We had spent quite a while at the feral horses view point and when we left eventually it was already afternoon. We decided not to drive till late and called it a day somewhere along the road to Helmeringhausen. We parked under a tree, got ourselves comfortable in our abode and spent some time working on the computer, cooking supper and reading a book in bed.
Next morning we continued to Helmeringhausen, a cute one street town. We filled up with diesel and went to the shop.
As we had internet there, we decided to just stay parked for a while and sort out mail etc. The owner of the shop came to visit us in Trokkie and expressed his jealousy of us being able to do what we were doing. He had run the shop for more than 30 years and he had a deal for us: we get the shop…. he gets our truck! Unfortunately, that deal was not gonna work for us!
We left the one-street-town and sauntered through yellow grassy plains and terra cotta dirt roads edged with surprisingly bright green bushes.
Later in the afternoon we arrived at Duwisib castle. The caretaker let us in and was very happy to tell us the heart rendering story about the house and its inhabitants. Seeing it was build in the early 1900’s, the interior reminded us a lot of our grandparents homes. We even found a typewriter named after our daughter! We browsed around in the house and even got a glimpse of the underground wine cellar.
After wandering around in the house we walked into the court yard and could peek through the windows of the luxury rooms one could rent… if it wouldn’t have been closed for Covid 19. While telling us some more about the original function of the guest rooms, the caretaker warned us to be aware of the wasps.
When we eventually wanted to leave and park on the picnic area to overnight, he came to ask if we perhaps had a ‘bobbejaan spanner’. Stefaan went with him to see where the pipes seemed to leak. While they were working, I dawdled around and took some more photos of the environment. All of a sudden, in a flash, I got zapped by a perdeby (wasp). And man...did that hurt! The hurt went away after a few minutes, I saw a little bit of swelling but didn’t pay any more attention to it.
Next morning Stefaan got up early to take photos of the castle at sunrise and afterwards commented on the general disrepair of the buildings and the grounds. Even the top eaves of the wall were “decorated” with heaps of wasp nests! (the broken pipes were just one example of the conditions). Although the castle looked pretty neat on the inside (except the garden that looked a bit disheveled) the outside and the grounds looked as if they needed a lot of TLC!
We left Duwisib and continued through the desert landscape towards Sossusvlei. Along the road we saw something that looked like melons (we figured out later they were indeed melons, but very endemic to the Namib Desert) and were wondering why they were not eaten by animals.
A little bit further we came across a skeleton along the roadside. Life can be tough in the desert.
We passed through landscapes of endless sand and rock with solitary buck and ostriches roaming over the expanses. We stopped for a lunch-cum-tea-break at such a great sand expanse and got lost into the vastness, silence and solitude. The vast plains change from peroxide blonde to fluffy egg yellow to warm caramel with tufts of olive green shrubs and stark black and white trees.
And then we crossed over into the Sossusvlei Namib Landscape and we started seeing the first red dunes.
My arm was hurting by then and when I pulled up my sleeves, we could see that my under-arm was swollen and red. We decided it would be better to start taking anti histamines until the swelling would subside (which it eventually did after a day or 3).
Getting closer to Sossusvlei, we passed a resort, which had definitely taken inspiration from Duwisib Castle, but was most probably commercial and better maintained.
We eventually arrived at Sesriem campsite, got ourselves a camp spot and called it a day!
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