22 November
We saw it, and for the first time began to feel a little homesick for New Zealand. The westerly aspect, the pounding surf, the huge curving beach vanishing into either direction, the setting sun sinking into the west and the incessent westerly wind. Particularly the wind. Apart from the absence of Kapiti it could easily have been the Otaki Beach of my early teenage years. But this was the Namibian Desert coast. Nearly two million hectares of dunes and gravel plains which form one of the world's most inhospitable and waterless (except for the Atlantic Ocean) areas. Early Portugese sailors called this area "The Sands of Hell". A treacherous fog blanketed coast, a graveyard for unwary ships and a death sentence for their shipwrecked crews.
It was late afternoon and sunny when we pitched camp here on the sands, just a hundred metres or so from the sea, opened a beer and waited for the sunset. One of the most recent shipwrecks here was the New Zealand Shipping Company's "Dunedin Star" which was run aground after hitting rocks a few hundred miles north of here, just south of the Angolan border. They were sailing from Cape Town to the Middle East war zone with more than one hundred military crew and cargo on board. They were eventually evacuated, after much drama, by a convoy of trucks which took them over one thousand miles of desert to safety in Swakopmund (where we will be tomorrow for four days) at the edge of the desert.
However tonight we sit here, sip our beers and watch the sunset, just as we have done so many times before back home.
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