"Africa." "There's nowhere else quite like it." "A billion people, speaking thousands of languages." "Incredible landscapes." "And astonishing wildlife." "I want to explore Africa by rail." "I want to meet its people." "I want to experience its breathtaking beauty." "From arid desert... ..to dense forest." "From wide savanna... ..to mighty river." "I'm navigating my way through a continent." "In this episode I'm crossing wild terrain in south west Africa." "I'm travelling into a part of the world where the names tell the story." "The land that God built in anger." "The Skeleton Coast." "The Gates of Hell." "This is Namibia." "Building a railway here seems like madness, but I'm glad they did, as I embark on one of the most spectacular journeys on the earth." "The rivers here seldom run with water." "Namibia has the least rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa." "It is home to what is considered to be the oldest desert in the world." "Until the railways, getting around was difficult to say the least." "And even with them, it's not going to be easy." "But I'm starting my journey in the very far north of the country, in the town of Oshikango." "This is a busy place, isn't it?" "Oshikango, here, effectively is a border town." "Angola is about 200 yards up there." "And the whole place has the smell of wheeler-dealing." "Everybody here is out to make a quick buck." "Basically it's just trade that happens here, and that's the reason that they've built a brand new railway, which I'm going to take my journey on." "It's hoped that this railway will spread the wealth, even beyond the 1500 people who stream back and forth across the border each day, buying and selling." "Here in Namibia, trade and trains go hand-in-hand." "Can I buy some?" "Thank you." "It's a mopane worm." "It's a delicacy." "I think they're supposed to be cooked." "But perhaps not as much as that." "I'm looking for the station which is called the Reverend Hamutumbangela Station." "Hamutumbangela Station?" "Yes." "The station behind this building." "God bless all of you." "And it just... good journey and good safe." "Thank you." "Well, thank you." "But it turns out that 'just behind that building' actually means... about a mile away." "Well, they... they certainly haven't made the station handy." "When I get there, my route will take me south, passing Etosha National Park, before crossing the Namib Desert to the coast." "From there I'll travel via the capital to Luderitz, where they're battling to rebuild a railway across the sands." "The line I'm travelling on today is just two years old." "And apparently passengers are still an uncommon occurrence." "I want to go to Tsumeb." "With a... with a train?" "With a train, yes." "Can you tell me, how much is that ticket?" "114." "Here we are." "I have 200." "There we go." "Less than seven pounds for a seven-hour journey, on a train with only one passenger carriage." "Morning." "What you have to understand is that the majority of the railways in Namibia are freight orientated." "And the passengers are just another piece of freight, so we attach ourselves to whatever freight train is leaving." "Here it comes." "Thank you." "Welcome, sir." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Here we go." "I've got the entire carriage pretty much to myself." "Overall, fewer than 200 passengers a day use the trains in the whole of Namibia." "Well, that's goodbye Oshikango." "Of course I'm hoping on this journey that I'll meet people, although that may not be as easy as it sounds, because Namibia is one of the most sparsely populated places on earth." "There are about two million people here, and they're living in an area the size of Germany and France combined." "It's not long before we stop for more wagons." "Oooh!" "At last... ..another passenger." "She's from the Owambo tribe and she's coming into my compartment." "Thankfully the inspector is a willing translator." "What is her name?" "Giopolina." "Giopolina." "My name is Griff." "Griff." "Pleased to meet you." "How do I say hello...?" "Wa lalapo." "Wa lalapo." "Yes." "She's pensioner." "Pensioner." "And when you get to over 60, you are able to get a discount." "Yes." "Hey, look." "this is my pensioner card." "We stop and then we start." "And then we stop again." "The 200-mile journey takes eight hours." "And when we arrive in Tsumeb, we have 40 wagons in tow." "Tsumeb!" "We're there." "We've reached the platform." "After the free-for-all spirit of Oshikango," "Tsumeb feels a bit orderly." "Thank you." "Wealth here isn't down to the trade in mopane worms but copper, tin, lead, and other minerals." "And that all goes by train to the coast for export." "Most visitors passing through, though, come for a different reason." "The town we're in now, Tsumeb, which you can see, pretty well-heeled in many respects, is only a few kilometres from the Etosha National Park." "55,000 acres of wildlife reserve." "The Great White Place." "It's called the Great White Place in the local Oshindonga language because at the centre of Etosha is a giant salt pan." "This is one of Namibia's main tourist attractions." "And at first, you think you've come here to stare at nothing." "Once a river ran through this place... ..and created a gigantic shallow lake, which is nealry 100 miles long and 30 miles wide in places." "And then the river ran away and created a huge clay basin with a layer of salt on top of it, that's visible from space." "This is clearly where they have meetings of the Flat Earth Society." "All around the salt pan, though, water holes attract the thirsty." "These gazelles are rather relieved that the lions are hot and tired." "Tomorrow I've been invited to sneak up on another icon of African wildlife, which I'm not entirely sure is a good idea." "But tonight I'm camping on top of a rocky outcrop in the neighbouring Ongava Game Reserve." "How many rooms are there here?" "We are only having three rooms." "Only three rooms in this entire camp?" "Yeah." "That means we only accommodate six people." "Only six people can come here?" "Yeah." "Enjoy your stay." "Goodbye." "Thank you very much." "Thank you." "Bye-bye." "OK, this is my... this is my wilderness camp for the evening." "Well, it's some tent!" "Rumour has it Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie roughed it here." "His and Her sinks." "Yes." "I don't need that sort of choice." "Ohhhhh, look at that." "Just a little balcony." "This is officially designated a camp because the whole place can be dismantled and removed." "Ecological, flatpack super luxury." "Yes." "Look." "I've got my own little private infinity pool here." "Not a his and hers but, you know, that's enough for the two of us." "And they've booked me in for two weeks." "As if!" "In fact, I'm practically just looking." "In a few hours, at first light, I'm venturing into the bush with an anti-poaching team." "They're on rhinoceros patrol, and I've been told I have to wear proper safari clothes." "They have to be stone or khaki." "No, it's pink." "Is that stone?" "That's quite stone, isn't it?" "The trouble is, you either look like a bush, or you look like a rhinoceros." "And if you don't look out, you'll be shot by a poacher, thinking you're a rhinoceros." "I'd stand out in this, wouldn't I?" "I'd look like a lion." "Or something." "There's always a down side in paradise." "My journey through Namibia has taken me to Etosha National Park." "Poachers have recently killed two rhinos for their horns." "And this morning I'm joining the Ongava Anti-poaching unit on patrol." "This is a serious business." "There's a real chance of confronting armed poachers, not to mention hostile locals." "Obviously rhino." "Mm-hm." "Lion." "Mm-hm." "Elephant?" "Elephant." "OK." "Might be also leopard." "Leopard." "Also may be leopard." "But if you see any lion approaching, don't run." "If you run then I'm going to shoot you." "I will leave the lion and shoot you." "OK." "So, in case, please, do not run." "OK?" "All good?" "You ready?" "I'm very excited." "You look good today." "Really?" "Nature." "Good." "Nature." "Good." "Thank you." "I spent a lot of time last night worrying about what to wear." "OK." "Binius leads his patrol into the bush on what has become a daily necessity." "There's still a heavy market for rhino horn." "And so in regions where people are as poor as they are in Africa, the temptations are enormous." "So, how do you find rhino in thick bush?" "It leaves its tell-tale traces." "Or perhaps I should say mounds." "Rhino." "But very old." "Right." "Might be of, like, three, four days." "So if we get fresh ones, then we're gonna, like, touch them and feel them, and give it a taste." "Thank you." "I'm looking forward to that." "Ah, yes." "Fresh rhinoceros poo is much more appetising." "Look, what's this?" "Fresh." "That's from the zebra." "That's from a zebra?" "OK." "We finally pick up the trail of a mother and calf." "So here's a front paw." "Here's the other one." "And it's heading that way." "OK." "Knowing they can charge at 30mph," "I'm glad I dressed inconspicuously." "You see the big tree?" "The big one in the back?" "It's under the tree." "It's moving." "You see?" "I see him, I see him." "There's... the mother... ..and the baby." "Just looking at us now." "There they are in the clearing." "Still waggling her ears a little bit because she can hear something over here." "What an extraordinary privilege to be able to see this." "Most beautiful." "It's a disturbing fact that the horn we're looking at here has a street value of around £100,000." "It's worth more than its weight in gold." "Poachers are like thieves." "They go in that area, they investigate the area, and then the day when they decide to go poaching, it's like a blink of a second." "Yeah." "And then they get it." "But what you're doing today is monitoring, keeping an eye." "So this is one rhino that we've seen, even just from a distance, that we can tick off and say, she's OK at the moment." "And you know where she is, roughly." "We know at least she is still in the property, she's not been poached." "We know that she's safe." "Under the watchful eye of Binius and his team, the rhinos here have a chance of a long life." "From Tsumeb, there are no passenger rail services at all." "Not even a single carriage attached to the back of a goods wagon." "So I'm hitching a lift on a southbound freight train, 120 miles to the town of Otjiwarongo, hoping to get even closer to another of Namibia's wildlife pin-ups." "Hello." "Otjiwarongo?" "Otjiwarongo?" "Yeah." "Yeah!" "Morning, sir." "Morning." "I am Griff." "Jimmy." "Jimmy." "Hello." "Nice to meet you." "Otjiwarongo." "Are we all set to go, then?" "Yeah." "Can I pull the whistle?" "You can pull it." "Only freight trains go from here because that's all this line was ever designed to do." "These railways weren't constructed out of any population requirement." "Nobody was supposed to take the train." "The earth was supposed to take the train." "The metals." "The goods." "Anything that could be dug out." "But for me, this is a railway to heaven." "Namibia's bushveld, thick with scrub and stunted trees, yields a series of endlessly unfolding vistas." "This is undoubtedly, in many respects - and forgive me here - the coolest place to be on this train." "I'm leaving Jimmy and his goods wagons to continue their journey, because there's something near Otjiwarongo that I want to see." "This is the cheetah capital of the world." "Home to the last large population in Africa." "But they share this land." "And they aren't everyone's idea of perfect neighbours." "The country we're driving through now is prime Namibian farmland." "Some of the farms here are as big as 100,000 hectare in size." "And the cattle roam around in it." "And this is the sort of territory that cheetahs thrive in." "But as far as the... ..as far as the farmers are concerned, the cheetah is seen as a predator, seen as a form of vermin, and they want to kill them off." "Cheetahs are now the most endangered cats in Africa." "And when adult cheetahs are shot, orphaned cubs are left behind." "I've come to the renowned Cheetah Research Centre to see what they do with them." "The Centre is run by Dr Laurie Marker." "Originally from Detroit, she's devoted 40 years of her life to cheetahs and is one of the world's leading experts." "Dr Laurie, I presume." "Nice to have you here." "I'm Griff." "We're gonna go out to where we're gonna run the cheetahs." "And these are orphan cheetahs." "The mother was shot, and they brought the cubs to us." "We're going to exercise our cheetahs." "So we've got a lure set up over here." "We're gonna show you that and you can maybe give it a try." "And this is a machine that was designed for greyhounds?" "Right." "You wanna give it a try?" "Yeah." "So this goes in two directions." "Got a neutral in the middle." "So if I go like that, it just sets off." "Oh, that's the other way." "Well done." "But the point is, this will travel at what sort of speed?" "It's about 45, 50 kilometres an hour." "It's half speed of what a cheetah could run." "What they have is extraordinary power." "They crouch down just to get the sense of timing..." "From nought to 60 in just three seconds is impressive enough." "But watch how they use their muscular tail as a counterbalance, and the way their head and gaze stayed locked on that moving target." "It's an astonishing sight." "Having been bottle-fed, these cheetahs are too tame to ever be released." "It's activities like this that are able to give them a quality of life." "It's terrific." "Caring for orphans is one part of the work here." "They also help prevent orphans being created in the first place." "Here in Namibia, we're different than most countries, because 80% of our wildlife actually lives on the same land as where all the livestock lives." "Part of your job is to educate farmers, because the temptation is to see the cheetah as vermin, as like a fox, that's something that needs to be eradicated." "That's what you're trying to stop happening." "If you protect your livestock, then your wildlife's out there." "The cheetah prefers, as do the leopards and the other predators, they prefer wildlife." "They don't want to wantonly eat your livestock." "And that's why livestock management plays such an important role." "How can the fastest predator on the planet exist alongside cattle and goats, without eating them?" "It's a problem." "But Laurie thinks she's found an answer." "And it's a cute one." "It involves breeding and then giving away" "Anatolian shepherd dogs to farmers." "Cheetahs are scared of them." "And it's been hugely successful." "Hello." "Hello." "Hello." "Hello." "So the whole idea is that these dogs are embedded with herds from the earliest age, and then they grow up with the herds, and then at a later date, they go out with them in the wild" "and they'll bark if cheetahs come close." "I don't know why they're not treating me as a predator." "See, I just don't look like a cheetah." "I look like a goat." "I'm picking up my rail journey again at Usakos." "From here I'm taking the train 100 miles across the Namib Desert to one of the most surprising towns in Africa." "At first glance, there's nothing untoward about by departure point." "At least I'll know where I am." "This is the most notable landmark in this place." "It's called The Witch's Hat." "It's a water tower." "And under that hat was the magical elixir for all steam trains." "Once upon a time, Usakos was an essential stopping-off point to fill up with water before puffing across the desert." "Even though the trains are diesel these days, this is still a last-stop town for fuel and bottled water for the empty place ahead." "And in my case, well, I have other needs." "Can I just ask, is it all right if my film crew come in here?" "You're shooting a video?" "We're shooting a video, we are, for British television for ITV." "Good morning." "How are you, sir?" "I'm very good, thank you." "How are you this morning?" "How can I help you, sir?" "I've been allocated the last... wagon." "I think I've seen enough freight trains by now to know the necessary comforts." "We're offsky." "And I'm about to enter a region once known as The Gates of Hell." "I'm making my way across Namibia by train." "Since the railways here were built for freight rather than passengers," "I'm finding myself transported as a commodity, as I head into the Namib Desert." "The Namib... is just an area of sand." "There is nothing there." "They can't mark out geological features because the sand, the area, the world, is shifting the whole time." "It's literally unmappable." "The Namib is 55 million years old." "Said to be the oldest desert on our planet." "It stretches along nearly the entire 1,000 miles of Namibia's western coast." "This is our planet in the raw." "Bare, naked, unclothed." "Shaped by nothing except the wind and seismic movements of the earth's crust for the last 1,000 million years." "And as such, it looks like nothing on earth." "It looks other-worldly." "We could be on Mars." "Giant 1,000ft sand dunes separate the sea from the interior." "It was this unforgiving environment that led sailors to call it" "The Gates of Hell." "Not only is there nowhere to shelter during a storm, but on around 180 days a year, when the fierce desert heat collides with icy cold air from the Atlantic, a thick fog engulfs the coast." "No wonder, then, there is a graveyard of shipwrecks all along the shore." "But we must shelter where we can." "This is covered wagon." "This is open wagon." "This is scenic." "This is carriage." "This is broken." "After four hours my train terminates at a town that doesn't look particularly Namibian." "It doesn't look like it belongs here." "Well, this is, er... ..this is a different sort of Africa, isn't it?" "This is Swakopmund." "And if that sounds like a German name, it's because it IS a German name." "Over 100 years ago, Namibia was a German colony, and this was its main port." "It's where the German holidaymakers still find their place in the sun." "You can hear... ..you can hear German..." "spoken quite a lot round here." "This is... this is supposed to be, in all the guide books... ..Bavaria by the sea." "But that's only for people who have never been to Bavaria." "But it is German." "The German lingers." "Which is quite an achievement, because they only actually occupied this place, ruled Namibia, for 30 years." "But they did leave a very important legacy, because, like all the colonial powers, what they wanted to do was exploit the place." "And in order to do that, they realised that the desert was gonna be an impossibility." "But being firm believers in advancement through technology, in 1897, they built the first railway line, so that they could get at the rest of their new colony." "Before then, the only way to travel the 230 miles to the capital at Windhoek was by ox and cart." "It was a gruelling journey." "It took three weeks." "But then the oxen needed a further three months to recover... ..if they survived at all." "It is a deadly desert." "This place is..." "totally unliveable in." "You would have thought." "It's about as dry as any area on earth." "And yet the Topnaar have always survived out here." "Topnaar means the people of the point." "Those who live on the margins." "But they weren't struggling in the desert." "They were thriving, well before the arrival of any Europeans." "And these people were content to live here." "They didn't come here to take things away or to discover minerals." "They've managed to exist here... ..in harmony with this environment for thousands of years." "I'm on my way to meet a Topnaar named Herman at a dry river bed that still provides enough moisture for vegetation." "Including a sort of melon that's been central to the Topnaar's existence." "How are you?" "Good to meet you." "Nice to meet you." "And you." "You are welcome." "Are we gonna collect some melons?" "Yes, of course." "I wait for you already." "You're late." "Oh, I'm sorry about that." "You've got some melons there." "They're very ripe." "And when we see them like that, they more resemble a squash or a pumpkin, don't they?" "Can I have a look at it?" "Yeah." "Look at the seeds and the very ripe flesh in there." "The flesh has a high water content, and is edible raw." "It can be cooked into a sweet porridge and the seeds can be dried, roasted, or even ground, to make flour." "Nothing is wasted." "Now the melon, what is its name?" "In our mother tongue, it is Nara." "Nara." "Nara." "Yeah." "It sound like music." "So how would you say in your language, in your mother tongue," "'We are going to collect Nara.'" "It does sound like music." "Let's go." "Yeah." "Let's go." "The nara is a hardy fruit, surviving temperatures of over 50 degrees Centigrade." "But each specific thorny bush is identified and owned by a family over generations." "Well, whilst you are knocking on the ripe Nara... ..it sounds like an inflated hoop or ball." "I'm just gonna listen to them first." "Is that a football or a bowling ball?" "I'm gonna come over here and do this one." "Yeah, that sounds like a cricket ball." "This one?" "Which is the ripest of those?" "The nearest one is this one." "OK." "The one right in amongst the thorns here." "Aagh..." "There we are." "It's a fine and heavy thing." "The nara is the culinary equivalent of a Swiss Army knife." "A remarkable array of possibilities, all in one portable package." "Most usefully, turned into a paste and dried in the sun, it hardens and sweetens and lasts for years." "And look, it's made itself into a sort of toffee." "And Herman calls this his Topnaar chocolate." "So, what you can do is roll it in to make a sort of sausage." "Break it off." "And just sort of chew the end of the sausage." "Mmm." "That is good." "And it does taste of chocolate." "It does." "It tastes of chocolate." "Wow." "I've come a long way, right into the desert, to find my perfect food." "For the final leg of my journey," "I've flown to Namibia's most southerly port" " Luderitz." "For the last 16 years, this place has been cut off from the rail networks, after the desert sands swallowed the existing tracks." "But that's about to change." "And I've been invited to take a test run on the brand new section that will reconnect this town and turn it into a major centre for import and export." "In the early 1900s," "Luderitz was used as a place to land troops during the German occupation." "It took off." "Fishing became central to the economy and that's because the waters here are out of the ordinary." "Everything along this coast, from the fog to the fish, is dependent on a current called the Benguela current." "It's a cold current that comes up from the Antarctic, but it brings an incredible amount of plankton and makes the fish fat." "And also oysters." "So I'm heading out into the bay with Lenny and his gang to see first-hand what it takes to produce around 13 million oysters a year." "I see." "OK." "Like that." "And how many bags are you going to put on?" "We always..." "This man is gonna put eight bags on, seven or eight bags." "The oysters are imported as tiny babies all the way from Chile." "and left in the shallows for five months before being moved here to the deeper waters." "They're put into these bags now, and then they're stuck on these ropes and they're just hung in the water." "And after three months, they're big enough to eat." "And that's fast." "A oyster growing in British waters would take five years to mature." "All the juicy plankton here just plumps them up." "There we are." "Good." "It's like science fiction, isn't it?" "These are science fiction." "These are triffid oysters." "And that's why aquaculture is big business here." "And, of course, when it comes to lunch in Ludaritz, there really is only one option." "There we are." "Somebody or other once said, 'It was a bold man that first ate an oyster.'" "But I find, after the first one, the next few go down quite easily." "The Benguela current is not only responsible for creating fat oysters." "Over 90 million years it also carried another valuable commodity here." "Washed into the ocean from South African rivers, and now scattered in the Namibian sands." "Luderitz... ..is right on the edge... ..of the forbidden area." "Well, the restricted area." "You are simply not allowed to wander into it." "And the reason is... ..there are diamonds there." "This area, it's the size of Wales." "No, I'm not kidding." "It really is the size of Wales." "It's 20,000 square kilometres." "And you are forbidden to go in there and start walking about picking up diamonds." "But the trouble with any restricted area, is immediately it's called a restricted area," "I want to go there." "But since there have been incidents of people being shot when wandering too close to mining operations," "I don't think I will." "I'll stick to the bit eight miles from Luderitz that's publicly accessible." "This is Kolmanskop." "The sand giveth... ..and the sand taketh away." "In the 1920s, it was the centre of the Namibian diamond rush, after a railway worker, clearing sand from the tracks, found a diamond lying in the sand." "1,200 people came to live here, and times were good." "They had a theatre, a bowling alley, and a casino, and this krankenhous, or hospital, which was the first in Africa to have an X-ray machine." "But the X-ray machine wasn't there in order to check up on the health of the patients." "It was there to check whether they'd swallowed any diamonds they were trying to smuggle out of the place." "The town only lasted 30 years." "When the diamonds went, so did the people." "The only trouble is, they did actually find their diamonds in the dust." "And once you know that, you can't help thinking... ..I wonder if they just missed one?" "This region is one of the windiest places on the planet." "It's the reason the sands here are constantly shifting, covering and reclaiming." "It's also the reason the old rail line was closed 16 years ago." "Now this new line is almost complete." "Though the exposed section through the dunes... ..will always need a bit of dusting down." "Closer to town, workers are laying the final few sections of the track." "What's happening is, they're straightening the line here." "And everybody does it together in rhythm, just to give it a little shove, because we're on the last few miles of a track, which effectively has been worked on for the last ten years." "Because there's an area of shifting dunes, about seven kilometres, and over the last century the track deteriorated, and now this is a big thrust, a big, big initiative to get this line open." "What is the song you're singing?" "Take it, push it, take it, push it." "Take it, push it, take it, push it, take it, push it." "Yeah, that's when they're pushing it." "OK, I'm gonna be the foreman." "Excellent." "The completed section is undergoing its final checks." "And I've been invited on a test ride." "This is a fitting end to my trip across Namibia." "So here I am." "I am taking what is effectively... ..one of the first trains into the last stop on my line." "It was great to meet the gang, working away, singing away, because this project is more than just an economic advantage, this project here is also a form of memorial because this train line, when it was originally built," "was built by the colonialists with slave labour." "And for every 100 metres of the original track, a man died." "So it's a moving thing to be travelling on this line." "Soon this railway will reconnect Luderitz to the rest of the country's network." "It will allow goods to flow to South Africa and up to Namibia's northern border, where I began my journey a thousand miles ago." "Well, there we are." "If I were to sum up Namibia in one word, it would be 'spectacular.'" "The place puts on an incredible show." "It may not be the easiest country to travel across by train... ..but it's been a hell of a ride." "In the next episode, the railways take me into the continent's richest and most southerly country " "South Africa." "I'll explore the rainbow nation, from its cities to its vast expanses, and reach the very end of the line."