despair as I counted the remaining kilometers that lay between us and the day's destination. After another grueling 10km that took the better part of an hour, we were treated to another mysterious stretch of pavement. This time I went slow and, as if it were a my last meal, savored every morsel, deriving as much joy as possible from every meter of pavement, knowing that nothing but the severest punishment awaited beyond. Sure enough, within a kilometer, the asphalt vanished once again.
After a brutal 3-hour slog through another brain-rattling 40 kilometers, we got to a more tolerable surface and made it through the last 100km in under two hours. The start of the pavement, coupled with the knowledge that the remainder of our route for the coming months would be almost exclusively pavement, was enough to move me to drop to my knees and kiss the smooth, dark expanse that would convey us effortlessly through the next 6000km.
Even though it had been our sole objective and battle cry for the last few days, there was not a whole lot going on in Walvis Bay, so we immediately pushed 30km further up the road to Swakopmund. The area along the coast was an eerie wasteland of grey dunes, high winds, and blowing sand. Small outposts of dingy shacks and the occasional dune buggy were all that broke up the monotony of the endless desert. In the twilight of Good Friday, Swakopmund was a deserted, somewhat scary tourist town where gangs of youths, aggressively selling souvenirs, followed you down dark streets of shuttered shops. We stayed at Desert Sky Backpackers, which at 110R, had more than doubled in price since our book was published, and was staffed not by the usual itinerant stoners, but by an obnoxious old lady who enforced the myriad rules with an iron fist. That night, we met a couple who had been hitchhiking around for the past nine months and had been paying for their trip by writing articles; they supplied us with a contact for staying in a remote Himba village, and raved about a Zambian game park without the typical vehicle requirements where you could sleep among lions, leopards and hippos.
