Day 1: Windhoek to Sesriem

Cullinan says: 360 km / 224 mi, 6 hr 30 min
Google says: 306 km / 190 mi, 4 hr 17 min
Actual: 353 km / 219 mi, 6 hr 11 min (gravel roads 103 km / 64 mi)

Let me explain this bit first. Our tour company, Cullinan, gave us a very useful booklet about what to see on our drive, with distances and driving times – which turned out to be not always accurate. There is a lot of talk on forums, etc about Google’s estimates and how accurate they are. So I have put down the estimates from both the tour guide and Google, neither of which hit the mark all the time, and then I have added what I actually found. I’ve also put down how much of this was on the notorious gravel roads – the rest was tarmac.

This morning we met up with our tour guide from Cullinan Tours, Jean. We only met him once, to pick up our car – a Toyota Forwarder 4×4 – and to receive a lesson on how to drive on Namibia’s roads. Despite being a big rugby playing guy, he was surprised we went to the Wolfshack last night!

Our first stop was to the nearby Spar supermarket to get some water and snacks in case we break down and needed them in an emergency. We have a shabby local Spar near to us in Wales so we were blown away by the size, cleanliness and choice of not just this, but all the Spars we came across in Namibia and South Africa. It’s a completely different world and one that makes us look bad!

Namibia has had some torrential rain in the last couple of weeks, and although that’s passed now, the gravel roads are in particularly bad shape. You can’t really drive more than 90 km/h on them – our guide said 80 km/h and our car hire company told us not to go above 70 km/h! We also had a couple of torrential thunderstorms to drive through, although neither lasted more than 15 minutes.

We stopped at the Shell garage in Rehoboth where I bought a boiled egg for lunch (yes, really), then drove through two small towns, Klein Aub and Reitoog, then onto Bullsport. At this point the storms with thunder and lightning which slowed us down a bit. The normal route to Sesriem is via the D854 but Jean warned us that they might be flooded if we get there too late, so we decided to go an extra 10km and took the C14 instead, which took us through an unnamed road through the Naukluft Mountain zebra park (we did see a couple of zebras), and then on to the C19 and to Sossuslvei. The scenery was amazing and we’ve never driven on such empty roads; we passed two towns and maybe about 20 cars in the last 4 hours.

Our destination today was Sossusvlei Lodge in Sesriem, which can be a bit confusing as we’re quite a long way from Sossusvlei. It’s like a big Center Parcs in the desert. The view from our door is absolutely amazing, looking out over the desert as the sun goes down. We saw a jackal come up to us as we had our beer. I was very impressed with the 1000s of stars we could see tonight – we had a clear night and you could clearly see The Southern Cross and Alpha Centauri stars you can’t see from the northern hemisphere; the Milky Way was vivid too, and I haven’t seen the sky like that since I was a child.