Travels in the Forbidden Zone
The signs are clear and unequivocal. Go beyond this point and you could end up having to pay a fine of one million Namibian dollars or spending two years in prison. Standing out in the middle of a desert landscape, where the only defining features are the track we’ve driven in on and the barbed-wire fence we’re now standing in front of, it’s difficult to see exactly what these signs are protecting. But although it’s hidden, there’s treasure under the sand, patiently waiting to sparkle. This is Diamond Zone 1, or Sperrgebiet, a German word that translates as ‘Forbidden Zone’, a 26,000-square-kilometre diamond-mining area that has been off limits since the first ‘unbreakables’ were picked up here by a railworker in 1908.
Since that time, diamond mining has taken place on about ten per cent of the area, and the rest has been roped off to stop any theft. For more than 100 years, only a few security staff and scientists have been allowed into the area, and tourists have been kept to one track that only gives them access to a small section of the landscape. But, that’s all about to change.
Pristine wilderness
In 2008, the Sperrgebiet was declared a national park by the Namibian government, and soon travellers will be able to take tours all over this 320-kilometre stretch of Namibia’s western coastal region, which extends from the Orange River that forms the border with South Africa to Lüderitz, a beer-swilling, fishing-nets-drying harbour town about a fifth of the way up.
What they’ll find is a pristine wilderness that has been unsullied by grazing animals or four-wheel-drives and is full of plants and animals not found anywhere else on the planet. Its terrain covers 17 offshore ‘islands’ – whose names include Possession and Plum Pudding – home to African penguins and Cape fur seals; an internationally renowned Ramsar site that hosts around 60 bird species; and the mainland, which forms part of the alluringly named Succulent Karoo, the world’s most biodiverse desert ecosystem, containing more than a quarter of Namibia’s 4,000-plus plant species on less than three per cent of the country’s total surface area.
Many of these plants are succulents, water-retaining plants adapted to making the most of the occasional winter rains, and, because of the shelter and sustenance they provide, whole food chains have anchored themselves in their vicinity, beginning with small insects, and branching off through lizards and voles to gemsbok and springbok, birds of prey such as Ludwig’s bustard, and a population of 90 or so brown hyenas, which feast on the endless supply of seal pups found along the coast. Together, the whole place is a wonderful stage on which the area’s wildlife shows off evolution’s ability to both fill environmental niches and adapt organisms to extraordinarily harsh conditions.
It’s quite a performance, but it’s an understated one (there are no elephants, hippos or leopards here). And like some of the best experiences, you need a guide to explain what you’re – often – not seeing, as you stare out on what appears to be miles and miles of absolutely nothing.
Dry land
For my visit to the Forbidden Zone, I’m accompanied by Wittes Beukes, a white Namibian tour guide and hunter who talks about meat with the same reverence that many Europeans reserve for vintage wines, and is able to identify a game meat’s provenance via variations in its herbal flavours, which inform him where that particular beast was grazing in the months before it was shot.
It isn’t a hot day, but the desert air still smells dry and slightly spiced. Guides are mandatory in the park, and I’m glad that Beukes is with me. This is an unforgiving environment: temperatures are mild compared with many deserts but they can fluctuate wildly, and this is the windiest area in the whole of southern Africa, with wind speeds averaging 40km/h. ‘And that’s average,’ the director of the Namibian Nature Foundation, Chris Brown, reminds me later, when I meet him in the capital. ‘It can be so windy it will sandblast the paint off your vehicle overnight. By the time you wake up in the morning, it will be stripped down to bare metal.’
To survive in such inhospitable conditions, the area’s plants and animals have developed strange coping mechanisms. When we stop to look at an old water-pumping station, left over from the early diamond days, Beukes points out a bushman’s candle – so called because of the thick waxy bark it has developed to stop its inner fleshy parts being shredded in a sandstorm – which was traditionally used as a form of lighting; and the head-standing beetle, whose acrobatic skills are used to tip the dew it has collected on its back down into its mouth.
None of these adaptations happened overnight. The story for much of the wildlife begins more than ten million years ago, when the Antarctic split off from the tip of South America, releasing a cold current that stopped hot, moist, rain-producing air rising up over the Karoo and bringing the desert conditions that exist there today.
That same current was responsible for the presence of the diamonds for which the area became famous. Formed between three million and 990 million years ago in so-called kimberlite pipes in South Africa, they were washed down the Orange River and then swept up along the Atlantic coast before being spat out onto Namibia’s beaches and blown inland. In some places, so many of them congregated together that early prospectors told tales of whole valleys of diamonds glowing in the moonlight, and having to stuff diamonds into their mouths because their hands were too full to carry any more.
Ghost towns
Today, the diamond-rush settlements that grew to service the prospectors are nothing more than ghost towns, with untended graves, sand-choked entrances and half-peeled-open roofs. Namdeb – a partnership between the Namibian government and the De Beers company – is still mining at a number of spots along the coast and offshore, but in about 20 years they’ll probably be exhausted, and for this reason, the government’s attention is turning to tourism.
Although the industry only provides around four per cent of Namibia’s GDP, compared with the nine per cent provided by diamond mining, the park’s founders are aware it provides opportunities to conserve the landscape while bringing a much-needed income to the nearby communities. The park has already been divided into zones that rate the importance of the biodiversity in a particular area and hence the type of activity that could take place there. Later this year, park officials are hoping to start handing out concessions to local Namibians to take tourists into the park.
‘We’re planning more than a dozen concessions,’ says park ranger Trygve Cooper, a wind-burned man with a big-wheeled truck and a crushing handshake who meets me in a sailor-themed bar to take me through the plans for the park. These operations will range from hiking treks, kayaking trips and camel safaris to four-wheel-drive safaris and even – strictly regulated – joyflights in light planes.
Having worked on plans for the park for more than a decade, Cooper is committed to making sure visitors will still have a wilderness experience, and the concessions have been set up so they don’t overlap. He thinks the park will cause quite a stir, internationally. ‘There’s a lot of interest for the tourist,’ he says, pointing out features on his map such as Roter Kamm, the world’s fourth-largest meteorite impact crater, and Bogenfels Arch – a towering whalebone of stone that is about ten times higher than it looks in any picture – as well as rock art and other archaeological sites and some impressive fossil beds.
The plan is to keep development within the park to a minimum and use the infrastructure present in existing settlements such as Lüderitz, Rosh Pinah and Aus as starting points for the tours. It’s a development welcomed by Aus, a small settlement of around 300 people that is situated on the edge of the park. It’s a poor place, still, like many towns in Namibia, economically segregated along apartheid lines, with pretty brick-built houses on one side of the road, where the white Namibians and the wealthier black Namibians live, and huts where the poorest citizens scrape by on the other.
Tourist centre
Until recently, the only reason most travellers would stop here was to fill up on petrol, but a few years ago, a trust set up by the forward-looking owner of Klein Aus Vista, a nearby lodge, built a tourist centre that has become a way for wealthy visitors to meet the locals. Inside is a display that tells the history of the local indigenous people, a small café, a nursery that sells some of the region’s rare plants, and a shop selling souvenirs made by local women.
A year ago, the ownership of the centre was turned over to the local community, and any profits made are ploughed into developing the area, paying for vocational training scholarships for youngsters, equipment for local schools and environmental education for the whole village.
One of the trustees, Elias Alfeus, was sent to learn to become a tour guide by the trust, and now takes visitors from Klein Aus Vista to see the ‘wild’ horses, a mysterious group of horses that have somehow managed to survive in the near-desert conditions. Not only has the trust helped him to make a living – ‘Not as much as I would like, but it’s more than many people in the area who are unemployed’ – but it has also taught him about the landscape around his home. ‘Before, if I saw a flower, I would think it was just a flower – I was never tempted to know what its name was, or how it works, but after my training that changed.’ The trust’s vice chairman, part-time farmer Johannes Vlees, agrees. ‘Before, our parents would teach us we must look after the landscape, but we didn’t really know why,’ he says. ‘Now we understand why.’
The centre’s manager, local woman Claudia Baisitse, is planning further developments, including tours into the community so that visitors can experience the traditional Nama foods. ‘I just hope that the community embraces the opportunities,’ she says. ‘Right now, they need to pull their socks up very high.’
Future plans
Currently, their sights are on the visitors who will be spilling into Namibia after the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, but the Namibian government is looking even further ahead, and there are plans afoot to create the Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park, which will stretch from Angola to South Africa. It would be ‘the biggest park in Africa – by a long way – and the sixth-biggest terrestrial park in the world’, says Chris Brown. ‘It would be fantastic. Visitors would have three countries to explore, including three Ramsar sites, Fish River Canyon – the world’s second-biggest canyon – the Sperrgebiet diamond-mining area, the biodiversity areas, the sand sea of Namib dunes. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.’
If fences can be brought down – as is already starting to happen in Namibia – the game and other wildlife would also start to benefit from being able to move freely in response to seasonal changes in the climate. And co-management would mean that resources could be pooled, so more could be achieved in areas such as wildlife monitoring, anti-poaching and marketing.
‘The idea isn’t to compete for a slice of what’s already there,’ says Brown. ‘The idea is to create a bigger cake, something that’s even more attractive to visitors so more people come and then stay for longer.’ And if it all goes according to plan, ‘you can make more money from that land per hectare than you could out of anything else’, reducing the likelihood that it will be converted into farmland, ‘by far the biggest reason for loss of biodiversity worldwide, by orders of magnitude. It’s a win, win, win, win, win, win situation.’
Namibia: co-ordinates
When to go
Summers in southern Namibia can be extremely hot, so it’s best to avoid this time of year. Better to go in the winter (May–September), although the desert can be very cold, and August can get quite windy.
Getting there
Air Namibia (www.air-namibia.co.uk, 08707 740 965) offers a direct service between Frankfurt and the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with prices starting at £606 return.
Further information
Accommodation near the national park includes Klein Aus Vista Desert Horse Inn (www.gondwana-collection.com) and the Nest Hotel in Lüderitz (www.nesthotel.com). Coastways Tours (www.coastways.com.na) offers one-day tours of the park’s diamond-mining ghost towns. For further information, visit the website of the Namibia Tourism Board at www.namibiatourism.com.na.
Since that time, diamond mining has taken place on about ten per cent of the area, and the rest has been roped off to stop any theft. For more than 100 years, only a few security staff and scientists have been allowed into the area, and tourists have been kept to one track that only gives them access to a small section of the landscape. But, that’s all about to change.
Pristine wilderness
In 2008, the Sperrgebiet was declared a national park by the Namibian government, and soon travellers will be able to take tours all over this 320-kilometre stretch of Namibia’s western coastal region, which extends from the Orange River that forms the border with South Africa to Lüderitz, a beer-swilling, fishing-nets-drying harbour town about a fifth of the way up.
What they’ll find is a pristine wilderness that has been unsullied by grazing animals or four-wheel-drives and is full of plants and animals not found anywhere else on the planet. Its terrain covers 17 offshore ‘islands’ – whose names include Possession and Plum Pudding – home to African penguins and Cape fur seals; an internationally renowned Ramsar site that hosts around 60 bird species; and the mainland, which forms part of the alluringly named Succulent Karoo, the world’s most biodiverse desert ecosystem, containing more than a quarter of Namibia’s 4,000-plus plant species on less than three per cent of the country’s total surface area.
Many of these plants are succulents, water-retaining plants adapted to making the most of the occasional winter rains, and, because of the shelter and sustenance they provide, whole food chains have anchored themselves in their vicinity, beginning with small insects, and branching off through lizards and voles to gemsbok and springbok, birds of prey such as Ludwig’s bustard, and a population of 90 or so brown hyenas, which feast on the endless supply of seal pups found along the coast. Together, the whole place is a wonderful stage on which the area’s wildlife shows off evolution’s ability to both fill environmental niches and adapt organisms to extraordinarily harsh conditions.
It’s quite a performance, but it’s an understated one (there are no elephants, hippos or leopards here). And like some of the best experiences, you need a guide to explain what you’re – often – not seeing, as you stare out on what appears to be miles and miles of absolutely nothing.
Dry land
For my visit to the Forbidden Zone, I’m accompanied by Wittes Beukes, a white Namibian tour guide and hunter who talks about meat with the same reverence that many Europeans reserve for vintage wines, and is able to identify a game meat’s provenance via variations in its herbal flavours, which inform him where that particular beast was grazing in the months before it was shot.
It isn’t a hot day, but the desert air still smells dry and slightly spiced. Guides are mandatory in the park, and I’m glad that Beukes is with me. This is an unforgiving environment: temperatures are mild compared with many deserts but they can fluctuate wildly, and this is the windiest area in the whole of southern Africa, with wind speeds averaging 40km/h. ‘And that’s average,’ the director of the Namibian Nature Foundation, Chris Brown, reminds me later, when I meet him in the capital. ‘It can be so windy it will sandblast the paint off your vehicle overnight. By the time you wake up in the morning, it will be stripped down to bare metal.’
To survive in such inhospitable conditions, the area’s plants and animals have developed strange coping mechanisms. When we stop to look at an old water-pumping station, left over from the early diamond days, Beukes points out a bushman’s candle – so called because of the thick waxy bark it has developed to stop its inner fleshy parts being shredded in a sandstorm – which was traditionally used as a form of lighting; and the head-standing beetle, whose acrobatic skills are used to tip the dew it has collected on its back down into its mouth.
None of these adaptations happened overnight. The story for much of the wildlife begins more than ten million years ago, when the Antarctic split off from the tip of South America, releasing a cold current that stopped hot, moist, rain-producing air rising up over the Karoo and bringing the desert conditions that exist there today.
That same current was responsible for the presence of the diamonds for which the area became famous. Formed between three million and 990 million years ago in so-called kimberlite pipes in South Africa, they were washed down the Orange River and then swept up along the Atlantic coast before being spat out onto Namibia’s beaches and blown inland. In some places, so many of them congregated together that early prospectors told tales of whole valleys of diamonds glowing in the moonlight, and having to stuff diamonds into their mouths because their hands were too full to carry any more.
Ghost towns
Today, the diamond-rush settlements that grew to service the prospectors are nothing more than ghost towns, with untended graves, sand-choked entrances and half-peeled-open roofs. Namdeb – a partnership between the Namibian government and the De Beers company – is still mining at a number of spots along the coast and offshore, but in about 20 years they’ll probably be exhausted, and for this reason, the government’s attention is turning to tourism.
Although the industry only provides around four per cent of Namibia’s GDP, compared with the nine per cent provided by diamond mining, the park’s founders are aware it provides opportunities to conserve the landscape while bringing a much-needed income to the nearby communities. The park has already been divided into zones that rate the importance of the biodiversity in a particular area and hence the type of activity that could take place there. Later this year, park officials are hoping to start handing out concessions to local Namibians to take tourists into the park.
‘We’re planning more than a dozen concessions,’ says park ranger Trygve Cooper, a wind-burned man with a big-wheeled truck and a crushing handshake who meets me in a sailor-themed bar to take me through the plans for the park. These operations will range from hiking treks, kayaking trips and camel safaris to four-wheel-drive safaris and even – strictly regulated – joyflights in light planes.
Having worked on plans for the park for more than a decade, Cooper is committed to making sure visitors will still have a wilderness experience, and the concessions have been set up so they don’t overlap. He thinks the park will cause quite a stir, internationally. ‘There’s a lot of interest for the tourist,’ he says, pointing out features on his map such as Roter Kamm, the world’s fourth-largest meteorite impact crater, and Bogenfels Arch – a towering whalebone of stone that is about ten times higher than it looks in any picture – as well as rock art and other archaeological sites and some impressive fossil beds.
The plan is to keep development within the park to a minimum and use the infrastructure present in existing settlements such as Lüderitz, Rosh Pinah and Aus as starting points for the tours. It’s a development welcomed by Aus, a small settlement of around 300 people that is situated on the edge of the park. It’s a poor place, still, like many towns in Namibia, economically segregated along apartheid lines, with pretty brick-built houses on one side of the road, where the white Namibians and the wealthier black Namibians live, and huts where the poorest citizens scrape by on the other.
Tourist centre
Until recently, the only reason most travellers would stop here was to fill up on petrol, but a few years ago, a trust set up by the forward-looking owner of Klein Aus Vista, a nearby lodge, built a tourist centre that has become a way for wealthy visitors to meet the locals. Inside is a display that tells the history of the local indigenous people, a small café, a nursery that sells some of the region’s rare plants, and a shop selling souvenirs made by local women.
A year ago, the ownership of the centre was turned over to the local community, and any profits made are ploughed into developing the area, paying for vocational training scholarships for youngsters, equipment for local schools and environmental education for the whole village.
One of the trustees, Elias Alfeus, was sent to learn to become a tour guide by the trust, and now takes visitors from Klein Aus Vista to see the ‘wild’ horses, a mysterious group of horses that have somehow managed to survive in the near-desert conditions. Not only has the trust helped him to make a living – ‘Not as much as I would like, but it’s more than many people in the area who are unemployed’ – but it has also taught him about the landscape around his home. ‘Before, if I saw a flower, I would think it was just a flower – I was never tempted to know what its name was, or how it works, but after my training that changed.’ The trust’s vice chairman, part-time farmer Johannes Vlees, agrees. ‘Before, our parents would teach us we must look after the landscape, but we didn’t really know why,’ he says. ‘Now we understand why.’
The centre’s manager, local woman Claudia Baisitse, is planning further developments, including tours into the community so that visitors can experience the traditional Nama foods. ‘I just hope that the community embraces the opportunities,’ she says. ‘Right now, they need to pull their socks up very high.’
Future plans
Currently, their sights are on the visitors who will be spilling into Namibia after the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, but the Namibian government is looking even further ahead, and there are plans afoot to create the Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park, which will stretch from Angola to South Africa. It would be ‘the biggest park in Africa – by a long way – and the sixth-biggest terrestrial park in the world’, says Chris Brown. ‘It would be fantastic. Visitors would have three countries to explore, including three Ramsar sites, Fish River Canyon – the world’s second-biggest canyon – the Sperrgebiet diamond-mining area, the biodiversity areas, the sand sea of Namib dunes. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.’
If fences can be brought down – as is already starting to happen in Namibia – the game and other wildlife would also start to benefit from being able to move freely in response to seasonal changes in the climate. And co-management would mean that resources could be pooled, so more could be achieved in areas such as wildlife monitoring, anti-poaching and marketing.
‘The idea isn’t to compete for a slice of what’s already there,’ says Brown. ‘The idea is to create a bigger cake, something that’s even more attractive to visitors so more people come and then stay for longer.’ And if it all goes according to plan, ‘you can make more money from that land per hectare than you could out of anything else’, reducing the likelihood that it will be converted into farmland, ‘by far the biggest reason for loss of biodiversity worldwide, by orders of magnitude. It’s a win, win, win, win, win, win situation.’
Namibia: co-ordinates
When to go
Summers in southern Namibia can be extremely hot, so it’s best to avoid this time of year. Better to go in the winter (May–September), although the desert can be very cold, and August can get quite windy.
Getting there
Air Namibia (www.air-namibia.co.uk, 08707 740 965) offers a direct service between Frankfurt and the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with prices starting at £606 return.
Further information
Accommodation near the national park includes Klein Aus Vista Desert Horse Inn (www.gondwana-collection.com) and the Nest Hotel in Lüderitz (www.nesthotel.com). Coastways Tours (www.coastways.com.na) offers one-day tours of the park’s diamond-mining ghost towns. For further information, visit the website of the Namibia Tourism Board at www.namibiatourism.com.na.
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