We spent one afternoon and then an early morning in the abandoned town of Kolmanskop, also called Kolmannskuppe (in German). A diamond was found in the area in 1908, which launched a full scale diamond rush, much like the gold rush of the mid 1800’s in California.  The town nearly vacated in 1928, when a far richer (and the richest diamond strike still known) was found 270km from here.  The last resident finally left in 1954, leaving behind a town to be taken over by nature.  In Namibia, that means taken over by sand.

The town is now run as a tourist attraction by deBeers. It has very limited visiting hours, but our tour guide (Ryan Dyar) arranged for us to be there during periods closed to everyone else.  That allowed us to create eerie images of a truly abandoned town taken over by the blowing sands.

I have seen occasional images from this area before, and wanted to visit it as a result.  However, in my mind, the town would be similar to Bodie in California — a small mining ghost town with a couple of intriguing buildings.  Instead, we discovered an entire town with buildings intact, though deteriorating, being taken over by the desert. We could easily post 100 interesting photos from these two sessions, but will limit to the 25 shown here.

Shortly after dawn, we walked the streets to capture images of the exterior of the buildings, showing urban decay at its peak.

Wandering the dozens of buildings, we came across numerous rooms with the sand coming in reclaim them back to nature. We were both blessed and cursed by calm winds for these few days.  It was pleasant not to need to fight a raging sandstorm, which would be rough on both body and camera.  However, the lack of wind meant that the footprints of the hordes of tourists from the prior day were still visible in the sand in almost every room.  On more blustery days, the sand gets wiped clean by the next morning.

In many rooms, the doors were ajar and often off the hinges. The remains of their original color and even wall paper could still be seen, creating an other-worldly image.

Sand even invaded through windows, whether open or with broken panes. The play of light and shadow was astounding.

A few homes had hallways that allowed us to peak from room to room from a single vantage point, past the open (and sometimes isolated and buried) doors.

This open window showed the landscape that the miners must have seen daily from their homes, when they still lived here.