Clancy Abroad – Page 12

A Day of Firsts

We had a few ‘first experiences’ yesterday before our encounter with the local cops last night, which was another ‘first’ for us, well in this country anyway.

We’ve seen our fair share of police stations and other official offices in our travels. There was the ‘we got deported from Russia‘ story that we still dine out on, 6 years later. Long before that, in 2001, there was the time we were cycling in Vietnam and staying in a small town about 30kms out of Hanoi. Not at all touristy, and apparently by midnight word had got around about the 2 white people on a ze dap hai noi noi bicycle for 2 people. I still remember that phrase, although my spelling is probably incorrect. The owner of the hotel knocked on our door at midnight and told us we had to go to the police. So the 3 of us all hopped on his Honda Wave motorbike and rode in the rain to the local police station, where the cops examined our passports and visas and wrote a heap of stuff in a big book. Then the 3 of us went back to the hotel on the motorbike in the rain. No helmets of course.

Anyway, yesterday …

We stopped and bought bananas from a roadside seller. Small and tasty, according to Greg. A couple of dozen cost 50c. I also bought a bunch of aromatic herbs from a woman sitting nearby for 25c. I didn’t really know what to do with them, but she was delighted to sell them to me.

Not far up the road, 3 young men were doing some informal road repairs – filling in potholes with dirt. We’d seen this before and just driven past – in our defence, the first time we were very preoccupied with keeping all 4 tyres intact until we could get to the next town. But this time, we stopped and handed over a small amount of money to say ‘thanks’.

And then we passed a real cafe, with a verandah, chairs, tables and real tablecloths. So we turned around, stopped and had the first drinks that hadn’t come out of Clancy’s kitchen or bar since we arrived in Angola. We were the only ones there, but it was 10am so hopefully things got a bit busier later in the day. Greg had a Coke Zero, I had a very good short black coffee and the owner gave us a plate of peanuts as well. When we first arrived, he was playing music videos of Smashing Pumpkins, then switched to a telenovella soap opera, I think. They sound the same in every language.

One more thing on our Angolan wishlist was to visit a local market and we did that too. Greg stayed with the car, I wandered around a couple of rows of sellers in the used clothes / fabric / cheap Chinese crap section. I’d thought maybe I’d buy some fabric to take home, but realised that, of course, it’s all made in China and while it looks great on the women here, it will just look like cheap Chinese fabric when I take it out of context and get it home.

We keep finding these Tuk-tuk type 3 wheel motobikes on the road. There is the “keweseki” version and the “kawisiki” version

Kids taking their chairs home from school. We didn’t see this in southern Angola, it seems they are too poor to afford chairs to take.

The incredibly rare roadside cafe on a remote rural road.

Camped the previous night, which was much more successful. We camped on a small track between villages.

This was a small field opposite our campsite. There are lots of small fields like this, in what seems could be an incredibly productive agriculture area.

Late at night, a knock on the door …

This post is dedicated to our young French friend Joffrey, who explained to us what ‘gasosa’ means here. Estamos juntos – I wish I’d remembered to say that to the nice policemen last night and this morning!

The Portuguese word ‘gasosa‘ means soft drink. The Angolan meaning has been slightly twisted, and here it means paying a small bribe to a local cop. We have been stopped at a lot of local police checkpoints, up to 4 per day sometimes, but haven’t ever actually been asked for a gasosa. For the last couple of days, whenever we’re stopped and the police realise we’re touristas tourists, they wave us on.

We’re heading east to Huamba, 2nd largest city in Angola. It’s been a bit trickier finding places to camp, and iOverlander has been a bit light on with suggestions. This area has a lot more agriculture, villages and people than we’ve been used to in the south.

Last night we found a spot seemed to be okay – down a side street behind an abandoned factory in a village 30kms north of Huambo. We did the usual thing, set up camp, cooked dinner and had just decided that we’re going to head south to Namibia, not do a side trip to Cuito Cuanavale, site of the bloodiest battles of the Angolan civil war. We don’t really have time and it’s still heavily landmined. I think I heard that collective sigh of relief from our parents when they read that.

We heard voices outside the camper and after sitting for a minute or so hoping they would just go away, Greg opened the door to 3 policemen! We introduced ourselves, emphasising that we’re tourists and that we love Angola. One of the cops asked if we had any weapons (what?! us?! of course not!), then insisted on looking in our under-seat storage boxes. The commandant told us to take down our shade and to get packed up. Every time I smiled at the 3rd cop, he smiled back, so I was hopeful that we weren’t in too much trouble. No one ever asked to see our passports or any paperwork, and as we’ve mentioned before, Africans love paperwork.

So, we’re all packed up, sort of. Actually, we had just thrown everything into the camper and figured we’d sort it out later. And suddenly there’s another guy there, a civilian. Then the commandant indicated that we had to take the 4 of them with us to … somewhere. We made space for 3 along one bench and left the door open at their request. The commandant and I sat in the front with Greg and we drove back out to the main road and parked near a single-room police ‘station’. We realised that the 3 cops who had visited us had all walked down to us from their station in the dark.

We waited there for a while with the commandant, who spent most of the time on the phone. The civilian went into the office with the 2 other cops and eventually a young man came out to talk to us in English. He explained that we weren’t in trouble, but that the whole area fasenda was owned by someone and they had complained about us being on his property. He said something about the area not being safe, which Greg and I interpreted differently – I thought he meant that we were unsafe there because of I’m-not-sure-what. Greg thought he meant that it was not okay for us to camp anywhere in the area because of the owner’s feelings about the matter.

And then the commandant indicated that he, Greg and I were going to drive somewhere else, following the other 2 cops who were on a moto motorbike. I hopped in the camper with the door closed, we drove about 5kms down the road towards Huamba and parked in the grounds of a larger police station, where there were at least 6 cops sitting, standing and chatting. The commandant indicated that we should get our shade out, meaning that we could camp there for the night. Still no requests for passports or any paperwork. As soon as we got the shade up, with the commandant’s help, I got out our stash of cans of Coke Zero and Savannah cider and presented them to him and indicted they were for everyone to share. His face lit up, we thanked each other profusely, shook hands and that was that. The nice policemen enjoyed their beverages, we got set up for the night and after a while the commandant walked out of the compound, presumably to walk back to his own station.

This morning we just got packed up, got the 4 on-duty cops to stand with me by Clancy so we could get a photo and headed off on our way.

At all times, all the police we interacted with were polite and professional, and there was never any suggestion of a ‘gasosa’. We did see the irony of handing over a dozen or so cans of soft drink and alcohol, but were happy to do so, and they were happy to have them.

Police stop number 4 yesterday

A quiet drive through Lobito (the main street)

Binga Bay to Benguela and Lobito

Pictures of traveling between Binga Bay and Lobito, March 11 and 12 2019

Truck off the road between Binga bay and Benguela

Crawling along the track heading to wards Benguela

Yes another unfinished bridge on the road to Benguela

The road blockages along the road to Benguela

Filling up the solar hot water tank. We constructed it from plumbing parts.

The Church on the outskirts of Benguela, which is the top tourist destination mentioned in the Angola guide.

Parked at the Shoprite Supermarket Benguela. The car park is nearly empty, yet outside the car park are lots and lots of people. Only the rich people shop at Shoprite, and the many security guards keep everyone else out.

People waiting for fresh Baguettes at Shoprite supermarket Benguela

On the Beach – Binga Bay

We’ve just spent several days at Binga Bay, which is about 150kms south of Benguela. No internet, no one else there, secluded bay with a lovely beach. We swam, slept, I read 2 books and Greg probably read a couple more than that.

Now we’re on our way north to Baia Azul and Benguela. More later

Timelaspe sunset at Binga Bay

A couple more interesting landmarks in the southern Namibe area

Welwitschia Mirabilis

It took us many hours to drive the 80 or so kms from Tchitundo-Hulo to the giant Welwitschia Mirabilis, a lot of it on a rough, rocky, bone-jarring single track. The bits that weren’t rocky were sand with ruts, so the whole drive was bumpy. As with a lot of the off-roading we do, we used 4WD for about 1% of it. It’s the ground clearance that’s essential. And time. Gotta take it slow.

We reached the Welwitschia late in the afternoon, with about 30 minutes of daylight remaining, so we camped there the night. Located in a long valley, with lots of other Welwitschias around, the main attraction was by far the biggest we have seen. These strange plants only ever grow 2 leaves, which grow longer and wider over the plant’s lifetime of hundreds or possibly thousands ot years. The leaves trail along the ground and are mainly green, some with red tinges. The ends dry up and eventually fall off.

They flower in spring and we saw dried-up old flowers on some plants. The males have stamens and the females have cones. I tried really hard to find some small, seedling-sized plants, but had no luck.

Arco

The next day, Sunday, we drove back to Namibe, stopping to see Arco – the Arches. We left our campsite near the Welwitschia and drove past a lot more of them on our way back to the highway, and then drove for just a few kms on unsealed road to get to Arco, an impressive set of sandstone arches which are located about 10 minutes’ walk from the carpark. A local man met us at our car and told us the entry price – AKZ 2000 AUD$10 per person for a ‘guided tour’. We paid and joined another group of people being led by another local man. We walked beside a lovely seasonal lake – I’ve since seen photos of the same area with no lake, so I guess it only has water in it during the rainy season. The arches were impressive – at home or in the US they would be in a National Park. We met 3 guys there – they work in the oil industry and live in the capital, Luanda. A Scotsman, an Algerian and a German … sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it? We had a long chat with the Scotsman and he recommended a good camping spot further north at Baia Azul Blue Bay near Benguela, & also told us that Luanda really wasn’t worth visiting. It’s expensive, crowded and just not a must-see place. Which matches up with most of the other things we’ve read and heard about Luanda, so we’re not going there.

Back in Namibe

We had thought about camping at an actual campground Villa Dorotea, just south of Namibe. We went and had a look at it and for someone who wanted to stay in a cabin by the beach it possibly would have been okay, but there was no vehicle access apart from a small carpark at the campground entrance. We parked and had a bit of a look around and realised that vehicles with camper trailers or rooftop tents were actually parked on the other side of the campground’s fence, near a very crowded tent area. To be fair, this was during Carnival – a 5-day long weekend, but we didn’t feel like staying there with lots of other people and overburdened facilities so we headed further down the coast and found our own piece of beach. So far we have spent nothing on accommodation, and in what may be construed as too much information, I haven’t seen a flushing toilet in over a week. Well, there was that one time at the Shoprite complex in Namibe but all 3 of the ladies toilets were broken, so I don’t count that.

We spent most of Monday in Namibe, getting a few things done. We were getting low on clean clothes and with limited access to water, we were happy to get it done at a commercial laundry. The woman who served us didn’t seem all that happy to see us and made a BIG deal out of counting out everything and pretending to look at her itemised list of dry cleaning charges to see how much she could get away with charging us. The boss wandered out from the back and suggested AKZ 4000, we thought AKZ 3000 AUD$15 was reasonable (and had read in iOverlander that someone else had paid that for a load of washing there) and everyone was happy. We went back in the afternoon to collect it and the woman was much happier then. And so were we, with all those clean clothes. And bed linen too! It was wonderful for all of 5 minutes before we brought in sand on our feet.

We’d been having trouble accessing the internet, despite Greg purchasing more data, so we went off in search of a Unitel shop to assist and after one false lead – from the outside the shop appeared to be what we wanted with all the right logos, but in fact was only selling phone cases and accessories – we found the right place on the same road as Greg had bought the inner tubes. Someone there helped him and we were able to catch up on some of what we’d missed and update this blog before we forgot what we’d done.

On Monday night we camped in sand dunes below a mesa north of Namibe, then on Tuesday we found a nice quiet spot between the road and the coast 5kms north of Bentiaba. Someone on iOverlander shared the spot because they had camped on the beach but we thought we’d be better behind the dunes – out of the wind, out of sight and away from fluctuations in tides. We spent 2 nights there and enjoyed it. Got out the insect/shade annex and settled in.

The stone cairn making the turn-off the the giant Welwitschia

Camped at the giant Welwitschia Mirabilis

A village in Southern Angola south of Namibe

The many, many potholes in good roads throughout Angola.

Camped for 2 nights at Bentiaba near the beach

All 500w of solar panels out on a cloudy day

The Atlantic Ocean and the beach at Bentiaba

Back to basics

One of our friends – hi Grant! – asked what our ‘go-to’ quick dinner is when we are setting up camp late at night. I replied that we always aim to be off the road well before dark, and if we haven’t reached our destination we just find somewhere suitable off the road and camp there. It did get me to thinking that I don’t write much about day-to-day stuff and what we eat. It is all just everyday life to us, but maybe it might be interesting.

We use a single-burner gas stove that takes disposable butane gas cartridges. Those cartridges cost less than AUD$2 at home, here we have paid up to AUD$5 for them. They usually last 2 or 3 days though and we bought enough in South Africa & Namibia to last us for this trip. We haven’t found any here in Angola, although I’ve seen the gas stoves in the local Shoprite supermarkets. I cook with a frypan, pressure cooker and use a small kettle for heating water. I love drinking black coffee and have worked out a good routine where I boil water in the evening, keep it in a thermos overnight and by the time I’m ready to drink my first (and usually only) coffee of the day, it’s the perfect temperature, and I don’t have to fuss about getting the stove out and heating up water in the morning.

I could write a whole blog post about how much I love our camping pressure cooker. Maybe I have in a previous blog, I can’t remember. We use a pressure cooker at home a lot, and prior to a previous camping trip – one of the European trips a couple of years ago I think – I got to thinking about how good it would be to take a pressure cooker with us, to save on gas and cooking times. I would have happily taken the 6L manual one that now sits on a shelf unused because we have a fancy electric one, but Greg found a Korean camping ‘rice cooker’ on Ebay. It’s a lightweight 3L manual pressure cooker and it is perfect for us. I also use it as an ordinary cooking pot occasionally, but a lot of the camp cooking I do now is done under pressure.

We have a hot meal every night. I love cooking while we’re camping, I love the challenge of making something tasty using minimal equipment, limited ingredients and in a short space of time – 30 minutes prep + cooking time. The foods that take the longest to cook are barley & potatoes- 10 minutes each. The stews I cook take about 12 minutes and barley risotto takes about 15 minutes.

Somehow everything tastes better when you’re in the middle of nowhere. As the saying goes – hunger is the best spice.

I started making a list of the meals we’ve eaten recently

Breakfast
Barley with tinned apple or other fruit- Greg
Muesli with home-made yoghurt – me

Lunch
Usually bread, baguettes or rolls, sometimes wraps, with ham & cheese or jam
Occasionally – frying pan pizzas with wraps, Mrs Ball’s fruit chutney, cheese, pineapple, ham

Dinner
Barley risotto with garlic, onions, chicken, cauliflower, carrot, broccoli
Cous cous as above
Stews – pork or chicken, lentils, potatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, carrot or other veg, tomato paste
Pasta – tortellini with cream sauce – garlic, onions, bacon, cream thickened with cornflour
Pasta – dry pasta with canned tomatoes, tuna, feta
Steak, potatoes, frozen peas
Veal steak ( + deglazed pan juices with cider), potatoes
White chili – chicken, cannelini beans, onions, garlic, spices
Sausage & lentils
Pasta with sausage bolognese – take sausage meat out of skins, add onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes
Frittata with leftover cooked vegies
Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday so I made pancakes and as we’re having a ‘rest day’ today and staying here, just north of Bentiaba, for a second night, I mixed up a batch of yeasted dough and made pan-fried not-quite-naan breads

We keep small quantities of onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, apples and bananas but not much other fresh fruit or veg as they don’t travel well. I cook with dried lentils and canned beans. At home I cook with dried beans but they take too much gas to cook when camping. I have a few basics that I add to our meals – onion salt and dehydrated raw vegetable stock powder that I make at home, plus mixed herbs, mild curry powder and ‘chicken spice’ that looks like it’s mainly paprika. I bought little cardboard boxes of the last 3 at Food Lover’s in Cape Town.

And finally, moving away from food and cooking, a confession.

We packed a 24inch TV in Clancy when we shipped him and sometimes watch TV shows at night. We convert Clancy’s dining room into our bedroom, hang to TV on the mounting bracket inside the door and watch an episode of a TV series Greg has downloaded. So far we’ve watched and enjoyed all of Russian Doll, and we’ve just started on Series 3 of True Detective.

Judy cooking with the travel pressure cooker

TV night – playing from our Raspberry Pi Kodi

Passing Nomadic herdsmen shifting camp

What a true paleo lifestyle and diet looks like

That abandoned family compound we visited just north of Tchitundo-Hulo comprised 6 or 7 domed huts, all with doors facing east, made of mud or dung or maybe both. The huts where people slept – one for the head of the family, the housewife’s hut and the boys’ and girls’ huts – had floors of the same building material. The head of the family’s hut was closed off with a piece of metal held in place with rope. The rest were open. One hut had a gourd and a piece of a vehicle’s tail light inside. We didn’t look in all of them, but the others that we did look in were empty. When we stayed at the mission campground just south of Ondangwa, there was a museum which featured a similar family compound of huts with labels and short descriptions. I’ve given the same names to the huts we saw here.

The storage huts had dirt floors. There were 2 grinding stones in the yard, bowl-shaped from use(which made my baker’s heart sing, I was more excited to see those 2 stones than anything else there!). One stone also had the hand-held ‘pestle’ with it. Nearby was a fireplace enclosed by stones, and an open shelter made of sticks with leafy branches forming the roof. There was also an enclosure for livestock in the south-eastern corner of the compound – a fenced off area made with the same thorny branches that made up the outer fence. In the north-western corner near a tree there were 4 tall forked branches – a couple standing in the ground, the others leaning against the tree

Scattered near the fireplace and a couple of the huts were several battered cooking pots, around 3 or 4 litre capacity. There wasn’t much evidence of ash or coal. Most of the other debris was rubbish and dung, a lot of dung. Broken bottles, bits of plastic, fragments of cloth. I wondered if the compound had been abandoned because it just got too dirty. The dung may have been left by roaming livestock after the family moved out.

In another compound nearby, we saw tent-like structures made of pieces of fabric and plastic over domed sticks and branches

We met ‘the locals’ when we were walking near the rock. We could hear voices higher up and a couple of kids saw us and let everyone else know. 2 young men walked down the rock, greeted us and then kept on walking. They were each carrying a sharp shiny machete and wearing sandals made of tyre soles and string straps and ties. Everyone else we met was barefoot. We kept on walking along the eastern side of The Rock and eventually heard more voices and chickens at another compound, but we didn’t get close enough to meet anyone there. We turned back and headed north east, a bit away from The Rock, and met 2 more women with a few little children at the edge of their compound. Mother and daughter perhaps, both still carrying babies. The older woman pointed us back to The Rock and seemed to be asking us for something, rolling her hands around each other.

We changed our course and walked past the place where we’d first met the kids and young men. By then there was a large group, mostly women and children and one man. Everyone except the man was bare chested and wearing fabric loincloths. The women had string tied around their breasts. The man was wearing a t-shirt. They also wanted us to give them something – water? food? my headnet to keep the flies off? Dunno. I had a little tin container of mints and gave it to a young woman. This group was heading back to their compound with their water containers but kept on calling out to us as we walked back to Clancy. They dropped off their kids and containers, then followed us for a while calling out, then eventually went back home.

These people were the most primitive we’ve seen, or are ever likely to see. They are herdsmen with cattle and goats, and some families also raise chickens. They don’t grow anything, we didn’t see any evidence of crops or agriculture. They are hunter-gatherers. They don’t use coconut oil or almond flour or make bone broth or drink alkaline water. And they sure as hell don’t buy Pete Evans’ processed packaged ‘paleo’ ‘food’ from the local supermarket. Sorry, obviously I’m not a fan of either the paleo diet or Paleo Pete.

Maybe they trade some of their livestock for goods – plastic water containers, lengths of fabric. The cattle we saw in this area were the healthiest we’ve seen in Angola. It’s currently the wet season and it looks like Spring for a lot of the local vegetation – bright green leaves at the start of their growth cycle. Close to The Rock, we saw a tall tree with some kind of fruit on it, but probably inedible as there was still a lot of last year’s crop on the tree. Of course, we have zero knowledge of edible flora there, and I’m sure the locals are eating well, they look healthy, but as Greg commented – where are they getting any carbs?

Tchitundo-Hulo Prehistoric Rock Paintings and Petroglyphs

For a short while on Friday we thought we’d stepped several, or many, millenia back in time.

We spent a few days driving south of Namibe, going to see the Tchitundo-Hulo petroglyphs and rock paintings. It’s not easy to get information on how to find them (and anyone reading this post hoping for clarification will probably be very disappointed … sorry!) but we had some GPS coordinates and a description from an iOverlander post, so we thought we’d give it a crack.

On our second night in the Namibe desert we were treated to a spectacular silent lightning show, predominantly over the largest mountain to the east of where we were camped. We sat and watched it light up the hills and mountains far away in the east, gradually swinging around to the south and west. It felt as special to us as watching the Northern Lights in Sweden, possibly even more-so as it’s taken us a lot more effort to get here! Later in the night we got rain, but no thunderstorm. We had rain for the 4 nights we camped in the desert, and started putting out containers to collect the rain which we could then use to augment our own stored water for washing up and showers. The lids of our storage boxes make good water collectors, so they all get put outside too.

On Friday morning we set off south towards the petroglyphs, turning left at an ‘intersection’ (ie, the point where 2 single dirt tracks met) at the abandoned buildings at Capolopopo. Our Bradt Angola guidebook just said that the Tchitundo-Hulo are impossible to find without a guide and possibly a local tribesman. No idea how one would actually find a guide, but we did meet up with some local tribesmen at the rock.

So, down a single lane sand track, heeding the advice of the iOverlander post to approach the rocks from the north east, but that track seemed to be taking us away from the rocks. Back to an intersection and onto the right-hand track …. which eventually petered out.

So we channeled some Aussie adventurers – Reg and Griselda Sprigg, Jack Absolom, Len Beadell, the Leyland Brothers, Malcolm Douglas, Russel Coight are a few who come to mind – and just made our own track! If I made anyone smile with that last reference …. I’ll be here all week, folks! Sometimes we would both get out and walk for a while to find the best, most open path, at other times I would walk it and point out the way, but for most of it we drove it slowly together, figuring it out as we went along. It was a new experience for us both, even Mr Adventure hadn’t bashed out his own track before.

I know what you’re thinking – are these people completely insane, bush bashing their way through a country that is still riddled with landmines? Well, this little corner of Angola is possibly the least-populated part of the entire continent, with fewer than 10 people per square kilometre, and it wasn’t landmined as there was nothing there to defend. The local people are herdsmen and there was a lot of evidence of cattle and goats in the area, together with human footprints so we were sure we were safe to proceed.

Just to the north of the rock, which is as sacred to the Mucuisses people as Australia’s Uluru is to its traditional owners, there is an abandoned ‘village’. That’s not the right term as this collection of huts inside a thorny fence would only have been ‘home’ to one family. I’m going to call it a ‘family compound’, with apologies to anthropologists if my terminology is incorrect. Later on we met some locals when we got closer to The Rock and their compounds are closer to The Rock than the abandoned one was, but we thought it had probably been home to one of the groups we met.

We parked Clancy on the western side of the rock and walked north. There were a few petroglyphs nearby, but according to the GPS info we had, the majority were on the eastern side, so we set off walking. We found more on the north eastern side, and noticed where parts of thin top red layer of the rock had sheared off. These petroglyphs are very fragile and other people have mentioned that it’s hard to avoid walking on some of them. Most of the ones we saw were circles with crosses, concentric circles and ‘suns’ – circles with lines around the outside. We didn’t see heaps of them, which were apparently further up the rocky slope. I’d been hopeful that maybe we could walk around the whole rock but, like Uluru, its circumference is large and we couldn’t really get a good idea of how big it was or how long it would take. We did walk a few kms around it, but as the afternoon was getting on, we decided to retrace our steps and head back to Clancy.

On Friday night we camped near some big rocks, just off the main track to and from Tchitundo-Hulo. We could see it to the south of us. Lovely thunderstorm that night and we collected enough rainwater so that we just had to add a bit more for showers the next morning, and I even washed my hair!

Greg read up all the info he had about finding the elusive proper track to Tchitundo-Hulo, so on Saturday morning we drove back down the first track we’d originally thought was heading too far to the east. The whole time we were in the area, we kept on thinking we’d find the right track to the rock and wonder how on earth we’d missed it, but … well … we never did. We came to a wide dry sandy riverbed that had a concrete trough nearby, and we saw a woman and small child carrying water, running back to their home. The woman was carrying a full open 20L container on her head, the child carried a smaller container in his or her arms and I felt bad that we’d made them run and spill some of their precious water.
The riverbed had lots of branches piled along the bank nearest us, suggesting that someone had had difficulty getting through either the soft sand or maybe mud. So we turned around and headed towards another significant landmark in the area – the giant Welwitschia Mirabilis, reputed to be the largest in the world.