The car was pulled free, but who will rescue my battered ego?n
NOT CLOSE TO MUCH OF ANYTHING, Namibia – Before us lay a conundrum. The Abu Huab River was dry, but recently flowing, leaving 100 meters thick, animal-tracked sand of unknown depth.
Our destination lay several miles to the other side, defeat to our rear.
I thought about our dainty Volkswagen Polo and the leaden storm clouds that threatened to fill the riverbed anew and said, “I don’t think we should do this.”
“I think we can make it,” Connie said.
She chucked a few large rocks out of the way, I gunned it, and for a couple seconds I was rally driving through the desert, fighting to keep it between the skids – a badass. Twenty meters in, I was just another idiot in need of a winch.
The afternoon sun washed the desert in a leering white glow and sand stuck to every crevice of my sweating, stinking body as I furiously scooped sand out from under the car.
We had no shovel.
A troop of baboons sat on the opposite river bank, the side where we desperately to be. The alpha lae looked our way. He was not impressed.
We dug and dug and snipped and dug and made no progress.
Fifteen minutes into our miserable, futile excavation, a truck crested the hill on the other side of the river.
The Afrikaans versions of Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh jumped out and immediately began hooking a rope to our marooned car. They towed us to the closest bank – the wrong side. We pondered our options. We would likely have to cross this river again on our way back if we continue. Jerry Garcia piped up.
“I think I can get her across," he said with a look of determination.
Se we let him and he did, barely. Not for the first time this trip, my pride took a savage beating.
Paved roads are the exception in Namibia, a massive, sparsely populated country criss-crossed by gravel roads and 4x4 tracks.
“Unless it’s been raining” is the caveat in guide books before going on to say so and so road is passable by any vehicle. And it’s true – the roads are fine, except that bridges in the country are about out as common as Damara terns, which is to say there approximately four, and the two times a year the river flows means major problems for the non-Land Rover set.
Despite the rainiest rainy season in decades, though, our VW, Petunia, rattled through the washboards and crawled through the swollen rivers almost without incident. We had to stop at many a crossing, move rocks, and, a couple times, turn around completely. But we usually made it, the mud from the roads perfectly covered the acacia thorn paint scratches (handy for our rental inspection) and the exposed rocks came just short of snapping an axle.
We toured nearly the full length of the Skeleton Coast, the yellow dunes of Swakopmund, and the red sands of the Sossusvlei dune sea, with nary more than a slow leak in one tire (also undetected by the rental company).
Then we headed back, Connie behind the wheel, and had to do battle with the Abu Huab once more. There was no other way - trust me, we looked. Connie gunned it, the baboons turned their heads skeptically (well, I imagine they did), and we served and skidded over the sand within 50 meters of the opposite bank. The tires spun, the car made one last pathetic wiggle. We were stuck. Again.
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