The Tow-Truck Incident

The boys decided we should head North up the Skeleton Coast. I didn’t really care, I was mainly there to see the sand dunes, and maybe even the ghost town (only cause the Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world, was closed). I was happy to be getting out of Swakopmund early, or as Alex would call it, Swakapoomp – it made me giggle every time.

On the way up the coast we passed a ship wreck which was kind of cool, and haggled with some guys over colourful rocks they were trying to sell. The guys selling them lived under little shade cloths on the beach just waiting for tourists like us to come along and buy their meager rocks. I was excited about one green one though:

“Put this rock in a fire and a rainbow will spread out of it” the man had told me.

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“For ever! It is a rock, it never burns out”

I bought it from him, and even at the time I knew I paid too much for it. It started a fight amongst his friends; they all said that he stole their business and they saw me first and that I have to buy rocks from all of them. The circle of men gathered in closer and closer around me. They got pushier and pushier. I was glad I wasn’t there alone and that the two boys were with me in a get-away car.

I later tried that rainbow-rock in a fire. For a few seconds it did nothing, then snap! Snap! Snap! the thing sparked and shot little flecks of fire out every angle. The thing fizzled and disintegrated into nothing. What a jip!

We turned off into Cape Cross seal reserve, you could smell it on the breeze kilometres before we could see it. Tens of thousands of barking, scratching, wriggling, fowl smelling seals all around us! It was very cool! It was not so cool seeing the dead carcasses of seals rotting amongst them, it was not so cool seeing the plastic and the string caught around some of the baby seals necks from crappy humans polluting the water with our trash, but it was cool staring into the wide owl-like eyes of a baby pup. I even petted one. Probably shouldn’t have, but did, and that was cool too.

We stopped at a random tin-shed bar in the middle of nowhere and a meerkat crept up to my ankles. When I picked it up it didn’t even squirm. The boys and I were getting along well, and I hoped that was the end of our teething problems. We stopped at a sea-side town and had the best fish meal I have ever eaten (wasn’t so bad to be forced to eat meat afterall)!

Heading back down south in the afternoon we passed some un-touched sand dunes. We decided it wouldn’t hurt to do some off road driving, we did have a 4x4 after all, and how amazing would it be to watch the sunset from atop of a terracotta sand dune with not another human in sight!

We were only a few hundred meters from the closest and largest dune when the car skidded and the tyres span at full speed but the car did not go forward at all, in fact, it started to sink.

We all got out and tried to push it out, then we pulled the shovels from the back and tried to dig it out. I pulled the foot matts from the car and wedged them under to give it some extra traction… it didn’t work, it just burnt skid marks into them which I hoped wouldn’t cost us more later. Nothing worked. The car sank lower and lower into the burning orange sand.

“Well” I shrugged. “We may as well take a few cold beers up to the top of that sand dune there and watch the sunset as planned. At least then we wouldn’t have gone through all this for no reason”. But Alex was stressed out, and my suggestion to just leave the car sinking in the sand while we drink beer and stare at the sky seemed to stress him out more (a cultural difference between a Frenchy and an Aussie perhaps?)

I called a tow truck company who said it would take a couple of hours to get there from the nearest town… not that I really knew where we were and I wondered how much delay would be caused from my shotty directions. I grabbed the beers and Michael and I left Alex down at the car and hit the top of the dunes.

It really was magic.

Not a car, not a building, not a blinking light in sight. Not even another sound except the sand crunching beneath our bare feet.

The sun had well and truly set by the time the tow truck arrived. We had watched their high beams scouring the empty desert for us. Without a single obstruction the lights seemed only minutes away when we first glimpsed them, but it took a good hour or more for them to spot us. I was almost disappointed that they had come. It was the perfect spot to set up camp for the night, waking up to the sand dunes at our door.

It turned out Alex hadn’t put the car in 4WD and that is why we had gotten stuck. The boys agreed it was a perfect camping spot so we planned to go in to the next town, buy some food and come back to where we were, in 4WD this time, and spend the night there.

Sounded like a plan set in stone except when we got to the town Michael decided he would rather eat at a restaurant and go to a bar to pick up chicks, but he was outnumbered. At the super market Alex raced around ahead of us filling the basket with cheap and crappy carbs and sugar – biscuits, chips, chocolate and 2-minute pastas. Michael and I definitely prefer to eat healthier than that, but I refused to fight about it. When Alex had filled the basket with crap he stood near the check-outs and waited impatiently. Meanwhile Michael was still in the first aisle, empty handed, deliberating over two different types of pesto. I went to see if I could help Michael, really just to speed things up a bit. He started whining that Alex is ruining ‘his and my’ trip. He said he can’t travel with him and he wants out. He wanted us to give him his money back so that he could travel alone. Quite frankly I would have been ok with him leaving, but I was not ok with giving him his money back. I talked to Alex and he said the same. I told Michael to give it another night, another go. He reluctantly said yes.

We went back to our bog-spot at the foot of the dunes in the middle of no-where and cooked our pasta dinner. Alex and I set up the tent we were sharing on the roof of the car. Michael was being difficult and insisted that he wanted to set up his little tent on the desert sand. “You’re crazy!” I told him, knowing he was just deliberately trying to be difficult. “You don’t know what is living out there in the desert – wild dogs… hyena’s…” He was a stubborn guy and not willing to lose a fight, so he chose a spot a few meters from the car to set up his little tent.

We sat on the back of the car and ate our nutrient deficient dinner and drank some more beer. “What is that!” cried Alex. We all had our head-torches on and swung them in the direction of his. Two glinting little eyes sparkled out of the darkness. We scanned the dark with out lights and saw another four sets of twinkling eyes. They had formed a circle around the car and silently watched us.

Michael changed his mind and set up the tent on the roof beside us.

In the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of howling. I needed to pee. Alex was snoring loudly beside me, the dogs were howling somewhere not far away and I was wriggling and squirming and willing the strain in my bladder to ease… It was not going to ease.

I gingerly crawled out of the tent and off the car roof. I squatted right below the car, too scared to move even a meter away and cursed myself for drinking so much beer right before bed. It was taking way too long and I stupidly had not brought my head torch down there with me. Though maybe it was better, if I was going to be mauled and eaten to death by a pack of hyena’s would it hurt less if I couldn’t see them?

We were all up at sunrise. After needing to pee I didn’t get back to sleep. Alex’s snoring was so violent it shook the whole car. I was relieved to hear both him and Michael stir so shortly after the first hints of light.

We bounded up the sand dunes, sinking knee-deep with each step we took. We would jump off the edge, falling and rolling down the sides, only to test our lungs and glute muscles running back up them again. Sand was in our hair, in our ears, in our cracks. At sunrise the sky was as orange as the sand but as the morning passed the lustrous blue of the sky made the fiery orange sand starker still. It felt like we were literally standing on the top of the world… and empty world and we were the only people in it.

Alex stripped down to his undies and I took a photo of him flying off the side of the dune, posing like super-man mid air and landing face-first in the sand.

It got to a time in the mid-morning when the sand scolded our feet and we descended off the side of the dune. The entire time we had still not seen another soul. The day had started off well, Michael seemed to have decided to stay with us after all, and the rest of Namibia lay ahead of us, waiting to be explored.