After a week in Swakopmund, we were itching to hit the road again! But not too eager to skip out on a big breakfast in town. At a quaint German breakfast café, we guzzled coffee and packed away pancakes while perusing the dog menu on the back of the human menu. This was a dog friendly restaurant. Also of note was a KTM biker who took interest in our ride north. Familiar with the area, he warned against pushing too far out into the wilderness beyond Messum Crater. “Yeah, we had a go at that route and it was hell,” the man said, as he elaborated on the bottomless sand and extreme temperatures. Apparently, these guys had gotten in a tangle with some massive sand dunes blocking the route. They had ultimately been forced to retreat with a heat casualty.

Armed with that knowledge, we increased our water reserve and double checked the battery on the SPOT beacon. All I knew is that we’d need to source a route around those dunes and be prepared to back off if necessary. I do love a track that offers a little story and a lot of “what ifs”.  We rolled north from Swakopmund on salt roads to find our trailhead to the desert.

But shortly before arriving at our turn off for Messum Crater, we were stopped in our tracks by a most unexpected obstacle. The furriest baby seals ever!

 

Over 200,000 seals packed into the largest seal colony on the planet. Adventure comes in all forms…even in fields of furry, starry eyed, sun lounging fuzzballs.

Ever seen a picnic shelter overrun by drunken seals. This is happening at Cape Cross.

Of note also was a marker on the ground, initially emplaced by a Portuguese explorer in 1484. Be advised there is an alarmingly large snake living underneath the relic.

So, what began as an early start to an off road adventure route, turned into a late start following 3 hours of gaping wide mouthed at seals. Finally, we pulled ourselves away from the seal colony and continued on track towards Messum Crater. The salt road turned to dirt as it meandered away from the coast and whisked us over endless fields of yellow lichen. As we pushed deeper into the Namib desert, an incredible and captivating landscape began to unfold before us.

And it was here, that we found our first welwitschia! One of the very few plants in the world capable of surviving in this hyper-arid environment. Extraterrestrial is the first word that comes to mind when I try to describe it.

Wiki  suggests that some of these plants are possibly over 2,000 years old! These edible flora are not endangered species yet, because the greatest bunches of Welwitschia plants are up in Angola and safely protected by post conflict land mines.

The long jarring road to Messum Crater dissuades all but the most dedicated motorists, but those who endure the trip are rewarded with an unworldly geological wonder all to themselves.

Its not a meteorite crater, but rather the result of a colossal volcanic eruption 132 million years ago. Descending into the volcano, we pushed towards some rock outcroppings that marked the center of the 18km wide crater. The graded tracks ended here.

We parked the bikes, scrambled up some rocks and took shelter from the sun in a shallow cave. Perhaps as nomads had done thousands of years ago, we peered out of the cave at the crater floor below and scanned the possible route before us. The silence surrounding us was intense, with the only sound being the occasional crunch of gravel as I shifted my weight from one boot to the other. Nothing moved out there, not even the wind. The late afternoon light played across the desert floor, lighting up the crater as if the whole of it were a living being of its own.

The view of the wilderness foreshadowed a real need for good navigating and dialed in riding. There appeared to be three gaps in the towering black rocky ridge that surrounded the crater. One gap was the way in which we had come, the other was the giant sand dune to the East, the third option was a wadi that the whole crater seemed to drain into. We hadn’t forgotten the stories over breakfast regarding the huge dune, so we bet our cards on the wadi. I marked the cave on the gps in case we needed to retreat to it for the night. We then saddled up, picked some faint tracks leading to the North East and rolled out to squeeze out a few hours riding before dark.

Leaving the corrugated road behind and blasting on along hard pack desert floor made for a dream ride across the rest of the crater. We were shocked to see a surprising amount of wildlife trekking across the the barren landscape. Zebra and springbok seemed to be living large on what appeared to be nothing except the rare welwitschia plant. The wadi naturally funneled us into it’s sandy bottom as we slipped off the crater floor and onto the ancient river bed. To pass through the crater wall, we had to fully commit to a river bed for a few miles until the terrain on each side opened up again. This is where, for perhaps the for first time on the trip, we really turned our knobby tread loose on some technical tracks. This is why we ride a GS with good suspension and aggressive tread. This is adventure riding and the GS was our ticket to paradise. It was full steam ahead, and where our riding skill faultered, the suspension or crash bars picked up the slack!

The sand stretches were never too deep, or too long and within an hour we were beyond the walls of the crater and able to break out of the river bed onto the surrounding arid plain. We linked together various 4×4 tracks and old offroad vehicle spoor that appeared to be going in a favorable direction on ridable terrain.

Clusters of Aardvark holes, big enough to swallow a 21” front wheel occasionally forced us off track, but the desert floor always offered enough of a bypass for a motorcycle. Although we saw thousands of Aardvark holes, we regrettably never saw any of these nocturnal “earth pigs”.

The evening air cooled off the once burning hot landscape as we drifted between mountain shadows and pink rays of the setting sun. Still not knowing if this route was going to work out, we did know we were deep into a spectacular experience.

Finally, scanning the distance from a hilltop in the fading light, I could just make out a white ribbon of graded road in the distance. This route was a go! We were only a few klicks from a maintained dirt road leading to the town of Uis. Exhausted and relieved, we shed our armor and set camp just in time to catch a sunset worthy of days adventure.