IT’S not on the grid, there’s no bar, no music, but
it’s the perfect destination for night life.
If your idea of night life is a black sky filled with stars, that is,
and you like to dance to the songs of
barking geckos.
The Family Hideout in the NamibRand private nature
reserve in southwestern Namibia offers
two camping sites – named after stars, naturally, Venus and Orion – and a
self-catering farmhouse.
What makes the camping sites special is that you
hire the whole site for yourself and your party of up to eight people, so
privacy and solitude are guaranteed. There’s a shower, a toilet, hot water, and
a giant camelthorn tree, and that’s just about it.
Your nearest neighbours are several sand
dunes away in the other camp site, out of sight and out of mind. You can’t even see the smoke from their
braai, which is the traditional gauge we Boer descendants use to assess if our neighbor
has encroached uncomfortably close.
Apropos of sand dunes, there are many of these, and
judging from the visitors' book sliding down them on duneboards has much to
recommend it. I didn’t try it
myself, it involves a great deal of
strenuous climbing in thick sand.
Besides, I was too busy reading the visitors'
book. It is filled with comments like “beautiful”, “idyllic”, and
“paradise”. The people who come here
love it, myself included. One of them, Susan Campbell of Knysna, was moved to
sketch a stunning full-page picture of
the camelthorn and surrounding dunes in pencil, which to my untrained eye must
have taken her the best part of an entire day.
It was so good it nearly became a collector’s item, but I thought better
of it.
See, there’s something about the desert that
encourages sober reflection on the nature of good and evil, the meaning of
life, and whether it’s time yet for the
first beer of the day. I was travelling alone, so I spent a great deal of time
talking to myself and to the gemsboks, who hung on my every word, judging from
the way they stared at me. I also spoke to the flies, but rather more rudely.
The gemsboks came traipsing past in their dozens,
stopping at the water trough about 30 paces from the big camelthorn, then
wandering off to pose elegantly on the horizon with the sunrise behind
them. The clacking of their horns as the
males sparred in their testosterone-fuelled way was one of the few sounds that
intruded on the silence, but it did so in a tasteful, wildlife kind of
way.
As did the call-and-response
serenade of the barking geckos. They begin
at dusk and continue through the night, emitting a staccato diminuendo of seven
or eight chirps, or perhaps they're croaks. It’s
a difficult sound to describe, but it is nothing like the bark of a dog. You
will just have to go and listen for yourself.
Far more silent were the long-legged spotted beetles
that scurried around the camp site.
There is little that is more entertaining than watching apparently
pointless activity from the comfort of your folding chair. The beetles never seemed to find anything;
they just scurried for the sake of scurrying. Except for the males of course,
who ran around behind the females, transfixed by a little red spot on their bottoms.
Suddenly one of the females did a spectacular back
somersault, sending her male companion scurrying in the opposite direction in
panic. At first I thought it was a clever piece of beetle kung-fu aimed at
discouraging stalkers, but then I realized the wind had come up and was blowing
the creatures off their feet. Be warned,
when the wind blows in a desert, one possible consequence is a sandstorm.
And then there’s the stars. Stars thrive in the dark, and the NamibRand
reserve provides plenty of that. The
nearest town, Betta, is about 60km away,
but it’s one of those Namibian towns that have one petrol pump, two beer
fridges and no street lights. The
closest real town that generates any kind of light pollution is Maltahohe,
about 120km to the east.
So the bits of the sky over the reserve in between
the stars are thoroughly pitch black. To prove it, the reserve has official
certification from the International Dark Sky Association, an organization dedicated to protecting
darkness around the world, much as one
would protect any precious, endangered
phenomenon, like a rhino. The
certification means that if you drive around the reserve at night with your
headlights on, you will not be popular, and all the solar-powered lights in the
campsites are shaded.
The Family Hideout accommodation is the only camping
and self-catering concession in the reserve, and by far the most
affordable. Covering more than
200,000ha, it is probably the biggest private nature reserve in southern
Africa.
If you have a 4X4 you can drive yourself on a route around the dunes, and if you
don’t, the friendly, helpful and knowledgeable
camp attendant Titus Nangolo will offer to take you in his vehicle. I was tempted but declined,
having just spent the best part of two days driving to
get to the reserve. Somehow sitting
under the camelthorn with the birds, beetles, flies and gemsboks seemed to be
all I wanted to do. Nangolo stays in a
house a couple of kilometers from the camp site, and can be summoned by radio
in case of emergency. Fortunately the only emergency I had was needing to
borrow some space in his gas-fueled freezer to resuscitate a can of beer.
On the last night of my stay I did discover the
meaning of life. Maybe it was that cold beer, and the one or two glasses of
wine afterwards, but as I sat under the camelthorn and gazed through its
branches at the stars above, it all seemed perfectly obvious.
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