The Brandberg climb

The website launch went well http://www.desertelephant.org, we sent out a newsletter to all previous volunteers, set up a facebook fan page which got lots of hits and publicized that the new site was up wherever we could.

With that out of the way, the next challenge was climbing the Brandberg mountain which is 2,573 m (8,440 ft). It's the highest point in Namibia and I've wanted to climb it since I saw it for the first time over a year and a half ago. Luckily there was another volunteer Rob who was out here for 8 weeks and he wanted to climb it also. Its a 3 day climb but its really hot this time of year and there was only one water stop along the way. We'd have to carry all our own food for 3 days so we decided we'd eat a lot of noodles since they were easy to pack. No offense to Rob's fabulous cooking of the noodles but I never want to see one again :)

The adventure began on Thursday 19th Nov. While the rest of the volunteers were finishing up their elephant patrol and heading back to town, I drove out to the base camp to pick up Rob and our guide Johnny, a local guy we found through one of the ellie trackers at EHRA. Dave from EHRA was very kind to lend us his car for the weekend and I learned out to remove a thingy from the car which prevents it from starting in case anyone tried to steal it from the base of the mountain. Considering we saw no other humans for 4 days, it was pretty safe.

We got to the base of the mountain Thursday evening in time for sunset and our first noodle-feast. We were up at 5am the next morning so it was an early night. I woke up feeling pretty crap and tired on Friday morning. I was recovering from a cold and my lungs were complaining. But I tried to put the brave face on and off we went. I like to think I've hiked quite a bit before, but hiking with a cold, a full backpack and fairly uphill was a whole new thing for me, I was gasping. Thankfully Rob kept stuffing me with sugary treats to keep me going. We made it to the first rest stop and our one-and-only water stop by 10.30am. Then we found a nice cave where we could enjoy a siesta from the sun till 3.30pm or so. The rocks in the cave were really cold so we both found ourselves placing various body parts on the walls of the cave to cool down.

I was feeling a teeny bit better in the afternoon and we made it to our camp for the night on the plateau of the mountain. We had to hug a lot of boulders along the way and sometimes it felt like one-false-move away from bye bye Jen. Johnny was tiny, about 5"2 but could take bigger leaps than either of us. Rob is 6'5" by the way! The plateau was really cool though and it was full of crater like holes in which we could sleep. The sunset was stunning and it was another fantastic night under the stars.

Again we woke up at 5am and left our main backpacks in the craters while we hiked to the summit with our daypacks. It was a 2 1/2 hr hike to the summit. We passed by some rock paintings along the way which are supposedly 2500-5000 years old. We reached the summit at 8.45am on Saturday morning and had celebratory hugs and apples. The 360 degree views were stunning and my photos will never do it justice. We could almost see to the ocean over 100km away since the land is so flat around the mountain. There's a book at the summit you can sign so we both wrote a little piece and sat for an hour almost in silence just taking it in.

The trip down was easier on the lungs but tough on the knees. It took us the rest of Saturday and a few hours on Sunday to descend. We got to a mining town called Uis where Johnny lives around 10am on Sunday, dropped him off and went to a lodge where we knew the owner. We were both pretty stinking after sweating tons and having no water except to drink for 3 days so we dived into the pool in all our clothes and ordered the best toasted sandwich and cokes we'd ever tasted! We'd started talking about them on Saturday on the way down the mountain so you can only imagine how exciting it was to finally get them into us.

We headed back to base camp Sunday afternoon and celebrated Rob's last day as a 33 year old with a fine dinner of bangers and mash over the fire and some good red wine. The rest of the volunteers were arriving on the Monday (including Darci!!) so it was really nice to chill out in an empty base camp for the evening. It was tougher climb than I thought it would be since there was no trail and lots boulders to climb with a heavy pack in crazy heat, but all totally worth it!

Here are all the photos from the trip

Jen
xx