Having fallen in love with cycling as a teenager while living in Namibia for a stint in the 90s, Capetonian Stan Engelbrecht has been dreaming about spending more and more time riding through the desolate desert terrain and finding creative ways to make it happen. Join Engelbrecht and a cast of characters for a bike overlanding trip through the austere Namibian landscape…
When you think of Namibia, it probably conjures up images of huge sand dunes meeting the icy Atlantic Ocean. While Namibia is certainly a lot more than that, it is indeed a harsh place. Water is scarce, the sun wants to kill you, and its little towns are widely scattered. In fact, it is one of the most sparsely populated places on earth. So it can be a dangerous place to traverse, even by vehicle. Not exactly the ideal environment for bicycles – or so most people probably assume without giving it much more thought. But if you ask me, I think it’s ripe for adventure if you’re looking for a real experience.
We’ve overlanded to some remote corners of Namibia over the last years in our Suzuki Jimny, and I’ve done some solo bike touring here. It’s a hard place to travel, but incredibly rewarding in its own way. It’s beautiful, and just massive. You can easily move through a landscape for days without seeing another human being.
My solo tour was in 2014, just after I got my Mercer Buitestander from South African builder David Mercer. I was excited for an adventure. I naively just came up with a plan: I was going to cycle from my home in Cape Town to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. In December. In the middle of the summer. Through the desert. Sunstroke aside, it was one of the most incredible adventures of my life. Save for last year’s Loskop Local (Onguza’s meet-and-greet-and-eat-great-food weekend cycling event) in Omaruru, I’ve not done any more real riding there.
So this year for Loskop Local I packed my Buitestander (instead of my fixed-gear road bike like last year, ha ha) and we thought up a plan for a bit of an adventure after the Loskop. We spent days studying maps of the area and came up with a semi-supported four-day tour from Omaruru to Swakopmund on the Namibian coast.
We roped in Dan Craven of Onguza, one of his clients Marius, who was having a road bike built at the time, and our old up-for-anything friend Cam flew up from Cape Town. Donnet and I drove up in Jim, and we’d use him as our tiny “support vehicle”.
The route was a mix of Tracks4Africa maps, some roads we’d driven before, and a lot of riverbed riding. The part of the trip that we were most unsure about was the last 100-or-so kilometres. This was down the Kahn and Swakop river systems. Dry for many years sometimes, it can be notoriously sandy – not great for gravel bikes. In fact, if you ask anybody around that area they will tell you it’s totally unrideable. But we were more than willing to give it a go.
A day after the Loskop event, we met up at Onguza’s factory super early in the morning. It was great to see the latest builds on the jigs and hanging from the roof. With their new paint booth up and running, the bikes were looking world-class. The Onguza building team checked out our bikes while we made some last adjustments and packed some snacks. The goodbyes stretched out and we took a few photographs with the team, but the sun was starting to climb. It was time to hit the road out of Omaruru.
Day 1: Omaruru to Spitzkoppe
Namibia is pretty flat, but every now and then the landscape rises up into some of the most incredible dramatic geological displays, like the famous Spitzkoppe granite mountain peaks. This was our destination for the first night, as we left Omaruru with its own smaller Loskop outcrop receding behind us.
We headed due west through the Erongo mountain range and then turned south at the little village of Tsubis. By now it was seriously hot, probably reaching the mid-30’s. Temperatures here can soar well above 40º C (104º F), even during the cooler winter months like now. We’d agreed to meet at the local Radama spaza for a classic cold Coke, and thankfully the shop had power and the fridge was on. Not always the case with these small remote spazas. This is the first time we saw Donnet in Jim. She’d gotten waylaid searching out rock paintings some ways back. But we still had a long way to go, and by the time we turned west again we had 55 kilometres left of our 130-kilometre day, across completely unknown terrain.
It got tough. Soft sand, rocky roads, and a tangle of tracks going off in different directions made it hard to follow the map, which we found out was also inaccurate. But eventually we caught our first glimpse of the Spitzkoppe peak, towering 670 metres above the desert floor. With our beacon in sight we sometimes simply pedalled through the veld. It still took a few hours, and running out of water, before we would reach the base.
We got to our informal campsite under the overhanging rocks at the base of the majestic Spitzkoppe just as the sun was setting. Donnet had already been there for a little while and greeted us with cold beers. We were exhausted and hungry, and soon the fire was going – pan fried gnocchi with a classic Italian tomato sauce was on the menu.
Day 2: Spitzkoppe to a Kahn Riverbed wild camp
We couldn’t depart from Spitzkoppe without visiting the famous Rock Arch and riding the smooth rocks that seem so similar to the Moab pictures I’d seen growing up in American mountain biking magazines. But we couldn’t linger too long. We knew the next part of the route south was on a very bad heavily used dirt road, and we’d be following a totally unknown service road from a T-junction at the end of it. All went okay, save for a few sandy river sections. Hours later we met up with Donnet where she prepared some lunch for us out of the back of Jim. We then followed the train tracks west for a while. At this stage Marius’s loaner gravel Onguza developed some serious tyre problems. Now with all respect to Prince Ronald and his beautiful and seriously cool Ultradynamico range of tires, they are simply not built for the Namib desert. Conditions out here demand the strongest of stuff, and even then success is not guaranteed. Ron, consider this your call to action – we need an ultra-tough, large-volume “Namib” addition to your lineup – please!
Marius’s tire woes slowed us down somewhat, but with barely-sealed plugs on top of plugs, zip ties, and numerous tubes to the rescue, we managed to keep him rolling. We would soon cross the busy B2 highway, and drop into the Kahn Riverbed system to see just how rideable it actually was.
It was time for me to drive the Jimny, and Donnet jumped on her Specialized Merz for the ride down to the riverbed. I drove ahead to look for an ideal wild camping spot. The Kahn riverbed is beautiful, as it undulates through some spectacular rocky cliffs that the river’s been carving out for millennia. Near sunset, I found a breathtaking overhang on a tight curve of the river. I parked and started setting up camp. With the last of the sunlight clinging to the tops of the rocks around me, I heard the unmistakable crunch of bicycle tires rolling through soft river sand. Dan and Marius arrived separately, with huge smiles on their faces. A little while later we heard Cam and Donnet’s voices bouncing and echoing off the rocks as they chatted away approaching us through the narrow ravine. With gin & tonics in hand, we finished setting up camp, prepared hot water for our makeshift showers, and got our green bean and potato stew with polenta dinner going on the fire. Good eating! After dinner, we hunted for some scorpions and geckos with Dan’s UV torch – a stark reminder that closed shoes are a necessity out in the desert.
Day 3: Khan Riverbed wild camp to Goanikontes
I woke up to the sound of hooves crunching softly through the river sand right past our tents. I sat up and saw the moonlit silhouettes of a small herd of oryx as they floated upstream into the deep shadows of the narrowing ravine. I drifted back to sleep with a smile on my face.
At sunrise we rose to the echoes of chirping desert birds bouncing off the overhanging cliffs. Today was to be all riverbed riding, and if it was going to be a sandy mess it could take hours. Coffees, breakfast, and we were off – with Donnet piloting Jim again. We headed down the Khan section of the riverbed, and the going seemed fine. Because of the wide river footprint when you hit a sandy spot, there is always a firmer section closer to the riverbed edge. And with the continuous downward slope, we could go pretty fast. It was good! Next we met the larger Swakop riverbed, and now we were heading due west, straight towards the coast.
This area, like many others in Namibia, is rife with mines. Some were abandoned many years ago, but most are fully operational and strangely unseen, hidden in the sparse landscape. Massive explosions that rip open the earth are an unfortunate downside of this geologically rich environment. But there is something otherworldly about cycling past these huge man-made facets that pop out among the natural rock faces all around. Looking up, they make you feel small, and we were in awe of the incredible power that man and machine and explosives wield over the land. The uncomfortable truth is that mining is part of the modern world as we have shaped it, and there is no way around it. We rely on the natural resources ripped from the earth to make everything from the keyboard I’m typing this on, to the film in my old Nikon, and the bicycles we were traversing this landscape on. As we moved on the stillness was punctuated by a protracted BOOM that made the ground shake eerily.
Now it was my turn to have a tyre problem. Dan wanted a video of me launching off a little ledge in the riverbed carved out by the water when the river came down last. Of course I obliged, but within seconds I was rolling on my rim. We inspected the tyre and could see no clear issue. With the Jimny right there, we thankfully had a compressor handy (we have ours permanently mounted in our engine bay) and we tried to simply reinflate it, but no… something else was wrong. We tried a few things but nothing worked and upon further inspection it was clear that my ancient rim tape had popped loose from the rim and all the air was escaping into the rim through the spoke holes and out the valve hole. With the tyre off, and saving the precious liquid sealant, we quickly fashioned some new rim tape from duct tape we had in Jim. Solved.
Donnet drove on ahead and close to the old Kahn copper mine, up a smaller tributary, she set up a little lunch spot under a big shady tree. It was super hot by now and we were hungry and thirsty. Cold grapefruit Schöfferhofers and the closest we could get to gourmet sandwiches disappeared in minutes. After lunch, Donnet jumped on her bike and joined the guys and I took over the driving. After two days of all manner of repairs, and with all our tubes done for, Marius’s front tyre was basically in pieces at this stage. He took my front wheel to keep going. It was still about 20 kilometres of riverbed before it was time for the long slow climb out onto the escarpment south of the river, known as the Moon Landscape. This is truly one of the most breathtaking vistas in the area, dotted with huge and ancient Welwitschia plants. It was getting closer to sunset and we couldn’t take our eyes off the light and shadows over the thousands of hillocks all around us. As much as we wanted to stick around as long as possible, it was still a good 10 kilometres to Goanikontes campsite.
At this stage, we’d been completely self-sufficient and we were happy to experience some true Namibian hospitality. We’d booked a campsite with hot showers – and a curious bokkie who was quite determined to sleep with Cam in his tent – at Goanikontes. We also booked dinner at their pretty famous restaurant. Offerings included Namibian staples like Oryx steak, but classic burgers and ribs were preferred by the hungriest riders.
Day 4: Goanikontes to Swakopmund
On our last day of riding, Dan had promised to take us along a secret route, only known to locals – a fun and fast 45-kilometre track that wound along the edge of the Moon Landscape. This mostly-singletrack route with rolling dips and jumps had us whooping and laughing out loud. We’d left the Jimny with all our gear back in Goanikontes, and the hack attempt at repairing Marius’s front tyre early that morning was actually holding. All 5 of us were riding together and we were having a blast. Before long we could see Swakopmund and the sea in the distance. It was now just one long flowing downhill singletrack to get to our destination, but not without a serious headwind of course. The wind gradually picked up as we neared Swakop, so strong towards the end that we tumbled exhausted into the first bar we could find for a couple of rounds of Namibia’s coldest. Welcome to Swakopmund.