Namibia

What you see above are the three camping spots at Rooiklip Guestfarm. To get there you drive through the beautiful Gamsberg Pass and only 30 km behind it you find the road to Rooiklip.

The camping spots are quite extraordinary, located under a rock spur. We put up our tents in good time to…

…enjoy a sundowner and a fantastic view. Above Imani and Hanna…

…and here is our neighbor Des…

…her husband Johan…

…and again Imani and Hanna with Anders and Marie.

I simply can’t get enough of African sunsets.

Can you?

Camping can be quite comfortable…

…and even children enjoys a late dinner with good food cooked over fire.

However, I was the only one who enjoyed sunrise enough to go up and I was well rewarded.

But it was not long until the children were up.

Rooiklip is an exciting place for kids. Rocks to climb…

..and explore…

..and treasures to be found.

A few days in this environment can be true stress relief.

When camping dinner preparations can take all the time it needs…

…with kids occupied…

…until it is again time for a sundowner…

…a braai dinner…

…and some stargazing.

Everything has an end though. Time to pack up…

…and say thanks for a really nice weekend!

The last weeks I have been driving through the Gamsberg Pass a few times. Here are some facts and photos. (Photos with my Pajero in them are by Johan Piek / Des Holmes.)

If you start in Windhoek and leave the city on C26 you will go through the Gamsberg pass.

It is a speactacular road.

Respect to those who built it.

The pass has it’s name from Gamsberg.

Gamsberg mountain is a table-mountain 120 km southwest of Windhoek that is 2347 m high and can be seen 100 km away. The plateau is about 2500m long and 800m wide.

The Gamsberg mountain was “created” ca 1500 million years ago as a granite mountain. It was later capped with an erosion-resistant layer of sandstone that explains why it is still there, some 450 meters above the surrounding highland.

In 1970 the German “Max-Planck-Gesellschaft” for Astronomy found Gamsberg, bought the plateau and established  a small astronomical station.

It is identified as one of the most suitable sites for an observatory in Southern Africa because of a large number of cloudless nights, a dark sky, excellent atmospheric transparency and low humidity. It is supposed to be comparable to the well-known sites in Chile. There are plans of expanding and making the Gamsberg into a scientific center.

After passing the Gamsberg pass you will come to the end of C26 where you will have the options to either turn right and follow the C14 to Walvis Bay or turn left and follow the C14 to Solitaire and Maltahöhe with another option to leave C14 at Solitaire and go to Sesriem and Sossusvlei.

Driving the Gamsberg Pass is a great way to travel!

It took us some time to realize that in Namibia you should try camping. One thing I quickly realized was that we needed a lot of things…

… and since this was only going to be camping for one night we packed without the roof rack…

… and it worked out. Barely…

We had chosen Melrose Farm, only 50 km southwest of Windhoek so it was just to follow C26, that very nice gravel road…

…until we were there and I could get my long sought-after cold beer.

We had rented a tent at Adventure Camping in Windhoek and even if this was our first time we quickly had everything in place.

Melrose is a very nice place to camp, well equipped (cold and warm water, flushing toilet…), with beautiful surroundings…

… and a swing for the girls.

Not far from the camping is “The Mission” and we went there to have a look…

… and a sundowner.

Very nice!

Oryx and chicken on the braai and a nice evening to end our day.

The night was cold and so was the morning but to see the sunrise you have to be brave…

… and if you are, you get rewarded by beautiful color’s. End of April is autumn in Namibia.

Even if a day starts cold in Namibia it always gets nice after a while so we enjoyed a long sunny breakfast before returning to Windhoek. And, yes there will be more camping…

So – the final post from Kolmanskop! We have seen the Kasino, all the houses, the hospital and the bar. Now let’s go to the shopping street – “Kolmanskuppe Ladenstrasse”.

Here we find “the Old Shop”…

…which is in a good shape with some furniture and equipment.

The shop owner lived next to the shop and his house is also well kept. It looks like he decided to leave Kolmanskop in the middle of a phone call and just put the phone down…

…leaving the bed made up and ready for his return.

The living room could have been in a house in any European town, but this one is in a house in a ghost town in the desert.

The stove is just waiting to be heated up…

…and the fridge just waiting to be cooled down. This is perhaps not so easy to day but in the days when Kolmanskop was a living town…

…there were daily deliveries of ice. Just to open the lid and place a big block of ice there. The melting gave water that was lead away and collected in the bottom. So people in Kolmanskop could always keep a cool beer at hand.

It was all made possible by this – the Kolmanskop ice factory just next to the shop owners house. Imagine this. A desert a hundred years ago with an ice factory…

In this room Hr Zirkler, the butcher was hanging his meat. The butchery was one of the shops in this street and it was neighbor to…

…the bakery, with Hr Brechlin as the baker.

Once upon a time this house smelled of newly baked german bread…

…of the type that is still the best bread you can buy in Namibia.

But today the bakery is closed since many years and Kolmanskop is no longer a place for baking bread, it’s just a place to go for a history lesson and for some special photos…

So you build a small town in the desert and bring in 300 Germans.

Of course you need a bar and the building above is supposed to have a past life as the Kolmanskop bar.

Kolmanskop had its own ice factory so here you could get an ice cold beer.

My guess is that you could also buy a fancy drink.

Already in those days a Dry Martini was a classic drink…

…like a Manhattan or a Tom Collins.

A Gin and Tonic might have been too British for the German taste?

If you ordered a Singapore Sling you might very well have been the first to do it – in Namibia.

So I decide for a Mint Julep:

Bartender: -Just put 3 or 4 mint leaves in the glass, add 4 teaspoons of powdered sugar, 3 cl of bourbon whisky and some ice and then fill it up with soda.

But most probably the poor bartender just kept on handing over beer. Even the Jägermeister wasn’t introduced until 1935…

Of course there had to be a hospital in a wealthy and organised town such as Kolmanskop.

The picture above shows the first hospital in Kolmanskop.

Some of the equipment used is shown in a small room in the “Old Shop”.

Later on the hospital was enlarged to what it is today.

When you enter the building the hospital “feeling” is unmistakable.

This was a very modern hospital in its days.

The hospital in Kolmanskop had the first X-ray machine of the southern hemisphere.

The acquisition of an X-ray machine was not only motivated by concern of the people living in Kolmanskop.

In Kolmanskop an X-ray machine could also be used to detect the smuggling of diamonds.

When Kolmanskop finally was abandoned the machine was sent as a gift to Ovamboland. Very appropriate since it was contract workers from Ovamboland who did all the hard work mining the diamonds.

This is the entrance to the Doctor’s house.

There were two resident doctors.

One of them was Dr. Kraenzle.

He had a strong belief in the use of a little wine or champagne to cure patients. Because of that the hospital had it’s own wine cellar.

The other doctor was Dr. von Lossow. He was a bone expert and an excellent surgeon and he had his own idea of how to increase the health of his patients.

Dr von Lossow had a strong belief in the use of onions and garlic and he lived as he taught.

So visiting him could be a challenge unless you took the doctor’s advice and (in self defence) ate a lot of onion and garlic before visiting the good doctor.

It has been many years without a doctor in the doctor’s house…

The next two houses after the quarter masters’s house are the two “single quarters”.

This was the houses for the single German men. Looking at the houses from this side they seem quite all right.

But on the other side sand has been building up.

Look! A door was left open, welcoming sand and welcoming me!

Inside there is a lot of rooms. Most of them are more or less filled with sand.

An example of “more”…

Think the sand away and let the beer stay. Quite nice single quarters…

Swedish colours…

Moving from room to room can be quite challenging…

Fancy living in the middle of a desert. Diamonds paying it…

Can’t help loving it. The walls, the mirror door and then all that sand. Surreal!

Electrifying!

Is it OK if I take the room to the right?

Nice detail.

The rooms are in all kinds of colours and very nicely decorated. I wonder if there is any furniture below all that sand?

Well, I found this…

This was the residence of the mining engineer Leonhard Kolle who stayed here with his family until 1935 when they moved to Oranjemund.

A beautiful house with a huge veranda along the whole building. On the right hand side you see trees. This was not common in a desert town. As a fact you can still see the remains of those trees today.

Yes, this is the same house but with no veranda and no roof and not much left of the trees.

Not much left of that big veranda…

…and really not that much left of the house.

It was many years since you could enter the engineers house through this door.

Once inside this is today more outside…

Only details, but if you look at the left side, “outside”, you can see…

…the engineers “outhouse”…

With the outer roof gone the inner roof creates strange shadow patterns.

Yes, the car far away is mine. Once this door was the way to the veranda…

… and this was the proud home of the engineer’s family…

…with exclusive stencilled paintings on the walls.

Today not much is left but a spooky atmosphere and those graphic shadows.

This would be a demanding object for a keen house renovator…

Next to the small taechers house is the much larger quartermaster’s house that also had room for a post office.

Well used stairs with sand…

…and nice carpentry…

…brings you upstairs.

Sunny wallpapers, or is it painted?

A good place for a cup of coffee.

Anyone for a bath?

Kitchen. Once water was spilled here, now it’s sand.

Those old, sandy stairs from above. It looks worn but actually it has been preserved quite well. It is at least 55 years since someone lived here.