We stopped for big unusual rocks, and a flock of goats which appeared to be herded by three dogs. There was no sign of a person.

We looked about for a shop to buy some bits and pieces but our travel guides were unanimous: there ain’t one. Not for miles and miles and miles. Well actually there is one, a breeze-block and chicken-wire hut at a t-junction. We went in and found a big friendly lady with a small boy who pointed out a chuntering fridge in the almost completely dark recesses of her earthen-floored shop. There were rickety shelves too with tinned vegetables, baked beans, crisps, toothpaste and deodorant. We had hoped for bread and maybe eggs but that was pushing it. We got some bits and pieces and said goodbye. I gave the one-armed man standing outside in the dust a few coins, ostensibly for watching the car but actually because I felt bad for him in that desolate place.

Twyfelfontein has one of the largest – perhaps the largest –  collections of rock engravings in Africa. They were carved by Bushmen between two and six thousand years ago, when the area was filled with rhino and elephant and big cats, most of which have since been hunted to almost complete eradication, but then re-introduced. You have to have a guide and we paid for one at the visitor centre run by a rather curt young woman with an exaggerated sense of her own importance. She summoned a guide, who could barely have been more bored or monosyllabic. All the guides have to wear what looks like a rather uncomfortable army uniform and maybe it makes them irritable. Anyway she took us along the trail and pointed out a range of engravings, though only a small fraction of what is there.

There were lots of giraffe which (were were told) were seen as having the power to bring down rain with their long necks, and so they were never hunted. There was a splendid lion with a bird in its mouth and a five fingered hand at the end of its tail.

Apparently some of the animals were depicted with some human features as a sign that shamans could take their forms. We were also told that the Bushmen left the carvings as a guide for others about where to find animals.

I have to say that all of this strikes me as guesswork given that no-one even knows exactly which people were living in the area before about 1940. Even when the Damara who’d moved in were cleared so that the land could be given to white settlers there was no-one around who understood what the engravings really meant (according to the guide anyway). They were lovely though. A beautifully rounded elephant and spiky nosed rhino and – extraordinarily – a couple of seals. That suggested that the Bushmen were used to going to the coast to trade.  It was well worth the trip despite the annoying staff.

In the late afternoon light we sought out the “organ pipes”; tall columns of dolomite which had formed a small gorge. Then to Burnt Mountain a couple of K further down the track which supposedly glowed astonishingly in the late afternoon light, but apparently not this afternoon as it just looked a bit like a slag heap.

Last stop, the wonderful Mowani Lodge campsite, set amid a jumble of big red boulders. Its beautifully done with a proper bathroom in a cave and hot water, courtesy of the man who lit the fire under the water tank as we pulled in. As I write there is something yipping very loudly in the dark behind us. Fox? Hyena? Philippa? Who knows. Quite a place to celebrate our sixteenth wedding anniversary… Night all.