Living Desert

We went on two more excursions into the desert, one into the “Moon Valley” along the dry Swakop riverbed and the other one into the dune girdle between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. One was as exciting as the other. The barren, hostile landscape of the Moon Valley was breathtaking and you could easily imagine how people get lost there and die from thirst. Yet, there are plants! “Living stones”, almost invisible, sunken into the gravel to expose only the absolute necessary amount of leaf surface to the burning sun. The sunlight enters the plant through little windows at the top of the thick leaves to allow photosynthesis inside. Then, there is the “pencil plant” with little grooves along the stem-like leaves to collect moisture from the fog and lead a few drops towards the stem of the plant where they enter the soil and can be absorbed by its roots. Last not least, we saw Welwitchia Mirabilis, actually a conifer which consists of a wooden stem and only two leaves. It can grow for thousands of years. It is amazing how some plants are used by animals. For instance, a kudu would injure a euphorbia and cover its fur with the poisonous milk so that any ticks fall out.

Along the way we found strange rock formations resembling the sinking titanic, a giant lasagne or comic figures. There were also some rocks very rich in iron sitting loosely on each other. When you hit them with a stone they gave a sound like from church bells, in different nuances. What a concert of the nature!

The drive through the dunes was a special experience, one of the highlights of the whole trip. Our guide would spot an animal track – not of antelope or such, but of tiny, tiny animals like scorpion or spider – and follow it to find the animal. Most of the time he was successful and brought the beast to us to have a close look. Thus we saw sidewinder and horn viper, two poisonous snakes. He even dug out a Palmato-gecko just after spotting a tiny heap of sand next to a little hole. The skin of this gecko is so delicate that you can see the vertebrae and guts through it and it would burn in the sun within 20 min. The most amazing animal, however, was the Namaqua-Chamaeleon. Our guide spotted one from the driving car, threw some tok-tokkie beetles to feed it and then caught it. We observed it changing colour and apparently it can even go pink. We watched it snatching out its long tongue to catch the beetle. We held it in our hands. We saw it turning its eyes in completely different directions. It seemed like a creature from the ancient past.