NAMIBIA: Wilderness Safaris To Rebuild Serra Cafema Camp

Wilderness Safaris’ will be rebuilding their Serra Cafema camp, in the North-West of Namibia, in Hartmann’s Valley, overlooking Kunene River.

“We are thrilled to be rebuilding this iconic camp in the first half of 2018, where we’ll be maintaining the same footprint on its current island location nestled amongst shady albida trees,” said Mike Wassung, Wilderness Safaris’ Namibia MD.

The camp will be closed from January 15 to June 15 2018, with a proposed opening date of June 16, 2018.

The new Serra Cafema camp will be completely solar powered and shall be built with a light eco-footprint ensuring minimal impact on the desert location.

The camp will comprise of eight riverside villas, all elevated on decks.

Wassung said: “Inspiration for the new camp will be drawn from the exceptional desert location and the local Himba culture; we look forward to sharing further information and details about our architectural and decor plans in the coming months.”

Activities include meeting member of the nomadic Himba people, exploring the Namib Desert on nature drives or quad-bike excursions, boating on the Kunene River and birdwatching.

Meanwhile, Wild Horizons’ white-water rafting closed on April 3, as well as Livingstone Island, which closed on April 14, due to the rise in water levels of the Zambezi River.

“Rafting usually resumes between May and June. This depends on how much water is still coming down from the flood plains,” says Wilma Griffith, Sales and Marketing, Wild Horizons.

The reopening of Livingstone Island will depend on the level of the water. There will be no bookings made during this period. Bookings already made will be cancelled.

NAMIBIA: Namibia's Skeleton Coast Is Most Pristine Place In Africa

Portuguese sailors called it the Gates of Hell.

Namibia's Bushmen speak of the land God made in anger.

From the air, the bleak shoreline of the Skeleton Coast looks wonderful -- a deep green sea, fringed with surf, breaks over a shore receding into infinite dunes.

From land, it's a different story.

The Benguela Current rushes in, urgent and strong, hurtling the chilling Atlantic into the fierce heat of the Namib.

Whale and seal skeletons from the former whaling industry still litter the coastline -- the source of the region's frightening name.

Humans have suffered, too -- the remains of ships wrecked on the hidden rocks offshore rust and crumble beside the animal bones.

Survivors didn't last long in this harsh environment.

Why, then, visit this brutal-sounding place?

Because its forbidding nature has left Namibia's Skeleton Coast one of the most pristine shorelines in the world.

It may be bleak, but it's beautiful.

The territory extends from just north of the city of Swakopmund to the Angolan border in northwest Namibia, taking in 500 kilometers of shoreline and 2 million hectares of dunes and gravel plains.

It forms a national park, divided by rivers.

The southern section runs between the Ugab and Hoanib Rivers, the north between the Hoanib and Kunene.

Independent travelers can apply for permits for day trips but only to the south -- and it's the northern extremes, the Skeleton Coast Wilderness, that most people want to see.

Visitors to the latter part of the park are restricted to around 800 a year to preserve the fragile environment.

Exclusive and expensive

The only way to reach the north is to join a fly-in safari -- an exclusive, if expensive, experience.

A typical four-day trip costs around $6,000 per person.

After flying to an inland camp, my guide, Bariar, and I reach the sea following a 200-kilometer drive through dune country.

We climb out of the Land Rover into a huge animal graveyard: seal skulls jumbled with turtles' rib cages and the colossal, bleached vertebrae of whales.

The wind shunts me from one set of remains to the next.

One ghoulish question suggests itself: "Are there human skeletons, too?"

"Of course!" Bariar shouts, his voice almost lost in the wind.

"It's the shore of a thousand shipwrecks."

One of the coast's best-known wrecks is a British liner, the Dunedin Star, beached by her master after hitting a reef (some say a U-boat) in the 1940s.

A tug, the Sir Charles Elliott, went to her aid but it sank, too.

An arch of whale bones marks the grave of the two crewmen who led the rescue attempt, trying in vain to secure a line from the ship to the shore.

Every now and then the wreck of their tug can be seen above the waves.

At Cape Frio, thousands of seals provide light relief. Their noise is deafening, their smell overwhelming, but their antics draw you in.

The surf is full of writhing bodies.

At the water's edge, the occasional rock twitches, rolls over and throws itself into the sea.

We follow the coastline for miles.

Ours are the only tire marks, soon to be erased by the sand.

Ghost crabs scuttle into the waves; terns swoop over the surf; a jackal flops, seemingly exhausted, onto the shore.

Little game

When it comes to watching wildlife, the Skeleton Coast isn't about big game.

Guides focus on small mammals, birds and insects and the stories of how they survive.

With ocean fogs the only moisture supply, creatures conserve what they can.

Black-backed jackals lick humidity from stones.

Desert beetles channel droplets along their backs and into their mouths.

Tok-tokkie beetles pair up, then climb on top of one another, taking it in turns to provide shade.

Without compass or Sat Nav, Bariar drives us on a convoluted route back into the desert.

He suggests I look out the window for "unexpected stones" -- indicators to turn left or right or double back a touch.

They're meant to keep vehicles on course and not flatten tracts of this delicate ecosystem.

We arrive at the legendary "roaring" dunes, climb to the top and slide down on our butts.

I know the fearsome rumble comes from air trapped between grains of sand, but I still glance up convinced there are low-flying jets overhead.

The next couple of days are spent hiking through gorges, tracking desert-adapted elephants and exploring a wilderness that never seems to end.

What looks like wasteland to me is, to the Himba people, home.

They're the last of Namibia's nomadic pastoralists: they grow nothing and eat only meat.

The women braid their hair and scrub their bodies with ocher to keep clean. Their skin gleams like polished copper in the sun.

One morning, we visit their camp.

The trip is laid on for tourists, but when it's over we head to the home of one of the guides on the tour.

His mother offers me a necklace of porcupine quills as young girls sit and smile.

Eventually they overcome their shyness and get up to sing.

As I leave, I notice a small boy, eyeing me from the top of a dune.

Keen to impress, he somersaults over the top and falls flat on his face in the sand.

He gets up, shakes himself down and laughs.

Even in this tough environment, the survivors find plenty of reasons to smile.

NAMIBIA: Skeleton Coast

The Skeleton Coast is the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean coast of Namibia and south of Angola from the Kunene River south to the Swakop River, although the name is sometimes used to describe the entire Namib Desert coast. The Bushmen of the Namibian interior called the region "The Land God Made in Anger", while Portuguese sailors once referred to it as "The Gates of Hell".

On the coast the upwelling of the cold Benguela current gives rise to dense ocean fogs (called "cassimbo" by the Angolans) for much of the year. The winds blow from land to sea, rainfall rarely exceeds 10 millimetres (0.39 in) annually and the climate is highly inhospitable. There is a constant, heavy surf on the beaches. In the days of human-powered boats it was possible to get ashore through the surf but impossible to launch from the shore. The only way out was by going through a marsh hundreds of miles long and only accessible via a hot and arid desert.

The coast is largely soft sand occasionally interrupted by rocky outcrops. The southern section consists of gravel plains while north of Terrace Bay the landscape is dominated by high sand dunes. Skeleton Bay is now known as a great location for surfing.

The area's name derives from the whale and seal bones that once littered the shore from the whaling industry, although in modern times the coast harbours the skeletal remains of the shipwrecks caught by offshore rocks and fog.[citation needed] More than a thousand such vessels of various sizes litter the coast, notably the Eduard Bohlen, Benguela Eagle, Otavi, Dunedin Star and Tong Taw.

Past human occupation by Strandlopers is shown by shell middens of white mussels found along parts of the Skeleton Coast.

Namibia has declared the 16,000 square kilometres (6,200 sq mi) Skeleton Coast National Park over much of the area, from the Ugab River to the Kunene. The northern half of the park is a designated wilderness area. Notable features are the clay castles of the Hoarisib, the Agate Mountain salt pans and the large seal colony at Cape Fria. The remainder of the coast is the National West Coast Recreation Area.

The coast has been the subject of a number of wildlife documentaries, particularly concerning adaptations to extreme aridity. There is a 1965 National Geographic documentary "Survivors Of The Skeleton Coast" . Many of the plant and insect species of the sand dune systems depend on the thick sea fogs which engulf the coast for their moisture and windblown detritus from the interior as food. The desert bird assemblages have been studied in terms of their thermoregulation, coloration, breeding strategies and nomadism.

The riverbeds further inland are home to baboons, giraffes, lions, black rhinoceros and springbok. The animals get most of their water from wells dug by the baboons or elephants. The black rhinoceros population was the main reason why the CBBC show Serious Desert was filmed in the region.

Skeleton Coast is a book by John Henry Marsh. The true story of the wrecking of the British refrigerated cargo liner Dunedin Star and the eventual rescue of all her 106 passengers and crew, at the cost of a tug, an SAAF aircraft and the lives of two rescuers.

The fictional plot of the 1968 movie A Twist of Sand involves diamonds hidden in a shipwreck buried in the sand dunes of the Skeleton Coast.