Chapter 3: An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered

In our last blog post, we told you about all the fun we had leading up to and in Windhoek as continue our 21-day journey across Southern Africa to put the Mahindra Pik Up Special Edition Range to the test. We left Windhoek in the early hours of the morning while it was still dark, heading off on the C28 (a 310-kilometres long dirt road that connects Windhoek to Swakopmund). The first 25km is tar road. It’s a beautiful, winding road through the Windhoek mountains into the Khomas Hochland Conservancy before it becomes a gravel road.

Our first stop of the day was about 40kms outside Windhoek at a place called Liebig Haus in Neuheusis. Liebig Haus, a Namibian historical monument, is an old, dilapidated house on Khomashochland Road C28 that some believe to be haunted. The house was originally built during the German colonial period in 1912-13 to house the farm managers of the Karl Liebig Company, which specialised in cattle breeding. The Liebig Company owned most of the commercial farming land in the Kuiseb River basin upper catchment and was formed in 1907 by the Deutsche Farmgesellschaft of South-West Africa.

We continued our drive on the C28, taking in the beautiful scenery of the Namibian landscape; it was truly an amazing day’s drive. Because of the seasonal rain, the grass was exceptional tall but that also meant there was some erasure on the road. We had to engage the 4WD because the road was quite tricky to navigate, you could easily overcook a corner or hit a rock in the road so we had to drive extra carefully from here onwards.

For the last 100kms of the Khomashochland Road, you have to drop into the Namib Desert, a coastal desert that stretches for more than 2,000kms along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa. It is almost completely uninhabited by humans so we got the unique opportunity to experience a stretch of untarnished natural land. In between the desert and the Khomashochland Road, there is a beautiful looking grassy plane with granite rocks. We stopped to marvel at the wonder of this natural landscape and appreciate its sheer spectacle.

The last part of the Khomashochland is a tarred road into Swakopmund. We arrived at about 3 pm in the afternoon after a long yet beautiful drive. We had lunch at a lovely local Indian restaurant before we headed into the Walvis Bay side of the Dunes. We drove for about 15kms into Walvis Bay—it is the second largest city in Namibia and an important tourist attraction, mostly because of Dune 7; which is where we were headed. Standing at 383 meters, Dune 7 is the highest dune in Namibia. We waited until the sun started to set before driving up the dunes and taking some lovely pictures of the amber sun setting on the golden sand as yet another lovely day went by on this phenomenal expedition.

Join us in part four of our ongoing blog series as we explore all that Southern Africa has to offer and we Unleash The Explorer In You!