The end of the road as we know it

The sands of time are fast running out on our travels, but we're having a last good-time fling before bowing to the inevitability of having to wash every day and actually work for a living.

When we arrived in Cape Town on 19 December two and half months of indulgent luxury (viz clean, sit-down toilets, good wine and typhoid-free salads) expanded ahead of us. It would last forever.

It didn't.

Christmas and New Year with my family wooshed by as quickly as saying "more wine?"; the Boardman clan's three weeks in the White House of Onrus were over after three bottles of Newton Johnson sauvignon blanc (apart from four days of looking after 6-month-old Isabella and fabulous '2 and half, soon I'll be 4' Beth); and on the Whale Trail, despite our best efforts, five days caught up with us before the five of us could kill a box of red. (Mind you, we did manage to work our way through 12 bottles of white. Easy hiking.)

And now we're in Swakopmund, on the coast of Namibia, moaning about the slow internet connection and wondering what the big deal is about Swakop. It does touch the heart for its tenacious perch on the Atlantic Ocean in a desperate effort to fend off the marching dunes of the Namib desert. But it's flat, modern (apart from a few stodgy remains from the German era), and its grid-like layout reminds too much of Australian towns of similar isolation.

But maybe we'll be converted to the charms of the town when I frog-march Amanda down to the beach in gentle persuasion to swim with me in the Arctic.

Sesriem and Sossusvlei, on the other hand, blew us away, and will probably be on the podium when it comes to handing out Highlights of our Year awards.

Sesriem is the campsite and Sossusvlei the dry (now) pan with centuries-old dead trees, both in the desert of big red sand dunes of the Namib Naukluf National Park. Starkly, deeply beautiful. If it had had broadband internet one could have lived there. (And I could have uploaded a few pics onto this blog).

Our campsite is a large spot under an immense camelthorn tree, enclosed by a low-packed stone wall (like Voortrekkers in our kraal). Our braai spot overlooks a plain of vividly yellow scrub while, on the left, the dunes climb to 300m and, on the right, raggedy mountains change colour throughout the day.

We share it with birds at breakfast time, stripy field mice during daylight hours and jackals, who come for dinner, circling our enclosure. One even enters our tent while we have dinner around the fire. We fall asleep to the sounds of their high-pitched yelping, and once or twice during the night have to shoo them from our tent with our imitation of lion-growls.

Mrs and Mr F Mice impertinently invade our space (admittedly, we invaded theirs first) and fearlessly sniff around us, our tent and our food. Even my tent-pole-in-hand menacing stance and lion-growls fail to instill fear, so we succumb and spend the rest of the three days in perfect harmony with the local wild life.

And so we cling to our last days as we traverse this immense country of perfect gravel roads, painfully beautiful scenery and no people in our sissy city car (never before have I suffered such four-wheel drive envy). Soon it will be over.