COUPLE FILMS LIFE AS IT IS ON `SKELETON COAST'

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 10, 1993                   TAG: 9304100329
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: S-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
COUPLE FILMS LIFE AS IT IS ON `SKELETON COAST'
Filmmakers Des and Jen Bartlett have lived and worked on the barren Skeleton Coast of southwest Namibia for nine years. They alone have captured on film nomadic elephants sliding down sand dunes, a lion - since killed - feeding on a beached whale and the almost magical desert vegetation that appears after a sudden thunderstorm.
This week, in "Survivors of the Skeleton Coast" (at 8 p.m. Wednesday on WBRA-Channel 15), National Geographic offers the Bartletts' spectacular footage as well as pictures of them at work.
Their home is a sand-blasted strip 300 miles long, named not only for the skeletons of wrecked ships, but also from the bleached bones of sailors who tried to cross the dunes.
The Australian-born Bartletts are pictured as they stride together overland, drive their Ford and Land Rover across the sand and take to the skies in ultra-light aircraft they put together from kits they ordered from the United States.
In almost every reference by narrator Peter Coyote, they are known as Des and Jen. Often they are almost identically outfitted in blue shirts and khaki trousers. Married for 37 years, they are together 24 hours of every day and sometimes see no one else for weeks.
They married in England when Jen, a former tennis player who competed with Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and Althea Gibson, was on a tennis trip and Des was scheduled to return to Africa to film.
Since then their home has been wherever they worked, from Alaska to Suriname and Argentina to Africa (they've made 14 films in Etosha National Park). They plan to continue on the Skeleton Coast for another year or so, then take a ship to film in the Antarctic.
On the Skeleton Coast, they have a cabin that the Namibian Department of Nature Conservation provided for a researcher studying elephants. Des called it "a flimsy little thing."
Weather on the Skeleton Coast can be hot and dry or cold and damp, depending on the winds coming off the ocean.
They catch fish from the ocean, eat vegetables (swiss chard, herbs, sometimes tomatoes) from their 6-by-6-foot sand garden, and buy supplies at the nearest town, 280 miles away. Their small medical kit is mainly bandages and eye drops.
They bake and roast in their cardboard-and-aluminum solar cooker, designed by two Arizona women, and take sponge baths using a few inches of hot water in a bucket. The water is used again to wash their clothes or poured into their garden.
They are on good terms with native Namibians, Jen said, "but we don't see very much of them."
Actually, they don't see very much of anybody. Of the five nature conservators who travel the 300-mile-long park area, two are assigned to the Bartletts' area. "But they may be out when we go back to our base for supplies and water," said Des.
The Bartletts chose the area in hopes of filming elusive desert-dwelling elephants, lions, giraffes and rhinoceros. They spotted the elephants from their aircraft and found the herd doing fairly well now that poaching for ivory has decreased. But the lions they'd come to know met a more tragic end: All eight strayed outside the park to find a water hole and were killed by Namibian natives fearing for their own lives or the lives of their cattle, goats and donkeys.
Des Bartlett began making wildlife films in 1952. Unlike most wildlife photographers in the days of black-and-white television, he has always shot in color. He made 14 films in Etosha National Park and said that the fate of the animals is "one of the conservation messages we try to get across."
The Bartletts took their daughter, Julie, with them wherever they were filming. They schooled her at home until she was 12, then sent her to boarding school in a country town in Australia.
Now, she and her husband, Jim Bruton, plan to bring up their son Tarl, 3 1/2, similarly. The boy visited his grandparents at the Skeleton Coast when he was 7 months old and went flying in their plane when he was 8 months.
"Tarl certainly loves the life we lead," Jen said.
Viewers may see more of Tarl. The Bartletts already have filmed the pilot of a children's series, "Travels With Tarl."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB