Lost Highways & Open Horizons

 

Ajmal Samuel’s Journey Across the Namib. It started, as most grand adventures do, with a simple idea. Over coffee, Ajmal Samuel mentioned he wanted to stretch his legs—his words, not mine—and take his handcycle on a proper ride through South Africa. 

 

I knew at once where we needed to go: not the well-paved tourist trails but the far reaches of the Northern Cape and beyond, into Namibia’s deep desert silence. Places where Google Maps sputters and dies, where a paper map and the angle of the sun are your best navigation tools. 

 

We would begin in Cape Town, a few days of indulgence—paragliding off Signal Hill with the aerial virtuoso Matt Van Zyl, scuba diving in False Bay’s kelp forests—before trading coastal comforts for the emptiness of the interior.

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Brandvlei and Verneukpan were the first taste of real isolation. Verneukpan, meaning “to swindle” in Afrikaans, is an absurdly flat, salt-crusted expanse where Sir Malcolm Campbell once tried (and failed) to set a land-speed record in 1929. I joked that Ajmal should try his luck on a handcycle. He took it in stride. The roads turned to dust, and the distances between anything grew vast. 

 

At one point, 70 kilometers into nowhere, his GPS lost all signal. "Are we lost?" he asked, feigning indifference but gripping his phone like a lifeline. I assured him we weren’t—though, to be fair, I wasn’t entirely sure myself.

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Then, onto Namibia, a land sculpted by heat, wind, and time. We stopped at Keetmanshoop to walk among the quiver trees—strange, spindly silhouettes against a cobalt sky. The San people once carved their branches into arrow quivers; now, the trees stand like sentinels of another era. 

 

Nearby, the Giant’s Playground lay scattered with ancient dolerite boulders, stacked as if some colossal hand had been playing a cosmic game of Jenga. Ajmal rolled through, navigating the labyrinth of stones, both of us marveling at nature’s quiet absurdity.

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But it was Wolwedans that left us breathless. A private slice of the NamibRand, where red dunes ripple like ocean waves and the silence is thick enough to press against your eardrums. Ajmal, ever the speed enthusiast, tested the limits of our 4x4 on the empty roads, dust plumes rising behind us like desert ghosts. 

 

We spent the nights beneath a sky so dark and vast it felt like falling into deep space. Even the stars seemed closer.

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From there, we veered west to Swakopmund, Namibia’s odd German colonial relic clinging to the Atlantic. Here, the desert meets the sea in an improbable collision of sand dunes and icy swells. We traded handcycling for quad bikes, carving reckless lines into the dunes, then sat on the shore watching fishermen cast their lines into the wild surf.

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And then, the long road home—south down the N7, where the landscapes shift like the turning pages of an old, leather-bound book. Dry riverbeds, abandoned farmhouses, wind-bent telephone poles stretching endlessly into the horizon. Ajmal, never one for nostalgia, said little. He let the miles roll past, absorbing it all.

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Somewhere along the way, between the salt pans and the starlit dunes, the desert got under his skin. You could see it in the way he looked out at the horizon, as if already planning the next expedition. 

 

And that’s the thing about journeys like these: they don’t end when the tires hit tarmac again. They linger, stirring something restless, urging you forward, always forward—toward the next unmarked road, the next blank space on the map.