Namibia - Survival

A somewhat delayed final post about the Namibia trip. Hope this brings some warmth to you.

I thought the survival part of the exped would be a couple of safety briefings. Of course there were safety briefings, but luckily we had Stani Groeneweg onboard so there was much, much more to learn.

Shelter and Shade - In a climate like Namibia you would have thought that water would be the priority. It is - but you have to purify it like you do over here. You could say that shelter is a good idea; not to keep you from wet and the cold but to keep you from the intense heat of the sun. Shelter and shade is the number one priority. It can be as much as 10 degrees centigrade cooler in the shade than in the sun. My little thermometer went off the scale at 120F when we stuck it in the sand at mid-day.

Fire - Fire will cook your food and purify your water. Temperatures can be driven to below zero in the desert winter making things pretty uncomfortable. Therefore the ability to light a fire is, again, as important as it is over here.

Water - Water and more water. If you've got it, drink it and keep drinking. The chart above (click to enlarge) was kindly prepared by Stani (sourced from the RAF) and shows survival times without water at certain temperatures and how much water should be drunk. You can see now why keeping in the shade or a shelter can, in a survival situation, significantly increase your chances.

Interestingly, we found that the body does get used to the heat and subsequently over a period of time, it will adapt. We started off drinking 4-5litres a day and at the end we were drinking just 3 litres. The Ju/'hoansi drink very little water, so well are they adapted but they will drink as much as we do if they get the chance.

I suppose this is a version of super-hydrating that I first came across at Shadowhawk. It certainly worked in Africa. Before starting an activity and you know you're not going to drink for a while, you slug down a litre's worth or as much as you can... and then a bit more. Not very pleasant but the super-hydrating will actually last you quite a while (depending of course on temperature and the type of activity you're undertaking.)

The most useful bit of kit on the trip was the Camelbak water bladder... by far.

Food - There was a surprising abundance of food if you are prepared to dig. The "Bush potato" is a good source of carbohydrate and normally there would be quite a few berries about. I wouldn't attempt to eat anything unless I knew what I was picking. The same as over here.

I spoke about tracking and trapping in previous posts so I won't dwell on that here. But there is a much wild foods in Namibia as over here (with the exception of mushrooms.) There is also an abundance of small game to trap like the Scrub hare and the ever present Guinea fowl.

Navigation - We had a serious issue in bushmanland where the environment was virtually the same wherever you looked. Natural features were not obvious apart from the odd burnt tree and perhaps an unusually shaped shrub, therefore there was nothing to get a bearing on or from. Navigation became quite important and we tested ourselves in a couple of exercises.

One exercise was to walk out on a bearing for a set distance (you had to negotiate the bushes and shrubs by going to the left of one then to the right of one to keep on your bearing)  then you add (or subtract) 120 degrees and walk the same distance then turn another 120 degrees and walk the same set distance again. The result should be that you end up where you started, being the apex of an equilateral triangle. Ha! Some hope! To my dismay I was way off but I learnt a lesson. More navigation practice is required. I also borrowed a GPS Etrex for the trip and I was pleased I had this as a backup on more than one occasion. This is one bit of kit for Santa's list.

Emergency signaling - So if you do get lost, what then? Stani had brought some signaling mirrors with him and at Hobatere and we tried them out. We had an old Brit army military mirror from the 80's, a new BCB Brit army mirror, a NRA mirror (the American Bushman sent me that one a few years ago), and a glass mirror. Stani used the mirrors from the top of a Kopje 500 meters away and the results were quite surprising. I won't tell what they were yet because I filmed the test and I'll put this up later. In the meantime, you will have to guess which one came out tops. (Guesses in a comment below would be interesting.)

By the way, lighting a fire as a means of signaling is totally useless in that environment unless you add plenty of rubber to make it nice and black. The white smoke just blended in with the landscape.

Bites and sting danger - Of course, survival also means avoiding the bity, stingy things in the bush. It wasn't so bad that you had to watch where you put your feet all the time, but it was a good idea to watch where you put your hands, like shoving them into a bush or leaning against trees. I noticed the bushmen kept well away from vegetation when they sat down in the shade of a tree.

Especially important was having some  footwear on at night. Our UV lights picked out a number of scorpions sitting outside their holes just waiting to ambush an insect ... or us! As soon as the UV light was taken away, they blended superbly into the sand.

I quickly learnt that putting on gloves to work in the bush was a sensible idea as I quickly collected a number of splinters and thorn cuts. An African version of Cat's claw thorn is evil stuff and will entangle you if you're not too careful. I was glad of the thicker cotton Rogue shirts, even though they might have seemed too heavy for the climate.

We only saw a couple of snakes, one wasn't poisonous at all, and there was no sighting of the dreaded puff-adder. I noticed the bushmen mostly went bare foot, which was a tribute to their hard soles - especially in the heat. I'll stick to surplus boots thanks.

Kit - I've put up a quick video showing what I carried on my person and in the day sack. It may help you if you ever go into this environment.

The Big Five - I suppose a fitting finale to end this series of "Pablo's Great Adventures In Africa" is to provide the same survival advice as we received when coming up against one of the Big Five...

... Whatever you do, don't run!