YEP 12 Africa Expedition – Day 2

Blog written by Kate and Sebastian

Up nice and early in preparation for our first day of hiking in the Namib Desert! Bags all packed we sent the majority of our stuff to PANGAEA and then hopped in the buses and drove, and drove and drove, past two police checks! We just kept going and this worried us, because over the next four days we knew we had to walk back that distance. Finally we arrived at Cape Cross and checked out the seal colony living there, 15000 noisy seals crowded the beach and swore at us as we took photos.

Eventually (at 2pm) we put on our packs and took the first steps of our long hike. Not more than 100m down the road we stopped, a local police car whizzed up and two men hopped out, where are you going, they asked us, after much discussion with Mike they told us that we had to drive back outside of the Cape Cross reserve before we could begin our hike…so off we went back to the main road, parked and began once again.
And once again only several minutes of hiking in a police car whizzed up to tell us off for whatever we were doing. This time however Mike successfully talked them out and we continued on our journey. We walked across salt flats and hardened sand and lots and lots of loose sand. Despite the desolate landscape we saw birds, flamingos, jackal footprints and even a springbok! Four hours and around 20 km later we arrived at Mile 72, perhaps the longest campsite in the world, with not a soul to be seen…anywhere. Head torches on we pitched our tents, ate some dinner and crawled into our sleeping bags for a cosy nights sleep.