On my final journey with Lily Marion Newton’s book ‘Faraway Sandy Trails’ as my trusty companion, I followed her tracks to the diamond coast.
Before Lily and her husband, Charles, had even reached Lüderitz, Lily had already encountered her first challenge. She writes how they reached Lüderitz after short sojourns at the small villages in the south. ‘In some the hotels were obviously not meant for the purpose for which most travellers need them, except in the way of liquid refreshment, and in that respect they were first class! The bars are in such case the only reason for the existence of the hotels. My major difficulty was always the same: Baths!’
In a village hotel she read the notice on the back of the bedroom door that instructed the occupants to notify the proprietress when a bath was required. When she followed the instructions, she found that the lady was anything but cordial. ‘”A bath!” said she, almost astounded as if I had asked her to arrange a fall of snow in the Namib.’ Lily did receive some lukewarm water half an hour later, which she was very grateful for. At another hotel, she was delighted to find that the bathroom out in the yard had a wood-burning geyser. She happily submerged in the bath until she looked up and saw that dozens of brown cockroaches were crawling slowly down the walls. She leapt out of the bath and fled before washing the soapy lather off her body.
As they neared the desert, baths were even harder to come by. ‘Baths at Lüderitz had to be ordered specially – at half-a-crown each – for there is no water to be had except that which is brought in by rail and the small quantity obtained by distillation.’ Today, although water is now channelled from the Koichab depression, it remains a valued resource not to be squandered in the desert land.
What Lily and Charles did encounter in the town built on rock ‘and bounded on three sides by the barren, diamond-bearing Namib Desert, the “Sperrgebiet”, forbidden territory’ was WIND, and Lily writes how the only thing they caught on a fishing trip was a cold.
The second challenge she had to contend with was seasickness on a small boat that took them past Diaz Cross to Halifax Island to view the colony of African penguins. Unlike on the boat trips today, they were allowed to walk among the penguins and climbed down the ladder to a rowing boat that took them to shore. She quickly came to the conclusion that like the seals they had encountered to the north, the penguins were ‘tough guys’ not much concerned with warmth or comfort. ‘The cold Atlantic was pounding on the barren coast and with the rising tide, the foam-charged waters poured over the low rocky ridges along the western edge; higher ground obscured our view of the other parts of the island but nowhere about us could we see a grain of sand or soil, or a tiny blade of grass; just rock, thousands of penguins and a few seabirds higher up the rising terrain.’
One of the couple’s most exciting trips was when they received special permission to visit the privately-owned diamond mine at Saddle Hill, north of Lüderitz. A vehicle picked them up and transported them to the mine along a narrow stretch of beach that could only be traversed at low tide. When the truck reached rocky sections, the only way to negotiate them was to fill up the deep crevices with sand, which was washed out with every high tide. After dinner in the mess and a comfortable night in the visitors’ quarters they were shown around the mine.
‘The diamonds lay in a bed of gravel some twenty feet under the sand, and close to the beach as though aeons ago the sea had washed them up from depths unknown’. Later in the day they were taken to see the ‘little Bogenfels’ rock arch up the coast. When they returned, they were quickly waved goodbye as the drivers of the trucks had girlfriends in Lüderitz and wanted ‘to take them to the cinema that evening for the once-a-week show’. The drivers decided to risk the beach section at Hottentots Bay although the tide was still going out and the sea was still high enough for the waves to break on the side of the truck. Lily writes that a year or two after their visit the old dangerous and adventurous route was changed to traverse the safer route over the dunes. And to her credit – and intrepid spirit – adds: ‘No doubt the drivers and employees welcomed this change but we were very glad that we had made the journey over the old slightly dangerous and very inconvenient route; we had felt excited and adventurous throughout the whole trip’.
They partook in another diamond excursion when they were invited to accompany the magistrate to Oranjemund, Consolidated Diamond Mines’ small mining town. She and Charles left their cameras at home to avoid their films having to be subjected to the X-ray machine. Although they wanted to travel via the ‘big Bogenfels,’ the road was impassable at the time due to sand. When they arrived in Oranjemund they were housed in the guest cottage and taken to the clubhouse in the evening. In the morning they were taken on a sightseeing tour and were impressed with the modern and clean little town with its gardens, hedges and trees. They had another chance to witness the diamond mining procedure and watched the diamond-rich gravel tumble over conveyer belts to washing machines and then on to the tables to be sorted.
A puncture later they were back in Lüderitz where they once again battled the gusting wind. More than half a century later, Lily would be interested to know that Oranjemund had opened its doors to the public in 2017 and that I’d travelled there on the good tar road that now leads southwards from Rosh Pinah through the once-forbidden area, now the Tsau //Khaeb National Park. I had also joined a trip into the old Sperrgebiet to visit the remains of the old diamond-mining town of Pomona and we had stopped to gawk appreciatively at the Bogenfels arch which towers over the sea.
As Charles had taken sick and needed to fly to Swakopmund, their last stop was the aerodrome at Kolmanskop on the outskirts of the town. Now an intriguing tourist attraction, Kolmanskop was then a restricted area. She writes: ‘We were much amused by the old tale of how the diamonds really came there: blown into this sheltered corner by the winds tearing across from the Bogenfels coast! There are few at either place now, for the winds robbed Bogenfels and Man robbed Kolman’s Kop!’
They flew over Spencer Bay, looking down on the wreck of the Otavi, and Saddle Hill, and as they neared Conception Bay entered the omnipresent coastal fog.
As they flew through the blue sky above the thick cloud, Lily expressed her concerns that the fear and the mystery of the coastline would vanish with the bones of its lost explorers of long ago, as would the romance of it. The tales of those intrepid wanderers of the desert, seeking fortunes or treasure and finding more often than not only death in a world of sand, and those more fortunate, who trekked into the wastes with a couple of donkeys and found their fortune twenty feet under a sandy beach.
The chapter ends when Lily, no longer hindered by travel sickness, flies back to Windhoek into the comforting arms of the Auas and Eros mountains. It was the end of our journey together, one which I had enjoyed immensely, reading about what it was like to travel through Namibia back then before tar roads and tourism, and reading about her trips across the country, which she, like myself, so completely revelled in. I flipped to the end of the book to her closing paragraph:
‘And now, far away from the scenes of all our adventuring in well-known and little-known paths, we look back, always nostalgically, and often it is the small incidents which appear first on the mental screen of our memories; those tiny flashes which bring a smile and then recall the other longer wanderings out into a wonderful, beautiful wild land which is so very fast becoming overwhelmed in the great march of civilisation.’
I would be very happy to tell Lily that six decades later the wild beauty of Namibia still exists regardless of progress, and it is still its drawcard and magic.