Roger and Nadine wanted to drive South after Tsauchab River Camp. I had no plans and thought about driving East over Maltehohe and spending a few days in the Kalahari. But I also really enjoyed camping with Roger and Nadine. They were fun and relaxed and we had a great time talking together. Roger wanted to drive through the D707, a road renowned as the most scenic in Namibia. It crosses through the Namib Rand, which is a spectacular green valley with salmon pink dunes and mountains on either side.
Checking out at Tsauchab, we asked Vicki for recommendations. She said there was a camp on the D707 which was one of the most beautiful in Namibia, a place even more special than her own campsite. It was about 120km on dirt and sand roads from where we were and driving that way would commit me to a Southern route back to Windhoek. I looked at the map. Driving East would be more gravel roads, but a trip South on the D707 would terminate in Aus and I could pick up a tar road there and blitz North to Windhoek.
The D707 did not disappoint. It was a spectacular combination of tan and blue grasses, pink sand dunes, green trees, and red mountains.
I decided earlier in the day to shoot exclusively with the Pentax-M 100mm 2.8 I had brought with me and almost never used on the trip. The lens is 40 years old, but looks new and it is normally quite a sharp lens for portraits. 100mm might seem too long for landscapes, but the distances in Namibia are so great and the air is so clean that one must use longer lenses in landscapes to fill the frame with a subject. Using wide angle lenses what you get are vast amounts of sky, flat landscape details, and no subject.
In hindsight, I think I should have used a more modern lens. I am disappointed with the color contrast of the Pentax. It doesn't pop as much as the newer Olympus and Panasonic lenses I have been using on this trip with the OM-D. Here are some examples of photos taken with those lenses for comparison.
I had the same polarizing filter on all the lenses that day, so the variation in color vibrance and pop is just the optical coatings. The Pentax glass is great, but it suffers older coating formulas and I will probably sell it when I get back.
The Kooimanis Campsite was at the end of a 20km pink sand road, nestled in an alcove of red rock hills, with spectacular scenery.
This was absolutely the best looking campsite I had seen in Namibia. But boy was it hot. It was 105F when we arrived at 3pm. So hot that we couldn't sit in the campsite because the sun was too high for shade. So we went to the adjacent Fest in Fells Lodge, which had a beautiful restaurant. It was completely unexpected that a restaurant in American adobe style would sit at the end of a 20km pink sand road in the middle of a red rock mountain range in Namibia. Unfortunately, the restaurant did not cater specifically to camping guests and only served lodge guests for major meals. Dinner at the lodge was out, but we managed to persuade the staff to serve us some beers and cake, and we relaxed inside, away from the hot sun, for a couple of hours.
We had a great meal together, with a few extra beers and a rose wine cooled down in my fridge. After dinner, we lit a camp fire and told stories about what we were reading on the trip. An unlucky locust came to visit near the end of the evening. Locusts are huge (6 inches long) grasshoppers and I guess he was attracted by the light of the fire because he jumped right into it and killed himself.
Guess we could have had him for desert but didn't have any chocolate nearby...
That evening it was still really hot. Normally, the temperature drops about 20 degrees after the sun sets and a wind comes about 9-10pm and by 12am it is 40 degrees cooler than the daytime high temperature. But this evening it didn't get very cool and the wind that came was an intermitant fierce wind. It would blow hard and shake the tent for 10 minutes, subside for 30 minutes, and return.
Bad for sleeping. I slept 30 minutes, was awoken by the wind, then repeated the cycle, for maybe a total of 4 hours of lousy sleep which made me super tired and grumpy the next morning. Just in time for a marathon 650km drive over 8 hours from Kooismanis to Kalkrand.
The drive had zero nice scenery. It was all ugly brown hills, empty canyons, and barren landscape from Aus to Keetmanshoop to Marienthal on the tar road. I consumed N$700 in diesel, 3 cans of Red Bull, 3 energy candy bars, a box of cookies, and 3 litres of water.
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