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Dunes, often characterized by pattern—stellar, linear, silk, transverse—are signatures of the winds that created them. Some dunes, such at this one with vegetation growing inside its cavernous deflation hollow, are stationary. Others drift. 8 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER | MARCH 2011 PHOTO CREDIT PHOTO CREDIT INTERNATIONAL MAPPING cloud. We’re touring the desert by air, a great way to hopscotch over Namibia’s big distances and see the scale of the forces that shape this land. Brain, whom everyone calls “Nad,” knows the country from cloud level like few others. As a boy growing up in South Africa, he excavated hominid fossils with his father, the eminent paleontologist Bob Brain. But when his time came, Nad turned to living primates, earning his doctorate studying desert baboons surviving the most extreme habitat of any nonhuman primate—the remote Kuiseb River canyon north of Sossusvlei. “Temperatures would be well over 120 degrees,” Nad recalls, “but those baboons could go without water for up to 117 days. They lived right on the edge.” Lack of rainfall is the bane of much of Namibia. From the air, the patterns are clear: Along the coast, fitful rivers stagger to the sea through dunes or across bleached land. And though most are dry all year—sometimes for years on end—they are corridors for wildlife that move seasonally between the interior and the cold Atlantic shores. Another lifeline lies out at sea: fog, extending in a long wall, high and clean-edged, waiting for the rising heat that will draw it inland over the dunes to a thirsting land. In some years, fog is the desert’s only moisture, all that life has to drink. We angle southeast from Sossusvlei, and between the great sand sea and the central escarpment stretch expanses of fiery red dunes and plains of honey-blonde grass fronting thunderheaddark mountain ranges—vistas of such improbable color and form that even Hollywood couldn’t make them up. “All of this is NamibRand,” says Nad with a sweep of his arm. It’s now one of the largest private reserves in Africa, covering more than 800 square miles, “the dream of Albi Brückner. He bought the first piece of land here for the price of a used Volkswagen Beetle.” Nad pauses. “Hang on,” he says. We buck and bounce, surfing the east wind to find a smooth way down to the airstrip. Relentless wind has probably deterred many a newcomer to this land. But Albi Brückner, a farsighted Namibian businessman, saw something transcendent in this desert. “The landscape overwhelmed me,” he recalled when I met him at his home in Windhoek. “The wide open spaces, the nature, the colors—it changes every hour.” Snowy-haired and relaxed in a soft stuffed chair, Brückner told of his first visit, in the 1960s, to what is now Namib- Rand, then owned by 13 Afrikaner sheep farmers, some of whom Etosha National Park N a m i b D e s e r t Namib-Naukluft National Park 0 mi 0 km Swakopmund Walvis Bay ATLANTIC OCEAN 100 200 Lüderitz Karibib Etosha Pan Kulala Desert Lodge NamibRand Nature Reserve Sossusvlei Sperrgebiet National Park Otavi N A M I B I A Okahandja Windhoek Keetmanshoop Karasburg Orange River ANGO AANGO ANGO ANGO ANG ANGO ANGO AANGOLA LA LA LA LLA LA LA BOTSWANA NAMIBIA AFRICA ANTARCTICA ZAMBIA TRAVELER. NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC. Feature: Namibia COM 9 3rd Proof Traveler 12/08/10
Giraffes were reintroduced to NamibRand in 2003, using animals already adapted to desert conditions. In 2006, the first giraffe calf was born on-site. were awarded parcels of arid Namibia for fighting the German grass and blue sky to a vantage point overlooking hundreds of oryx Army in North Africa during World War II. Cleared of wildlife, streaming across a distant slope. “All the herds are increasing,” fenced, and soon overgrazed, the land was marginal for livestock Kashandula says, “oryx, springbok, zebras, red hartebeest. As we in the best of years. In the 1980s, drought hit, the sheep industry take down fences, they have more freedom to roam.” collapsed, and the farms began to fail. That’s when Brückner, then If we overshoot a turn or need to go back, Kashandula drives in business selling water pumps and generators to farmers, stepped in reverse, for a meter or a mile, as far as it takes—a skill you in to buy. “And they jumped for cash in the bank,” he said. Over time, Brückner bought more land, removed livestock and fences, and reintroduced wildlife. “Game is a totally different eater,” he told me. “They take care of their food supply, unlike domestic animals.” Grasses and vegetation returned. By the early 1990s, Brückner developed a bold plan to join the farms as a private nature reserve for the benefit of wildlife, with high-quality, lowimpact ecotourism generating the funds for ongoing conservation. “Twenty years ago, this was a novelty,” he said. “And now we’re a worldwide model. Most of the people who come to NamibRand [ ] must master to be a NamibRand guide. “It’s a strict policy here,” he tells me. “We don’t want to leave tracks all over the desert. They can take a lifetime to heal.” Giraffes, leopards, and, most BRÜCKNER recently, cheetahs have been re- DEVELOPED introduced to NamibRand. The cheetahs, five males and two fe- A BOLD PLAN TO males, had been rescued from JOIN FARMS INTO A ranches where they would have been shot. As if on cue, the five PRIVATE NATURE males appear, walking parallel RESERVE FOR THE to the main road through deep BENEFIT OF WILDLIFE, grass, single file. They’ve been on their own for more than a year FUNDED BY LOW- now. “We think they will survive,” IMPACT ECOTOURISM. Kashandula says. At sunset we drive backward up a steep track into a grove of are as taken by what we are doing gnarled quiver trees, each with a as they are by the landscape.” form so expressive that it feels Today the 13 adjoining farms that make up NamibRand have like being in a room full of people with stories to tell. There’s nine owners, and all have agreed to protect Brückner’s original no wind tonight, no lights, no sounds. I rock back and watch an vision. Ecotourism concessions here range from walking safaris ocean of sky turn velvet blue and the silver spray of the Milky and rustic “hideouts” for local families to high-end eco-lodges with hot-air ballooning and exquisite private camps attracting Way appear, serene in my own private Africa. Hollywood celebrities. CHRIS ECKSTROM and FRANS LANTING, a couple based in Califor- Nad lands the plane, and we join guide Progress Kashandula nia, also teamed up for our March 2007 story about Zambia’s Luangwa for a sunset game drive across a minimalist landscape of yellow Valley, “The Last Real Africa,” which received a Lowell Thomas Award. 10 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER | MARCH 2011
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