I haven’t had my coffee yet as I’m lazily scaling the dunes on my way to collect the overnight rigs. I’m fascinated by the intricate patterns that bugs and reptiles leave in the soft sand and I try to identify who’s responsible for each. As I approach the tree where my 8020s and Mixpre have spent the night, I hear an aggressive hiss that instantly transports me back to the present moment. A Horned adder is viciously squirming at the base of the Camel thorn tree, evidently woken up from a pleasant morning slumber in the sun.

How did I get here? Ever since my first trip to Africa in 2016 I’ve been meaning to properly record deserts. I did this to some extent in the Sahel in 2017 but I only spent a couple of days in the desert then. This time I wanted to immerse myself fully into the environment, both in sandy and rocky deserts. No better place for this than Namibia, with big chunks of the Kalahari and Namib within its borders.

I land in Windhoek on a hot and sunny day and I meet up with Yigong who landed here the day before. We collect our hire vehicle, a Toyota Hilux equipped for overland travel and we’re on our way to our first stop in the Kalahari desert. We have some car trouble right when crossing the Tropic of Capricorn but I manage to fix it by replacing some fuses in the engine bay.

Kalahari desert

On the first couple of days it rains quite heavily, a rare occurrence in Namibia. We arrive at the lodge in a storm and almost get stuck in soft mud when stopping on the side of a road. Luckily the Hilux has a great 4x4 system and we escape without having to dig ourselves out. The downside of all the heavy rain and strong wind is that recording the subtle sounds of the desert isn’t possible.

We get a chance to meet the local cheetahs, a few rescues who wouldn’t be able to adapt in the wild so they have to live in a huge enclosure. The lodge supports them through tourism and even allows a few students to do their research here, so we’re happy to help. Unfortunately the drop in tourist numbers caused by the pandemic has meant a drastic reduction in the funds available for conservation.

Our next stop is a different part of the Kalahari. We leave the sand behind and arrive at a much rockier part of the desert called Giants# playground. Huge rocks and alien looking Quiver trees are the staple of this place. We have to cross flooded riverbeds to get there which makes things a bit more exciting. The rain stops but the high winds continue so recording is limited here too.

The dramatic landscapes and driving adventures make up for that though. This is our first opportunity to get acquainted with the immense rocks and weird vegetation. We go for several hikes in the area as the weather gets better. I eventually manage to do an overnight recording session at a rocky hilltop so we can leave the Kalahari without feeling shortchanged.

Namib desert

After driving for a few hundred miles we arrive at our first proper camping destination, NamibRand nature reserve. This is a huge conservancy made up of 17 former livestock farms that have been bought and set aside for conservation. There are only a handful of campsites, each a few miles away from the next one. There are also very few people around so we feel like we have the whole place for ourselves.

It’s very windy when we get here but the wind slowly dies down so I set up a couple of overnight recording rigs. After a hearty barbecue dinner accompanied by excellent Windhoek beer we go to bed exhausted. There’s a full moon so astrophotography doesn’t look promising. We wake up at 3 am once the moon has set and we get some beautiful views of the Milky Way. This has to be one of the darkest skies I’ve ever experienced.

This is where I get my first chance to drive on sand. I have experience driving on snow, mud, rocks and gravel, but I haven’t done much sand driving. The two things I’ve learned are to air down the tires and to keep a steady speed and not lose momentum on soft sand. We have a shovel, Maxtrax and a winch just in case we get stuck, but fortunately I get the hang of it pretty fast.

One of the things I want to record in Namibia is the famous singing sand. I’ve heard recordings of sand that growls or groans and several sources indicate that sand dunes here sometimes do this. I go for long walks around our camp trying to make the sand sing but without much luck. Undeterred, I leave out a few rigs even if during the day it’s very breezy and the wind only dies down late in the evening.

It’s at this point that I meet the Horned adder. The snake doesn’t look too pleased to be woken from its slumber and I’m faced with quite the conundrum. I want to collect my microphones and recorder (not my cheapest devices, I have to add) but I want to avoid a nasty bite. I throw some small branches in the general direction of the snake without hurting it, and it eventually crawls into a hole in the tree. I then proceed to slowly removing the zip ties from my gear and taking it all off the tree without any incident.

After the snake encounter we pack our things and drive to our next location in the Namib, Sossusvlei Lodge, to spend Christmas. We arrive at Sossusvlei just in time for lunch and we plan to go see Deadvlei right away, but the vehicle thinks otherwise. After a few hours of me trying to fix it and then finding a proper car mechanic we finally identify the issue and get it fixed.

With the car fixed we can go visit Deadvlei, Dune 45 and the other interesting sites in the area. The wind is pretty strong during the day so there isn’t much to record, but late in the evening it seems to die down so I drop a few unattended rigs in various places. I’m not looking for wildlife, although there are barking geckos and plenty of Cape turtle doves. What I’m after is the famous singing sand dunes. It doesn’t seem like they can be found here though.

What I manage to record is plenty of wind, sparse dawn choruses, the occasional cicada, nice subtle soundscapes and more wind. This has more or less been the theme of the trip so far, and it’s quite the departure from previous trips to places like rainforests. It’s still incredibly beautiful though, and it offers us an opportunity to slow down and immerse ourselves into the landscape.

It’s hot, windy and sandy. As soon as we go for a walk we start sweating and the sand ends up sticking to our skin. It gets everywhere. Not even the cameras are immune. I don’t mind it one bit though. It’s an incredibly small price to pay for access to such majestic landscapes, especially since there’s hardly any other tourists out in the wilderness. There are quite a few families at the lodge but we only see them at breakfast and dinner.

After a couple of inspiring and exhausting days at Sossusvlei Lodge it’s time to move on to our next destination, a hidden campsite in a rocky part of the Namib. We arrive after a beautiful but long drive through spectacular landscapes. After we set up camp I do a quick tour to drop a few recording rigs and I notice that again there’s no other people here. We have this massive wild place to ourselves!

After a calm, overcast and eerily quiet night we pack up and leave for our next destination - Swakopmund. This is a good opportunity to take a shower, charge some batteries, do some (many hours) of data management and to explore a surreal-looking town that would not look out of place in Germany. Too much urban life is bad for our inner calm though so early on the next day we set out for Spitzkoppe.

We arrive at Spitzkoppe rest camp on a scorching hot day, contrasting heavily with the mild and humid weather on the coast. This is yet another gorgeous campsite, in the shadow of huge inselbergs. There are lots of rock paintings here, some of which we get to see on a quick tour that I use as a recce. Later I go back again and leave out a pair of rigs.

After a quiet and uneventful night we leave the gigantic rocks and get back on the road. It takes more than 8 hours to get to our destination on Terrace Bay. The landscape gradually becomes much sparser and less exciting, with inviting sand dunes in the distance though. Sadly the place we decided to stay in is pretty mediocre and frequented mostly by anglers. There isn’t much to do here besides angling and there’s quite a lot of road traffic.

We decide to cut our stay short and we leave for Mowani Mountain camp at Twyfelfontein the next morning. Not before we take a detour into the dunes and do some sound recording though. To my surprise, this is where I find the elusive singing sand! It’s not singing though, but rather groaning and farting, and it only does so when I walk around and shuffle in the dunes. Still a pretty exciting discovery! We spend several hours here trying to record this elusive phenomenon but we don’t get anything longer than a few seconds. We manage to record about half an hour of very subtle wind-blown sand however.

Listening back to these recordings, I wish we spent more time in the dunes on the Skeleton Coast. It didn’t really sound like much in the moment but listening back on proper studio speakers unveils a lot of subtle detail. Lesson learned and noted for the next time I find myself in a sandy desert, which will hopefully be pretty soon.

Back on the road, we notice dramatic changes in the landscape. The flat expanses of sand slowly turn into endless rocky plains, and eventually hills and mountains. The colour palette changes from white and blue to a million variations of yellow, red, ochre and purple with soft tinges of green and deep blue skies. The soundscape is still pretty sparse but we start seeing more birds and hearing more insects.

As is quite often the case, I feel an immense fear of missing out when driving through places like this one. I would love to stop here and spend a few weeks exploring the land, the nature, the wildlife, the culture. The best I can do is stop on the side of the road and spend a few minutes listening and then taking photos.

Damaraland and Twyfelfontein

We finally reach Mowani mountain camp, our destination for the following 3 days. We decided on this place because it offers decent amenities, great food and a variety of landscapes to explore. Besides all that, it’s New year’s eve tomorrow and we want to take some time off from the endless driving and slow down a little.

It’s difficult to explain what this place feels like. The lodge itself is built on top of a rocky hill and is surrounded by gigantic rocks (some are the size of buses or even bigger) on all sides. At first glance it seems barren and devoid of live, but after a few hours our ears become accustomed to the sparseness of the soundscape and we start noticing minute details here and there. There’s wildlife as well, we’re told, from the doves and hyraxes we can hear from our room to leopards and elephants even!

We spend most of our time at Mowani either recording, photographing or looking for wildlife. We are rewarded with generous amounts of sightings, from elephants to squirrels and a lot of others in between. To my surprise, the desert elephants are much quieter and more placid than the ones I’ve seen in Central or East Africa. They hardly argue with one another and they go about their business ignoring humans, unlike what I’ve witnessed in Kenya or Gabon.

Sadly this means that I don’t manage to record any big mammals. Most of my recordings from Mowani are wind, some insects and very sparse bird calls. Overall the soundscape is eerie and barren, not a surprise for a rocky desert though.

Etosha National Park

After a wonderful 3 days immersion into the Damaraland rocky desert, we get back into the Hilux and on the road. It takes about 7 hours to get to our final stop on this trip, Etosha National Park. This is quite the opposite of the landscapes we’ve seen so far. It’s not lush like a rainforest but there’s decidedly more wildlife and the soundscape reflects that.

We’re staying at a pretty upmarket lodge and we get a personal guide/driver. I don’t mind roughing it at all, but in places like Etosha roughing it means sharing safari vehicles and lodging with lots and lots of other tourists. This obviously doesn’t work for sound recording. On top of that, within Etosha itself it isn’t allowed to exit the vehicles so my drop rig strategy does not work.

Etosha Heights is a huge conservancy situated right next to Etosha NP, and includes several lodges far away from main roads. The fence that separates it from the park is broken in many places so wildlife permeates back and forth easily. It’s a great place to see rhinos and big cats, we’re told. Our guide and driver Jacky is excited to hear about my sound recording plans and goes out of his way to take us to the best sounding parts of the conservancy.

We don’t waste any time and we go on a game drive just a few hours after we arrive. I set up a few drop rigs at water holes and at a large Weaver nest (recording in the video above). Darkness falls as we’re still driving slowly through the bush, and Jacky tells us stories about black rhinos charging vehicles. Not long passes and we hear a huge thing crashing through the bush and making a loud huffing noise. It’s a black rhino who could smell us because of the wind direction but can’t really see us because it’s dark and rhino vision is quite limited.

After a few tense moments, the rhino decides we’re not worth charging at and leaves for the bush. Not before I manage to get a quick video though. Fortunately the image stabilisation in my phone is pretty good, because my hand was shaking while holding it. This has to be one of my top 3 wildlife experiences, up there with being charged at by a gorilla and chased up a hill by an orangutan.

After the rhino encounter, seeing elephants and antelope seems a bit bland, ordinary even. The game drives are still very enjoyable, even if we don’t expect anything as adrenaline-inducing. The soundscape is quite lush at dawn and dusk, but it’s still windy during the day so the recordings aren’t all great. The nights are overcast so there is little scope for astrophotography. From the balcony of our room I can hear a good amount of calls at night though, even a distant lion.

On our last morning in Etosha I’m woken up around 5am by lion roars weaving in with my dreams. Soon enough I realise it’s actually happening so I get out on the balcony and enjoy the primal and terrifying call. It’s coming from pretty close by so we decide to get into the vehicle and go look for him. It might sound surprising, but lions camouflage easily in the dry, dustys ochre savanna. We drive for a bit and see him just as we were about 10 meters away. Not wanting to disappoint, he does a few lazy but booming roars that we can feel deep in our chests.

Once I’m done collecting my 6 rigs we can get back into the vehicle and drive to Windhoek. We have to drive through a huge tropical storm which floods some streets in the capital, but this is nothing compared to what we’ve experienced the last few weeks. Physically we’re back in a populated area ready to board our flight tomorrow, but our minds are still in the wild and raw Namibian landscape. They’re probably going to be there for a few weeks or even months.

Conservation

Before I conclude I want to briefly mention conservation. I’m pleasantly surprised to see how much this topic is present in all areas that we visit. Tourism is obviously a big part of the country’s GDP so most places that we see are well equipped to handle tourists in a sustainable way. Solar power is the norm in many places. Wildlife rangers are a regular sight in areas where there’s endangered wildlife. Local villages have museums and shops where tourists can learn about their way of life. The quantity of plastic in the environment is surprisingly low compared to places like Senegal or Ethiopia.

Not everything is perfect though. Not unlike what I saw in South Africa, there are fences almost everywhere, even in some protected areas. This drastically limits wildlife movement and makes some populations unviable. We drive past several hunting estates quite close to Etosha. I’m very curious how well-regulated hunting is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not at all enforced. As expected, the fallout of the pandemic has resulted in drastically reduced numbers of tourists. This has resulted in many guides, drivers, rangers, hotel personnel having to take other jobs or to leave for urban areas, which eventually is going to lower the perceived value of wildlife among the local population. Hopefully things will get better before that happens.