I urge you to have a good look around: enlarge the featured image and zoom in on every element within a very complex landscape.
Finding the river is no great challenge.
However, you will need “eagle eyes” to be able to discern any evidence of the lightly-used access tracks on which “our” vehicles had travelled along some of the Hoarusib River’s lower reaches, and then up to the hilltop vantage point.
Within the photo’s field of view – which is similar to that of a naked-eyed human’s – those tracks are the only man-made feature.
No human lives here.
Not even a single signpost has been erected.
By some inveterate travellers’ standards, I have hardly been anywhere.
However, by “average bear” human standards my beloved and I are well travelled, and have been lucky enough to experience more than a few of the world’s “wilder” places, directly.
I think the very idea of a “league table” or “bucket list” of destinations is inane, wrong-headed.
That said, wherever else a traveller has been, the northwestern/“Skeleton Coast-adjacent” section of the Namib Desert is likely to prove a “lifetime highlight”.
This place does not closely resemble any other place on “our” planet.
I would say the same of Namibia, more generally; “unique” is a sorely-abused term, but it accurately describes a deal of Namibia…the Namib, especially.
(our November 2022 trip was my third trip to Namibia, but this was our first visit to this particular area. Some Namibian places I have experienced three times – in 1971, 2006 and 2022. Each time, the “same places” proved pleasingly-different, whilst also reminding me why they had made my heart sing, on first acquaintance. I am forever grateful that I “accidentally” first experienced Namibia at age 16)
The featured image in this series’ next chapter was taken from the same vantage point, looking in the same direction, but through a much longer lens.
That post will share a few “truths” about Namibia’s rivers.