Down to Purros
Chris takes the wheel for our long drive to Purros campsite. We’re still heading south and somewhat westwards so things get drier and more desert-like. As we finally drive down into the gorge that will lead us to Purros, the views are spectacular, with ridge after ridge of sharp hard rock to both the left and right of us. Deposits of clay and silt have been carved into wonderful shapes reminiscent of the ramparts of castles and the friezes of ancient temples.
Getting to the heart of the gorge takes us until lunchtime. We have a good lunch and then Chris continues behind the wheel as we follow Caesar’s car up through the southern arm of the gorge towards our campground at the small town of Purros. The floor of the gorge – the course of the seasonal river – is green with occasional pools of water from the last flood. The going is not too difficult but there are patches that are a bit sticky.
We see quite a few animals down in the gorge, there are scattered Oryx and a few Zebra. We come across a single Impala – which surprises Caesar as he hasn’t seen one there before – and get some good pictures of it as it doesn’t want to leave the road and venture into the dense reed beds.
A few hundred metres further and we run into a real problem. Chris follows Caesar down onto the bed of the river. Caesar safely negotiates the thinly crusted mud but Chris doesn’t and we sink down into some soft mud. This shouldn’t be a problem, as we select low range and try to back out of the slime. Backing out isn’t the problem, but as soon as we start to go forward one of the tyres deflates. It turns out that something has snapped the valve, causing a rapid flat tyre. Michael and I get out the equipment, jack things up and switch to the external spare – it’s the easiest one to get to.
Of course, we are now a little behind schedule, but we still manage to make good time through the rest of the gorge and out into the open riverbed and the campsite at Purros in good time for camp to be set up for dinner. We also have some discussion about the final day of this part of the trip. Our options are to have a day of wild camping in Amspoort Gorge, or to stay at Purros for another day with campsite facilities and do a couple of game drives. Naturally we all decide on the comfortable option – none of us really like camping!
This turns out to be a good choice, as on the morning drive around the area Caesar takes us into a high valley and we sight a lone Rhino, high on the hillside. He’s not for coming towards us and we have to settle for some long-distance photos, but it’s great to see a desert-adapted rhino in such a desolate and wild location.
I take a turn again behind the wheel for the evening drive, back down part of the gorge and then up into a different valley to complete a circle back to camp. Things here are fairly uneventful, but we see the usual Oryx and Zebra among the rocks.
Amspoort Gorge – Desert Elephants
Fred is back behind the wheel for our final day of off-road driving, the long trek over the desert to Amspoort and the gorge drive back to Sesfontein where we hope to get lucky and see some desert elephants.
As we travel from plain to plain down one river valley after another, the scenery changes constantly. There are spectacular rock formations, huge fields of boulders and scree, high rock ridges and wide sandy plains. Despite the fact that we only cover about 150km to get to Amspoort, we see a magnificent variation in terrain – the only constant is the dryness and lack of vegetation.
As we approach Amspoort, we see a couple of Giraffe – our first for days – and glimpses of the isolated greenery of the gorge itself. We take lunch at the base of the gorge of the Huanib River, a wide sandy riverbed that clearly has a very different nature on the rare occasions when the floods flow. We eat near to one of several water-level monitoring stations that look totally out of place in the parched environment.
In the early afternoon, we head slowly up the gorge and are rewarded by our first sighting of an Elephant in Namibia. A lone bull is eating beneath the shade of a huge acacia tree, leisurely pulling down the branches that he can still reach and munching away. He has to work quite hard at it, reaching as high as he can on three legs, trunk high above his head, to get hold of even the lowest of the remaining branches.
As we travel further up the valley after this uplifting sighting we meet a group of four more Elephants, walking in single file down the valley. Caesar gets us into a position to have a good view of them and we watch as they walk past us down the valley. The huge bull at the back of the line is magnificent and even stops for a bit of a dust bath to give us a good show.
There are quite a few Oryx and Zebra around here – there is a pumped spring that feeds an artificial waterhole just up from the river bed – and Caesar takes us to show us why they are in the area. Mysteriously, the pump for the waterhole is turned off and the pool is bone dry. Caesar and Michael take a quick look around and turn it back on, but we are all left wondering who would turn the water off and why anyone would do such a strange thing.
Another couple of kilometres up the valley and we meet still more elephants, this time a family group taking the shade of a couple of large trees. Apparently, we’re doing really well, as there are fewer than 20 elephants in the valley and we’ve seen about a dozen of them in just a couple of hours.
As we near the head of the valley and our exit point for the town of Sesfontein, we meet some deeper splashes and even sections where the water is running for quite long distances. At one point, we slip down into a hidden deep hole in a water-filled reed-bed, but a quick switch to low range gets us out with a degree of ease that surprises all of us, not least Fred in the driver’s seat.
At last we drive through the narrowest part of the gorge – a deep cleft that’s barely 3m wide – and can make our way out of the riverbed and on to the track that will take us back to civilisation. After just a few dozen kilometres on good gravel roads we are back at Khowarib and our off-road adventure is at an end.
Moving Towards Etosha
As it would have been very difficult to drive the whole way from Khowarib to Okakuejo, which lies 200km into the Etosha National Park, in a single day, we had booked a single night at Rustig Toko, a small lodge on a privately-owned farm about half-way between the two. On our way, we stopped to get the valve replaced on our spare wheel. We couldn’t do it any sooner, as no-one could recommend anybody near that could be trusted to do the job properly.
It turned out that we were the only guests at the camp, so everything was low-key and dinner was simple but well-prepared. We managed to get booked to take a night-drive around the estate to see what nocturnal animals we could see. This was a roaring success, as we managed to see Cape Fox, African Wildcat, Aardwolf and Aardvark. I’d always wanted to see an Aardvark, and it was amazing to see just how quickly they could ruin the road by digging a big hole in just a few seconds. The Aardvark was the only one that we got really close up to, but it was generally a fun event in the cool of the evening.
The following morning, Fred took the wheel for the drive into Etosha. For many years, access to parts of the park had been restricted, depending on where you were going to stay. This has now changed and you can go in by any gate to get to anywhere in the park. We were going to Okaukuejo, which is in the middle of the park and the biggest of the four (soon to be five) lodges.
Looking at the map it is difficult to get a sense of scale, but from the Galton Gate in the far west of Etosha, it is about 200km to get to Okaukuejo and then almost the same to get out the other side. Unfortunately, the road from the gate to Okaukuejo was absolutely awful. It was so heavily corrugated that it was almost impossible. We made slow progress, and were glad to stop at some of the signposted waterholes and look for wildlife. We were lucky enough to see Elephants at three of the waterholes on the way, but only in ones or twos.