The Circle of Life, an expensive ten-day soft expedition through the Etosha National Park, down the windswept and wreck-strewn Skeleton Coast, surfing through the biggest sand dunes in the world to the depths of the Namib Desert, could not be any further removed from the experience of juddering into Timbuktu in a peeling Land Rover charabanc. At our disposal, a dozen of the newest Land Rovers in Africa, complete with air conditioning and a stereo - luxuries in this part of the world.
Land Rover Adventures are the result of owners' desire to take their own or a similar vehicle to a corner of the world for which it was designed. Not, as is usually the case, just Sloane Square or Guildford High Street. Mud-plugging in Malaysia or glacier-hopping in Patagonia are the more physically challenging of the adventures. But this Namibian motor safari is more
Born Free than
Romancing the Stone."This is an adventure, not an expedition," reassures Land Rover's David Saunders. "At the end of the day there is either a nice hotel or a comfortable camp."
Not a desert in the Saharan sense, the Namib is littered with a carpet of brush and small trees, barbed to make life even harsher. This is not a place to breakdown. We had radios, satellite phones and enough water to keep us from turning into human prunes.
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| Land Rovers scale the massive dunes of the Namib desert |
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At least in this desert there was no Harmattan wind and no honking camels. But 2500 miles south east of Timbuktu the sand was still a challenge. Across the Namib we were making for the world's biggest walls of sand - the shifting 900ft dunes that act as natural ramparts to the coastal towns of Swakopmund and Walvis Bay.
A few miles north of here, at Sandwich Bay, is where the tropic of Capricorn bisects the Namibian coast. Due there in a few weeks is Kingsley Holgate, at the end of an expedition by Land Rover along the Tropic's African odyssey from Mozambique.
Ironically, Sandwich Bay is in the area inhabited by the Himba tribe who at one point were going to sue Land Rover over that advert. But, however insensitive the ad and however ill-advised the plan to drop the one engine fixable by any African bush mechanic, it will take more than a few errors of judgement to eject Land Rover from Africa.
"Something like two thirds of all Land Rovers imported into Africa are still going. They don't have a life, they have a half-life," said Holgate. "Not even the Model T Ford opened America like the Land Rover opened Africa."
Related Feature
Jeremy's Namibia diaries
