Let’s bring Sauna into Africa

My favourite passage until now! We leave the Skeleton Coast at Ugab river and follow its riverbed eastbound. Many different paths into all directions exist, as if everybody except us knows the correct way without any signs. Google Maps quickly renders useless, but our paper map gives me some hope. I use paper maps from Freytag & Berndt quite often on my trips and love them! If they show a path, then there is a path. (Here around Africa maps from Tracks4Africa are supposed to be state of the art, I got the most recent for Sambia.) So, the detailed path finding we finally do digitally in Open Street Map. Let the mapping community be praised to the max! The path starts next to the river and changes into the riverbed after some 10-20, 30 or 40 km. Who knows, distances become irrelevant here. A barely visible track in sand, dried mud and rock 'n' roll! Hell yeah, this is fun! Welwitschias are predominant, being an endemic Namibian desert plant which can get older than Old Amsterdam.
Our destination: Brandberg west mine, a deserted tin mine with a water pond deep inside. Supposed to be campable but turns out to be already occupied by one of those tourists with a rented, white Toyota Hilux and a roof tent (you don't see anything else around here). We enjoy the scenary and return down to the Ugab river base camp which we prefer a lot! Total tranquility, in the middle of the riverbed, surrounded by spiked trees, by mountains and sometimes visited by rare mountain elephants (according to their dried dung) and by lions (which probably is a myth). It's a Save the Rhino Trust camp where you pay as voluntary donation. The African Black Rhino is nearly extinct and exists in natural environment just in these mountain areas. Apart from that you probably find it in Etosha National Park, but that's it.Weiterlesen