If you are keeping track (Marlene!) we are on a heading due north, with plans to wild camp until we get to Gronesriviern and the Nampqua National Park. We proceed with four navigation devices – five if you count intuition. 

Camping at this 1994 shipwreck I imagine the captain being totally fed up with his GPS and running aground just to get it over with. For us the urge to throw the ipad out the window and run over it has passed, for now.

I am writing this while sitting on the sand in front of the Atlantic Ocean, watching its remarkable foam tide. We’ve never seen or heard of anything like this foam. I’ve seen what’s called spin-drift, that soft cotton candy foam that the Pacific offers. This foam is something else all together. Yesterday afternoon, the waves were like meringue, thick, viscous and pure white. They pushed ashore miles and miles of foam, moving under the piles of it like undersea monsters. Meringue coated the rocks as if someone dumped paint on them. This morning, the fancy white foam all up and down the beach has deflated and what’s left is smelly grey-green stuff. But more is on the way, I can see it off-shore. What is it exactly? I’ll have to find out.

We enter Namqua National Park from the south gate, the only place where staff is posted. Flamingos graze the estuary nearby. The SANS Park staff are friendly and knowledgeable – they tell us they’ve seen many snakes. The Cape Cobra is famous in these arid parks; its bright orange color unmistakable. I would love to see one preferably from the (closed) truck window.

Namqua is a land of contrasts. There’s the open Atlantic Ocean on one side and as far as you can see, shrubs and succulents on the other. Water looks scarce until the fog rolls in. A colony of meerkats are standing up; as sentinels they can see what’s coming but by standing up they create a different shape than the surrounding shrubs and are somewhat easy to spot. I dig meerkats. We spot another colony down the road.

Less cute, but still a hoot, is a colony of thousands of Cape Fur Seals. I’m hard pressed to describe what it smells like. Like the bottom of the ocean all stirred up. Down the road are ostriches and the shy Pale Chanting Goshawk – always staying still until the camera comes up, then off he flies.

And so it goes until we reach our first assigned campsite in many nights. Nothing fancy, a windbreak for a cooking fire and compostable toilets right on the shore. For the first time in days we meet fellow campers. They come over with a couple of cold ones for us – how’d they know we were down to our last Castle beer? SA native Gary is a large animal vet specializing in wild creatures and Annie is battling South Africa’s work permit bureaucracy which could be a career for her. They leave us with a 6-pac and their phone number to visit them in the Limpopo area. Now when a South African invites you to visit, they really mean it. We’ll take them up on it.

To continue our route, again for those of you keeping track, we’ll leave Namqua and resupply in Springbok, a charming and very hot town inland. Our goal for the rest of February will be to visit Augrabies National Park, near the South African/Namibian border, and the famous Kalahari Transfrontier Park, where we traveled in 2013 with Adrian and Rentia. A different season will make it a completely different park; instead of sparse grass and little water, we should see greenery and baby animals. That is, if we can get in. That park is so popular that many visitors make reservations a year in advance – like trying to get that perfect spot at Redfish Lake. We have no reservations. But something will happen – it always does.