Welwitschias!

May was spent in Namibia, a first trip to this wonderful country.  It is a country of extraordinary contrasts in every way possible.  A modern capital city, and 50 km away tribal groups living in essentially 4th world conditions.  The trip was arranged by Guillermo Rivera of South American Nature Tours.  Sean Braine of  Batis Birding Tours was our guide.  Donald Smith, a lithoparian from England, Stan Yaloff from San Diego and Joey Glickman and Jenny Flannery of Los Angeles made up the rest of the group.  We were there to look at plants, and here are few Welwitschias.

Welwitschia mirabilis in Swatkop River Canyon with fellow travelers Stan Yaloff in Orange and Jenny Flannery walking out of the picture on right.  We spent several days looking at Welwitschias, which are more variable than you might expect.  Looking closer at these.

 

There are only two leaves, but as the plants age (these are a bit over 100 years) then the leaves become more and more fragmented with bare spots from the main stem.

A better look at the one in the lower left of the first picture.

 

And for scale sitting next to a female plant full of cones, each with hundreds of seeds and dozens of orange bugs resembling beetles eating them.  We never saw the orange bugs anywhere except on Welwitschias, and saw them on every Welwitschia with cones.  They are the  Welwitschia Bug (Probergrothius sexpunctatis) to be fully latinized.

Swatkop River Canyon is home to not only fantastic plants but also to amazing geology.  A diorite dike cuts through a rock range.  Deep in the canyon are these intersecting diorite dikes, the record of early geologic upheavals in what is the oldest desert in the world.

The following day we headed further up the coast to look at some larger specimens.

And for scale again

The largest of these plants is about 700 years old.  Not shown are the seedling plants, only 20 to 50 years old that are around all of the more photogenic plants.  These are not rare, there are thousands that we could see from out van.

Much further east there is another population of Welwitschias that are out of the fog belt and live on sporadic summer rain.  They are much smaller, and the color appears slightly different, although this could easily be the soil.  Everything we saw reflected the local soil color.

Next on to the other great plants of Namibia!