My wife, Salome, and I had a group of guests on safari in Namibia and we were going to spend the day exploring the Lunar Landscape just outside the town of Swakopmund. We set off into this magnificent, but potentially dangerous, stretch of land, on a road that wound through rocky hills which were mostly devoid of vegetation, and then slipped down to the waterless Swakop River, which was lined with large acacias, before moving out onto a flat grassless plain where I knew of an exceptionally large welwitschia specimen. As we stepped from the vehicle onto this vast landscape, with distant mountains gazing down on us, my mind went back to a guest who had visited our lodge in the Okavango some years before.

I immediately went to the fridge at the back of the vehicle and offered everyone a beer. It was about 10.30 in the morning, so my suggestion was received with raised eyebrows.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘You never know out in this desert when you might regret the refusal of a beer.’ Then I told them of a drama that had unfolded from this very spot where we were admiring the strange plant.

Salome and I had had a lodge in the Okavango and we had received a radio message that an important adviser to the German government, a Baron van der Ropp, was arriving that morning and that we needed to give him special attention.

The Baron was one of the largest men we had ever seen, measuring around seven foot six from the bottom of his size 14 boots to the top of his wispy hair and he was built like a panzer tank. He put me in mind of those fierce knights who used to extort toll money from merchants along the Rhine. Dressed in armour and wielding a double-edged sword in each hand, he would have been terrifying.

He was too big to fit on just one of our single beds, and we had to push three of them together so that his feet did not hang over the bottom and his shoulders did not drape over each side.  Salome lit two mosquito coils under them, one near his head and another near his feet, in an attempt to protect his huge frame against these nocturnal killers.

After he had settled into his room and bounced around a bit on the beds to see if they would support him, he joined the other guests in the lodge area. Salome offered him a beer. While she poured it a small amount of foam split over the edge of the glass and he boomed at her, ‘Don’t you dare to vaste beer like zat!’

Salome, taken aback at this outburst, offered to pour him another.

“No, zat’s not necessary! Give me zat beer.”

I went up to him, strained my neck as I peered skyward to see his face, and squeaked, ‘Hey!  She only spilt a little foam. What’s your problem?’

He looked at me as though I was a cockroach that he was about to step on and made me suddenly glad that he did not carry a sword. ‘I’ll tell you why I hate beer being wasted. I hope zat you have zee time.’

“Shoot, we’ve got loads of time,” I replied, pouring myself a coke.

‘Ja, fine,” he took a sip of the precious amber, cleared his throat and started his tale. In his job as advisor to the German government, he frequently travelled to Windhoek, and on one such occasion found himself with a weekend to kill – so he flew to Swakopmund where he decided to take a day trip to the Moon Landscape. He booked with one of the tour operators, and joined two English couples on a tour. The giant welwitschia that we were admiring was off their standard route, but the guide had offered to show it to them.

After they had fallen to their knees in admiration they headed back but had not gone far on their return journey when the vehicle’s engine cut out. The guide, a crusty old hand, failed in his efforts to start it again so he told them that he would walk for help as he knew of a team of geologists based on a nearby mountain. He instructed the group that while he was away they should remain with the vehicle, as there were drinks and food enough for a day.

The Baron insisted, in his over-bearing manner, on joining him. The guide shrugged his shoulders, told him that the mountain looked much closer than it really was, and that if he wanted to come along he had better hurry as there was no time to waste. The nobleman followed immediately, dressed only in shorts and sandals as it was a warm afternoon and he welcomed the chance to get a tan.

After about an hour, the mountain looked no closer than when they had left and the Baron’s back was starting to burn, so he decided to turn back. The guide just shrugged again.

At first, Van der Ropp was relieved to feel the sun on the other side of his body – but when there was no sign of the vehicle on the flat, open plain after an hour and a half of steady walking, it started to dawn on him that he might be lost in this barren wilderness.

After another hour’s fruitless searching, the sun was scorching him and his pace quickened but to no avail, as all he could see was the open plain.

Although the lost Baron did not know it at the time, the guide had reached his destination, realised with a shock that it was the wrong mountain and set off for the next one. Meanwhile the group waiting at the vehicle had spent an uncomfortable day in blazing sun, although it was not a life-threatening situation as they had enough food and drink.

The temperature plummeted rapidly after sunset and van der Ropp spent a sleepless night shivering from both the cold and a fever caused by sunburn. He was also desperately thirsty as well as hungry.

The guide’s wife eventually reported the group’s non-arrival to her husband’s business partner, who set off to look for them – and returned empty-handed to Swakopmund three hours later because they had left the standard route. The guide, in the meantime, had walked right through the night to reach the geologists in the early hours of the morning. There was no communication with town, so he borrowed a truck and set off to Swakopmund to get a relief vehicle.

The group at the Land Rover had also spent a cold uncomfortable night and, in the early morning when their rescuers had not arrived, they tried to start the vehicle. To their amazement, it fired straight away. They headed off in the direction that they had come in on and somehow blundered up against the Swakop River. They decided to follow the riverbed to Swakopmund, but as none of them were experienced 4×4 drivers they managed to wedge the vehicle against a tree on a steep down-slope. They did not dare to try to drive it further, for fear of it tumbling down onto the rocks below.

By mid-morning, the guide had reached Swakopmund and alerted the town. A vehicle was sent out to the welwitschia site but found the place deserted. The ground was too hard for the Land Rover to have left clear tracks, so they soon gave up trying to follow it and returned to their headquarters, expecting to find everybody there. When it was realised that they had not arrived, a spotter plane was sent out, but because the vehicle was lodged under a tree, it could not be seen from the air. Eventually someone at the stricken vehicle lit on the idea of burning a tyre, and when the thick black smoke was spotted a rescue vehicle was sent back out to retrieve them.

A celebratory party was scheduled for that evening, and it was only when they all got together that they realised that the Baron was neither with the guide nor with the vehicle.

He had spent another searing day wandering the desert without food, water or suitable clothing, followed by a freezing night. He was also dehydrated and confused (because his brain was now starved of liquid), when he found a euphorbia plant that was full of a milky sap he gratefully slurped it. Almost instantly, his mouth started burning fiercely and then it blistered and began to rot, with chunks of skin peeling off.

I have experienced euphorbia sap in my eyes and have some idea of the agony that he went through. The pain was instant and unbearable, and while I was running around like a guinea fowl screaming ‘be quick, be quick,’ Salome was reading aloud the dangers of blindness from eye contact with euphorbia sap. I can still remember the agony of that experience and can begin to empathise with the Baron. He would have blistered inside his mouth and all the way down though his oesophagus to his stomach, and he had nothing with which to dilute it. The suffering, without a shot of morphine, would have been unbearable.

A search plane flew overhead so he ripped off his shorts and waved them frantically to attract attention, but they never spotted him in that vastness. He mentally surrendered to the agony and the disappointment of watching the aircraft fly off and tried to cut his wrists with the edge of a Zambuck tin, the only item that he had other than his shorts and sandals. It was too blunt to make any real impression, so he tried tearing the veins out of his wrists with his teeth. Even that failed and he became completely delirious as his ordeal entered its third day.

At some stage in his delirium a waiter, with no feet and no hands, came gliding across the desert towards him, balancing a number of ice-cold beers on a tray. As the steward drew close the desperate, tongue-swollen wanderer gasped, “Please give me a beer.”

The waiter looked down at the prostrate Baron and haughtily said, “Sorry sir, but you have not ordered,” and continued on his way.

We now understood his phobia about spilt beer but the story continued.

He fell into a coma, close to death, and remembered nothing further. Fortunately, the German government had been informed that he was missing and they requested that the South African government spare no expense in finding their senior advisor. An SADF helicopter discovered him face down in the open desert and ferried him directly to an intensive care unit in the country’s leading hospital. It took him three months to recover.

Our guests were so relieved to get back to the main road that they stood us to Swakopmund’s famous Black Forest cake and they did not dare to spill a crumb.

Many mistakes were made by just about everyone involved and the Baron only survived due to his high profile with the German government and an extraordinary amount of good fortune. If that was you, would you have survived? We will take a close look at what everyone should have done at various crucial stages of this debacle in the forthcoming blogs.