Post 27: Sand, dunes, a diamond rush,a ghost town and a mercy flight

Captain R Jones, the skipper who started the diamond rush in
South West Africa

Monday March 14

This may sound odd but I don’t much like travelling by air. I love flying. But going by plane means you can’t really take in the difference between one place and another. My advice is: get there, hire a car or take a bus. Talk to people. It never disappoints because you never know what to expect. After nearly 11000 nautical miles- even at Alpha Charlie’s sedate pace- places are beginning to blur in my mind: Libya, Khartoum, Quelimane, Kenya, South Africa.

But every so often you come to a place, unannounced and unscheduled that really sticks in the mind.  Luderitz, the diamond mining ghost town in southern Namibia, is such a place. If I were Pedro Almodovar this is where I’d set my next movie.

Bartolemeu Diaz, the Prtuguese seaferer, passed through this barren place in 1488. But the real story begins in 1897 when  passing skipper, Captain R Jones, arrived in Capetown, to the south, clutching a parcel of diamonds which he said he found in South West Africa, then a German Colonial Territory. His find had sparked a diamond rush. A railway was built. The magnificent town of Luderitz rose up out of the desert, whence some has now returned. Ernest Oppenheimer established the Consolidated Diamond Company of South West Africa, today De Beers. Fortunes were made. Fortunes were lost. Competition was brutal. Employment ( mainly of blacks) bordered on slavery. Mining companies were masters of the universe.

LUDERITZ AIRFIELD

We fly from Uppington, in South Africa, to clear customs at Keetmanshoop, just inside Namibia. I love Namibia: deep canyons, mountainous red sand dunes, savannah; the San bushmen of the Kalahari desert who are perhaps the oldest surviving (just) culture in the world; huge cattle farms battling it out with private game reserves for breathing space and scarce resources; the wonderful Etosha game park and the Skeleton Coast ( so called because of the bleached remains of stranded whales and skipwrecked vessels). Big country with a tiny population.

Alpha Charlie rides the up and don drafts on autopilot to Luderitiz over the mountains like small boat on a gentle rolling sea. At Luderitz Jo brings her in to land on runway 22 with a 22kt wind gusting 28kts from 170 degrees in a mini sandstorm. Not easy but safe. Alpha Charlie’s recommended crosswind limit is 17 knots. We are followed in by a Cessna twin, a mercy flight from Capetown to Windhoek which has come to pick up someone waiting in ambulance, light flashing, with an anxious relative.

THE OBELIX GUEST HOUSE

The owner, a charming lady who, it turns out is “mute” ( she cannot hear and is very difficult to understand) sits in the courtyard. I ask her for an adaptor plug. She asks her son, an angelic 8 maybe 9 year-old with a shock of blonde hair doing wheelies on his mountain bike, to “translate”. I tell him I’ve flown from England and can I have a plug please? Non sequitir. He pauses briefly,nods, gets the plug, then gets back on his bike. He is suitably unimpressed.  

PATRICK THE DIVER  

In town, studded with magnificent colonial German and Dutch architecture but deserted and soulless, we meet Jonathan,a diver. He works the small mining vessels which go to sea, south of Luderitz, for 21 days at a time. They are virtually all subcontracted to Namdeb Diamond Corporation half-owned by (yep) De Beers. They prospect mainly to the south. He dives to 30 metres in a dry suit ( the Atlantic waters at that depth are near freezing) and, using a sort of hoover connected to the boat above, sucks up diamond-rich gravel. On deck it is sifted in jigs, under armed guard. Its very big business. In 2009 nearly half of the 1.36 million carats farmed by Namdeb came from undersea mining off Namibia. I tell him I admire his pluck.

Tuesday  March 15

Bringing water the now deserrted mining town of Kolmanskuppe
in the diamond rush

Before taking off for Swakopmund we visit the ghost town of Kolmanskuppe. The deserted hospital, built in the very early 1900s had the first X-ray machine in Africa, a school, a dance hall and a casino. It was finally abandoned in 1956.  The visitors centre today does a nice cream tea.



The Good Times in Luderitz



Kolmanskuppe: A ghost town but with style



  



The indispensable Jo, henceforth Monsieur Passepartout,
parking Alpha Charlie at FYSM (Swakopmund)
( Ref M. Passepartout see Jules Vernes: Around the world in 80 days).



SWAKOPMUND
The man runway is unserviceable. I bring her in to land, after a go-around, on a vaguely recognisable, gravel runway. Just before I turn base a skydiver appears out of nowhere and lends with impeccable, Tutonic precision on the apron. This place feels like South Africa. Most of the clients at the ( very nice) Hansa hotel are Afrikaans or German wanting a slice of colonial nostalgia.

Tomorrow a game park. Then Angola and towards the Equator and the InterTropical Convergence zone.