From Stellenbosch it was a short drive to Cape Town Airport to return the car, then a taxi to the dock area to join the Silversea Explorer. A Hertz man called up a "cab" for us. We think it was his next door neightbour moonlighting. The taxi was driven by a Zimbabwean who was not an ace at navigating the city
On getting to Silversea reception we hit our first snag - I had forgotten our Internation Yellow Fever certificates. This meant that the ship's doctor, a somewhat surly, not to say rude, Romanian, made us sit, without giving us any information, in the dock shed for over an hour. Eventually the port agent for Silversea took us to a hospital to be re-vacinated. There, the South African doctor did not want to vacinate us as we were over 60. But , eventually, after several phone calls by him to government departments, he let us have the jabs and the certificates. By then the taxi that had brought us to the hospital had gone, and it took some time for them to send us another one. The only plus point was that the jabs and certificates were, by European stantards, extremely cheap
Eventually we got on board the Explorer, had the usual life boat drill, followed by the ship practicing launching lifeboats while we were still in Cape Town harbour. The next day we were at sea to en route to Luderitz
Click on thumbnail image to get a larger photograph
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Luderitz
After a day at sea, we arrived at Luderitz.
The bay on which Lüderitz is situated was first known to Europeans when Bartolomeu Dias encountered it in 1487. He named the bay Angra Pequena (Portuguese: Small Bay) and erected a padrão (stone cross) on the southern peninsula. In the 18th century Dutch adventurers and scientists explored the area in search of minerals but did not have much success. Further exploration expeditions followed in the early 19th century during which the vast wildlife in the ocean was discovered. Profitable enterprises were set up, including whaling, seal hunting, fishing, and guano-harvesting. Lüderitz thus began its life as a trading post. The town was founded in 1883 when Heinrich Vogelsang purchased Angra Pequena and some of the surrounding land on behalf of Adolf Lüderitz, a Hanseat from Bremen in Germany, from the local Nama chief Joseph Fredericks II in Bethanie.
When Adolf Lüderitz did not return from an expedition to the Orange River in 1886, Angra Pequena was named Lüderitzbucht in his honour. In 1905, German authorities established a concentration camp on Shark Island . The camp, access to which was very restricted, operated between 1905 and 1907 during the Herero and Namaqua Genocide. As a result of the conditions of forced labor employed by the Germans, the systematic extermination of between 1,000 and 3,000 Africans from the Herero and Nama tribes took place here. The aim of the camp was extermination by forced labor of indigenous peoples, which was used for expansion of the city, railway, port and on the farms of white settlers.
In 1909, after the discovery of diamonds nearby, Lüderitz enjoyed a sudden surge of prosperity due to the development of a diamond rush to the area. In 1912 Lüderitz had 1,100 inhabitants, not counting the indigenous population. Although situated in harsh environment between desert and Ocean, trade in the harbour town surged, and the adjacent diamond mining settlement of Kolmanskop was built. After the German World War I capitulation, South Africa took over the administration of German South-West Africa in 1915. Many Germans were deported from Lüderitz, contributing to its shrinking in population numbers.
From 1920 onwards, diamond mining was only conducted further south of town in places like Pomona and Elizabeth Bay. This development consequently led to the loss of Lüderitz' importance as trade place. Only small fishing enterprises, minimal dock activity, and a few carpet weavers remained. The harbour has a very shallow rock bottom, making it unusable for modern ships; this led to Walvis Bay becoming the centre of the Namibian shipping industry. Recently, however, the addition of a new quay has allowed larger fishing vessels to dock at Lüderitz. The town has also re-styled itself in an attempt to lure tourists to the area, which includes a new waterfront area for shops and offices.
Kolmanskop
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Kolmanskop (Afrikaans for Coleman's hill, German: Kolmannskuppe) is a ghost town in the Namib desert in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port town of Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. Once a small but very rich mining village, it is now a popular tourist destination.
In 1908 the worker Zacharias Lewala found a diamond while working in this area and showed it to his supervisor, the German railway inspector August Stauch. Realizing the area was rich in diamonds, German miners began settlement, and soon after the German government declared a large area as a "Sperrgebiet", starting to exploit the diamond field
Driven by the enormous wealth of the first diamond miners, the residents built the village in the architectural style of a German town, with amenities and institutions including a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theatre and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere, as well as the first tram in Africa. It had a railway link to Lüderitz.
The town declined after World War I when the diamond-field slowly became exhausted and was ultimately abandoned in 1954. The geological forces of the desert mean that tourists now walk through houses knee-deep in sand. Kolmanskop is popular with photographers for its settings of the desert sands' reclaiming this once-thriving town.
Desert Wild Horses
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There have been several theories proposed as to the origin of the wild horses. The two most likely stem from the period between 1915 and 1925. During World War One, Union of South Africa troops were stationed at Garub. Reports from the time make reference to 10 000 soldiers with 6 000 horses who pitched camp on the dusty expanse at the edge of the Namib Desert. They relied on the water from the borehole that was used to replenish locomotives at the nearby railway line and supplement the water for the town of Lüderitz.
The German forces had set up a stronghold in the hills at Aus, 25km to the east. The base comprised a series of entrenchments, supply routes, a radio mast and housed two planes, which bombed the Union camp intermittently. The last attack was on the 27 March 1915 to mask the Germans’ retreat, scattering the Union horses. A German report stated:
‘In the morning of 27 March the indefatigable pilot officer Fiedler flew to Garub and caused great bewilderment by successfully dropping bombs onto the enemy camp and among about 1700 grazing cavalry horses.’
It is thought that the Union forces might not have had sufficient time to catch all the dispersed animals before advancing on the retreating Germans, although some soldiers would have remained at the camp after the troops moved off.
Another, perhaps more probable, theory believes that the horses that formed the core of the wild horse population came from a stud farm at Kubub. Emil Kreplin, who was the mayor of Lüderitz from 1909 to 1914, had a stud farm south of Aus. Here, Kreplin bred workhorses for the mines and racehorses for the flourishing town of Lüderitz that had boomed in the diamond rush sparked in 1908. In photographic evidence of the Kubub stud horses, unearthed by hobby-historian Walter Rusch, there are remarkable similarities in conformation and characteristic markings between the Kubub horses and the present-day wild horses showing traces of Hackney, Trakehner and Shagya Arab breeds.
Kreplin was interred in the Union of South Africa during the hostilities and later lost his fortune in the depression years in Europe. It is assumed that during or after the war the horses, ownerless and not contained by fences, would have begun to scatter, leaving the overgrazed Kubub area in search of better grazing and following the scattered rainfall. They would have eventually made their way to the permanent water source at Garub, becoming wilder over time and linking up with any remaining Union horses and any other abandoned horses in the area.
Substantiated biologically and historically, the theories can thus be brought together. Any horses that were abandoned in the turmoil of war would also have gathered in the area around Aus, finding water at the springs after the rains and at the Garub borehole.
The horses lived in the protected Sperrgebiet diamond area, which provided safety from hunters and horse capturers. From as early 1908 the German colonial administration had established a restricted area, which extended about 100km inland, and was strictly controlled. Garub and surrounds were part of Sperrgebiet II. Nobody was allowed access to the area, with the only exception made periodically from the 1950s until 1983 in times of serious drought to provide emergency grazing for farmers.
Garub’s borehole was maintained by the South African Railway (SAR) for their steam locomotives until the 1960s when diesel replaced steam. Afterwards water was pumped for the railway workers who maintained the track and their animals. From 1977 Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM) maintained the drinking trough and covered the cost to ensure that the horses were kept watered.
In 1986, that section of Sperrgebiet II was incorporated into the Namib Naukluft Park. For 100 years the horses were able to develop in almost complete isolation, generation by generation, through seasons of drought and abundance, becoming a pure breed through decades of natural selection. They are now regarded as a breed in their own right, the ‘Namibs’.