Sleeping under the stars at Spitzkoppe

Spitzkopppe, the well-known 1728 m high mountain of Damaraland is beautiful to look at, but also functions as one of the hotspots for the Namibian climbing community. Tours are organised even for beginners, since climbing the mountain apparently is 95 % hiking. Even so, you need to be totally self-sufficient and geared up when starting the climb, so e.g. for these reasons we decided to leave the climb to another time and just admired the beauty of the mountain during sunset, when leaving Swakopmund behind and continuing our journey towards the Northern parts of Namibia.

We had chosen a community-run Spitzkoppe Rest Camp as our destination for the night, and it turned out to be exactly the right choice. The moon that night was huge and shed its light from a clear sky down to the isolated camp site. We decided to sleep without a tent, under the stars (even though there had been cold nights in Namibia, this was almost too hot of an evening, so we concluded it would be okay). As one of us did worry about insects and other nightly animals a bit, there was some reassuring to do before we were peacefully asleep.

At nighttime the wind was blowing gently, and besides feeling the cool breeze on his face, Timo was also able to hear the wind as a constant hum in his ear. This was even when it wasn’t blowing anymore, so we figured something was wrong. Turned out there was a small ant inside the ear and Timo could hear it stepping around! To our relief at 4 am a small drop of hand antiseptic fluid on a cotton bud did its magic and the small ant crawled his way out. For the rest of the night we naturally covered our ears with our woollen hats - didn't wanna take the risk of a bigger insect finding its way in. 

Like mentioned before, the campsite we stayed in is run by the nearby community. This means that every person in the village gets their share from the travellers spending. People who work as guides or in the campsite restaurant get a bigger share, but they still ensure that everybody in a community will benefit from the business, which is a huge deal for the village.

One of the sources of income to the community are guided Bushman painting tours in the area. We took part in a tour in the morning, and had a superb local guide showing us the ancient Bushman paintings - when we heard the stories it was hard to believe how essential and informative these beautiful paintings have been. The paintings were made 2000-4000 years BC, and they were used for communication purposes and knowledge sharing.



As nomads the Bushman people lived in small groups, and they had to move long distances in order to find food and water to live on. Tribes had to share information about their movements to other tribes in the area in order to e.g. ensure there were not too many people sharing the valuable resources at the same place at the same time. But they didn't leave having water to a change - they used ostrich eggs to storage it! They made an extremely small hole to the egg, filled the egg with water and then buried it deep into the ground so it could be used during the dry season. Beats me how they were able to find it later on! Also, the direction into which the paintings pointed into worked as a map: in the head-side one would find water and animals, so it was also like an ancient compass system. Fascinating!