A good day’s mountain biking
We’re back in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. After the wonderful kayaking trip with the seals, a bus took us for several hours from the cool, pleasant coast to the hot interior. When we arrived in Windhoek ten days ago, it hadn’t been this hot. And this is the southern winter: I don’t even want to imagine the summers in this part of the world.
We’re going to use one of our last days before heading back to Spain to visit the Daan Viljoen nature reserve. It’s just a few kilometres from Windhoek, so the city’s residents use it a lot to spend the day relaxing and watching animals. It has good road access and a good restaurant with a lovely swimming pool for hot days, which are more common than we thought.
We leave Windhoek early in the morning, without panniers, which we’re grateful for. Riding out of the capital lets us see how Windhoek’s poorest people live. We pass through several ordinary residential neighbourhoods until we reach the real outskirts, where we start to see genuine poverty. Not the poverty we all picture when we think of Africa, but poverty all the same. Hundreds of tin shacks spread over the small hills around the capital, gleaming under the intense sun today. And as you can imagine, we don’t see a single white person in this area. In Windhoek you can see both white and black people with a good standard of living, but of course, you won’t see a white person in a shack. Here white people live somewhere between well and very well.
It doesn’t take us long to reach Daan Viljoen. The girl on the entrance barrier charges us a small fee (bikes go free) and stops to chat with us in Spanish. She speaks it pretty well. We carry on along the road and reach the centre of Daan Viljoen, home to the campsite, the restaurant and a lovely lodge. We treat ourselves to a slap-up breakfast and set off on a short hiking trail through the inner part of Daan Viljoen. Although we, of course, will do it by bike.
The trail turns out to be great fun on a bike. We enjoy the constant ups and downs and barely have to get off in the more technical sections. We’re all eyes, trying to spot an animal. We keep searching for the elusive giraffes, which have been hiding from us the whole trip.
After riding the upper part, we drop down into what looks like a dry riverbed. The riding gets tricky, but not carrying panniers lets us enjoy the terrain.
The heat, far too much of it, drives the animals to the coolest areas, which are well away from the tourists. However hard we look, we’re not lucky enough to see a single one. This is the closest we’ve come to a giraffe on this trip.
The ground is very abrasive and full of little thorns, which makes us extra careful. The rock grips better than tarmac, so we can ride up almost any slope. Only our legs (or lack of strength in them) force us off the bike. And the punctures… we dodge them by the skin of our teeth.
With the trail done, we go back to the restaurant where we started to relax a little before returning to Windhoek. All that’s left is to pack the bikes, put them on the plane and go home. The worst part of the trip, no doubt about it. Going back is hard: it’s been many days of adventure, uncertainty, sleeping in a tent, companionship and supporting each other when things went wrong. Now it’s back to reality. Time to go our separate ways, although lots of people who love us are waiting for us and we can’t wait to see them. There’s the story to write and more dreaming to do. The future will be tough, but who knows whether we’ll live a similar adventure again… or a better one? What’s clear is that I’ve had the best of company, without which none of this would have been possible. Thank you, Nines!!
