Sunday, February 16, 2014

Desert Hideaway - Chasing fugitives in the Namib



A version of this story first appeared in the Sunday Times Travel Weekly


I searched for Henno Martin’s hiding place.  I drove deep into the Naukluft region of the Namib Desert, the wilderness he called the gramadoelas.  A landscape of tightly folded valleys, bent and twisted ravines and stingy scrub.  A place where animals cling to a tenuous, dry, desert life.  An empty place which, in the 1940s, had no roads and no maps and no reason for anyone to visit unless they were looking for two German fugitives.

Martin and his friend, Hermann Korn and their dog, Otto, hid here during the Second World War.  The two young geologists decided that it would be better to spend the war hiding in the desert than be interned as the enemy.  Nobody knew when the war would end, and anyway, it was a war the two friends wanted nothing to do with.

They hunted the sparse game in the area with a Luger hand-gun, their hunting rifles having been confiscated at the beginning of the war.  They learned, after many failures, to get close enough to the Gemsbok and Zebra that were their primary quarry to kill them.  In the quickly evaporating pools in the deep shade of a gorge, they found a way to harvest fish.  They tried, and failed, to plant a vegetable garden.  With a combination of resilience and resourcefulness they survived for two years in an environment where failure could mean death. 

In his book "The Sheltering Desert", Martin described this corner of Namibia as somewhere "the devil had created in an idle hour...an impressive and intimidating" place.

Somewhere between the Kuiseb and Gaub passes I slowed the car expecting to pick up some sign,  of where they built their shelter.   Over the brow of a low pass, built years after Martin’s adventure, I came upon a cairn.  Did this mark the spot?  I parked and looked down the slope.  There was a path, which I hoped would lead the way to the shelter.  The barely discernable scraping in the gravel braided several times and then petered out into the stony desert.

I looked back at the car high above me on the road.  Below, the small gully dropped into a ravine which led into another, forming a rocky and confusing labyrinth.

I followed the gully and then scrambled to the ravine to where the deep shadows of afternoon tempted me out of the heat.   To continue would be to lose sight of the car:  another turn this way and one that way and would I remember the way back?  I took a few more steps, hopping onto rocks and sliding on stones and halted just before the car disappeared from view.  Down the ravine I could see no order to the brokenness of the terrain, no obvious reference points:  a maze in which to get lost, a place in which to die.  Martin, Hermann and Otto, who nearly died after being gored by a gemsbok, survived somewhere near here until they had to move, fearing that their hideout had been discovered.  I wondered who might have discovered it in this impenetrable place.  I turned around and trudged back up the slope.

Disappointed, I drove on, slowly, scouring the rocky brown terrain for a sign of the hiding place, hoping that I would notice a clue.  Like the authorities of the time, I never found the shelter of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn.  They chose their hiding place well.

I continued on towards the Gaub Pass hoping that perhaps the shelter was further along than I had anticipated.  As the horizon drew nearer to the sun the shadows lengthened and the rocks softened from their bleached harshness to a deepening red.  It was time to consider a camp site for the night.  I kept a look out for a sign pointing to accommodation and occasionally I stopped the car to watch the bat eared foxes foraging next to the gravel road.  There were still a couple of hours of light when I spotted a sign:  The Namib Valley Lodge and Camp Site.  There was a signal so I dialled the number on the board and the man, sounding a little surprised, told me there were sites available.  “Turn left from where you are and drive seven kilometres.  Then turn right and pass through the gate when you see the notice board and keep going until you get there.”  He didn’t tell me that there was another seven kilometres of jeep track to drive before we would reach our destination.  It was slow going but quite beautiful as we climbed slowly up into the mountains.  We startled a herd of zebra that then cantered off ahead of us before cutting across the track and disappearing into a kloof below.

When we arrived we realised that we had found our own kind of hide-out in the Namib Desert.  There was a solitary caretaker in residence.  I asked him for a camp-site and he pointed in the direction of three small, thatched rondavels.  Later we discover that, rustic on the outside, the rondavels contained hot showers heated by their own individual solar panels, immaculate private ablutions for each site.  Meanwhile, I gave up on conversation with the caretaker.  Though quietly friendly, he was not a man for small talk.  Perhaps spending so much time alone, surrounded by the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Namib mountain-scape is what reduces his conversational needs to the essentials.

The roadside sign pointing the way here had said “Namibia’s Valley of a Thousand Hills”.    Below us, beyond a lone quiver tree, stretches a scene that looks like the hide of a giant elephant.  A valley of a thousand ravines hemmed by ranges of saw-toothed mountains.

As the fire burned the hard thorn-wood, the cracked valleys below glowed like red embers in the dying of another day.  Martin and Korn must have gazed at similar scenes during their time in the desert as they spent long hours discussing their theories of life and the natural world.  Whereas I have plenty of supplies in a cooler full of ice and cold beer, the two fugitives had few luxuries.  Hardly knowing where their next meal would come from the men would often walk great distances in extreme heat through the canyons and onto the plains, seeking out new waterholes where there might be game to shoot.

Though I set out to find the shelter, and although I had felt disappointed by my failure to locate it, I feel a creeping satisfaction as the mystery lingers.  A confirmation that the Namib is one of the few wilderness areas left in the world, a place that can still keep its secrets.  Even though many people have visited the old shelter, it remains hidden to those without detailed directions. 

The night claims the view with a blackness unspoiled by artificial light and so I crawl into my tent.  As I draw myself down into my sleeping bag I resolve to return one day, next time with the map co-ordinates, to the place where the two courageous young adventurers successfully sought refuge in this empty place from the collective madness that was World War Two.