Sesriem

For most of its history this corner of the Namib was a place people passed through rather than lived in. The Tsauchab River, which flows only after rain on the escarpment, ends in the sand west of here, and its valley gave the San and later Nama herders a route between the plains and the dune sea. The name Sesriem is Afrikaans and means "six thongs" — the number of joined oxhide riems, or leather straps, said to have been needed to lower a bucket from the rim of the canyon to the water below, in the era of ox-wagon travel.

German colonial administration brought the first formal protection to the surrounding desert early in the twentieth century, when a large game reserve was proclaimed across the Namib. The boundaries were redrawn repeatedly and the present Namib-Naukluft National Park took shape under South African rule, growing by stages into one of the largest protected areas in Africa. The farmland around the park was settled by ranchers running sheep and cattle on very dry ground, and many of those farms later became guest farms and reserves.

Sesriem itself grew from the park gate and its campsite, planted with camelthorn trees, which for decades was the only accommodation near the dunes. Tourism to Sossusvlei expanded sharply after independence in 1990; lodges spread along the gravel roads outside the boundary, the road into the valley was tarred for most of its length, and the dune field was inscribed as the Namib Sand Sea World Heritage Site.

Sesriem has no settled community in the ordinary sense. Its culture is that of a park station and a tourism outpost: rangers and gate staff, camp attendants, lodge cooks, guides, drivers and pilots, most of them from Windhoek, Maltahöhe, Keetmanshoop or the Nama villages of the south, living on site in staff quarters for weeks at a time before going home. English is the official language of work, Afrikaans is widely spoken, and Khoekhoegowab and Oshiwambo are heard among staff.

The rhythm of the place is set by the gate. People are awake in the dark, and the queue of vehicles at the barrier before sunrise is the day's one crowd; by mid-morning the settlement empties, and it fills again at dusk when the park closes. Guides and drivers take their break in the heat of the afternoon, and conversation at the campsite runs on tyre pressures, sand driving and where the light will be best.

Conservation etiquette is the strongest local custom. Driving off the marked roads damages crusts and plants that take decades to recover, and it is treated seriously; so is leaving the pans untouched, taking rubbish out, and keeping noise down at night, when the sky is one of the darkest in the world and much of the camp is out looking at it. Guiding in the desert also carries a body of knowledge — tracks in the sand, the beetles and lizards that live off the fog — that is passed between guides rather than learned from books.

Almost nobody lives here permanently. The resident population runs to a few hundred at most, nearly all of them staff at the gate, the campsite, the airstrip and the lodges scattered along the gravel roads, housed in quarters attached to their workplaces and working shifts of several weeks. Families and homes are elsewhere, usually hundreds of kilometres away.

Everything has to be brought in. Water comes from boreholes, electricity from generators and solar arrays, and supplies arrive by truck from Windhoek or Mariental; a delivery delayed by a washed-out road is felt immediately in the shop. There is no bank, no hospital and no secondary school, and the nearest substantial towns — Maltahöhe and Solitaire to the north and east — are small in themselves. Serious medical cases are flown out from the airstrip.

Work is seasonal, busiest in the cool months and over the Namibian holidays, and almost entirely tied to tourism, which has made the desert around the dunes one of the higher-earning parts of the region. The wider Hardap countryside is sheep and cattle farming on very large, very dry properties, and drought is the constant background concern. Days start before dawn and end early: by nine in the evening the camp is quiet and the sky is full of stars.

Sesriem has no food tradition of its own — it has camp cooking and lodge kitchens. At the campsite the standard meal is a braai, meat grilled over camelthorn coals with roosterkoek, bread rolls baked on the grid, or a potjie, the three-legged iron pot in which a stew of meat, vegetables and stock is left to simmer slowly for hours. Supplies are bought far in advance and packed into a cool box, because the shop at the gate carries only basics.

Lodge menus follow Namibian country cooking: oryx, kudu and springbok steaks and carpaccio, beef from the farms, lamb from the dry south, and biltong and dried sausage set out for the road. Vegetables are trucked in and treated as precious. Breakfast tends to be early and large, since guests leave for the dunes in the dark, and packed breakfasts eaten at the pan are common.

The drive north brings the one reliable stop, the bakery and cafe at Solitaire, the only one between the dunes and the coast and a fixture of a Namibian road trip. Namibian lagers brewed to the German purity law, South African wines and rooibos tea are the usual drinks, and water is consumed in quantities that surprise first-time visitors.