Kolmanskuppe & Fish River Canyon & Quiver Tree Forest
Our tour continued south and we stayed at the best so far lodge – Klein-Aus Vista. It was really amazing there and we didn’t camp but stayed in the lodge with beautiful houses and we had dinner at the house of Kennedy and Erastus which was right next to ours. The location is very close to the rocks and we hiked to see a horse made of stones on the ground below us which you could only see from the top of the cliffs. That, and the stunning sunset made our evening unforgettable. Of course, lots of selfies with the group had to be taken haha 😀 This area is famous with wild horses left behind after the German left the area back in the day.
The next day we visited the deserted diamond town Kolmanskop, which was famous before WWI for diamond mining and what was a super interesting fact was that at the beginning you would literally walk and find diamonds in your feet. Normally, to find diamonds you need to mine but they think that back in the day the area was underwater and the currents brought the diamonds up to the surface. Germans came here and established a whole town around the diamond area. They had the best of the engineers and constructors, the ladies had their own TRAM to bring them around the town so they wouldn’t have to walk, one of the ladies owned a store and she would purchase everything for people to get, including caviar and other luxurious things. They had the first X-ray machine in the whole of AFRICA, and this was around 1917! But it wasn’t for people’s health – it was for the workers to be checked upon leaving the area after working in the diamond mines – if they had swallowed diamonds, they were sent to a 24-hour guarded facility with toilets, given laxatives and once they diamonds are out, they are sent for trial and jail time. And these workers came on a voluntary basis for 3 months at a time and lived in an isolated area with a common facility to sleep at and another for dining. In return, some amount of money was sent back to their families’ home. That area is also today restricted. If they catch you wandering there, you get an insane fine and possibly even jail time. The town’s engineers were super smart, a super bizarre and interesting thing is how they made ice for refrigerators in order to keep their produce fresh – they utilized the fact that saltwater has a lower point of freezing than fresh water and inside a giant tank filled with salt water they added tubes filled up with fresh water and cooled down the whole thing. The fresh water froze and they used the blocks from inside the tube to give to people to put in their refrigerators to keep their products nice and fresh. Amazing. They also built the buildings such that pipes would connect them and they could use the heat to warm up several buildings at once. Really, super advanced engineering for its day.
Then we continued the journey towards the Fish River canyon and at some point, we stopped for a break and saw on the rocks some super cute animals, rock dassies, adults, and babies and I loved them, super cute!
The Fish River canyon was one of the highlights of the whole trip, we were dropped by the guides at one of the viewpoints to walk down towards the other viewpoints and to see the canyon from a few different angles. It was so stunning, like a mini Grand Canyon, I believe this is the second largest canyon actually and Shelley said the Grand Canyon is about twice as deep. There were lakes at the bottom with all sorts of colours of the water, from cappuccino brown to very weird grey colour. But you couldn’t really see much more than that. At some point, someone noticed people walking at the bottom of the canyon but you could only see them if you zoomed in with the camera or with binoculars 😀 At some point, Shelley proposed that we write “Namibia” with stones and we had tons of fun with that and wrote “Namibia 2024” and then took a ton of photos with the sign, all together, only with Kennedy and Erastus as well as alone sitting and jumping. So much fun!!!
The last night we spent at a camp where we arrived by sunset and I ran quickly to the Quiver Tree forest because I realized that we wouldn’t have a chance to see the quiver trees the next day unfortunately. It was stunning, these are not trees but again succulents like the Welwitschia Mirabilis plant, they collect and store water. The beauty of the quivers was that each branch looked like a sprout of its own little tree. Also observed how a mother bird was feeding her little ANGY birB hihi 😀 was so cute how she looked around for grasshoppers and the little baby was taking cover under the rocks. That, unfortunately, was out last night of the tour in Namibia, we headed for a 5h drive the next day towards Windhoek where they dropped us at each of our hotels and we bid our goodbyes with Kennedy, Erastus, and with each other 🙁 .
Overall I can tell that with its vastness and insanely beautiful “nothingness”, full of colours, yellow sands with grey mountains behind them, mountains of all shapes and colours – some looking as if boulders were stacked on top of each others, others looking as if they were painted with a brush, green bushes on yellow sands with rend dunes in the back, tabletop flat mountains, crazy weird flora and magnificent fauns, vibrant array of cultures between the tribes and colours in their products and languages and everything, this was one of the best countries I have ever visited and will forever stay in my mind!
On the downside I could tell that tent experiences are not exactly my thing, especially with freezing temperatures of the winter when we went there in July, temperatures went down to 4-5-6 degrees Celcius and in the morning we were freezing until about 10AM when it would be like 25 degrees, we used to ride in the bus with blankets and sleep with 2 sweaters and clothes and blanket inside the sleeping bag during the night.
Below are a few photos for you to enjoy the beauty as well..
