Beautiful part of the world :thumleft:
Still the best trip I've done on my bike! (Although we didn't do Van Zyl's, we went just south of it into the Kaokoveld and came out again at Palmwag. And I was the only one on bike, the rest were in 4x4's)
I went far too fast through it though.
I vow to go back with a decent camera and forget about the planned schedule and covering distance etc and just experience it properly, instead just a beautiful blur on either side of the track.
I must admit elephants and thick sand make a nerve wracking combination - something my mates in their 4x4's just never understood.
In the Kuwaribshlucht I was riding through fresh urine, broken branches, wet dung etc in sand so thick that you had no choice but to follow the wheel tracks in the sand. You couldn't easily climb out of them because the middlemannetjie was so high and the sand so soft. The GPS had notices of "danger aggressive elephants" - and I was on my own, way ahead of the bakkies and still learning how to ride k's and k's of thick sand! All I needed was to ride into an elephant because I would probably just have fallen over right in front of the damn thing and died of terminal bowel control loss!
