Swakopmund

Swakopmund is a town surprisingly bigger than I anticipated.  I expected a wide spot in the road with a few businesses, some scattered houses, and the rest vanishing into the desert and sea of my beleaguered imagination.  But surprisingly, it felt like a real town, a pleasant town, albeit still small, though like no other I had ever seen and as remote as a town on the Baja.  The air was cool, maybe 65 degrees.  The ocean waves were tumultuous and went from shore to to at least a quarter mile out where the big waves were first breaking.  It was a desolate beach, except for the town.  They had a pier like a miniature Huntington Beach that went into the water, wind, and waves a couple hundred yards out.

Where the pier began there was a fancy sea food restaurant with almost American prices.  From our table we drank beer and enjoyed the sun and the cool wind while we partook in good dining until the cold drove us into the restaurant.  The wall was filled with historic photos of German Army memories all the way through WWI and then there was, in my opinion, an obvious absence of WWII conquests.  The town had a definite  German feel to it: steep roofs, wide streets, German names and titles, and bright colors.  It could have been taken out of Germany for all that I knew.  The shops were quaint, clean, unique.  I could only guess at what the population was, but to me, it seemed like a small modern town in no place that I had ever imagined.

It was a small pleasure walking the quiet streets, visiting shops, always admiring the unique wares, tasting German custards or pastries or delving into a jerky shop where we sampled every kind of antelope that ranged Namibia.  They had an aquarium though it was not quite like Monterey Bay or the Scripps near San Diego.  And the fishes were a sampling of species my scuba diving days had yet produced.  But it was a pleasant addition to the little town, lending just a touch of the cosmopolitan to a place where you would least expect to find it.

I had wondered where the black population lived, since there seemed to be a sort of invisible segregation that was very difficult to discern.  The people all seemed to be integrated and at peace with their apparent roles, though I had heard, talking to various black African girls in Windhoek, that there was a distinct difference in the salaries.  In moving about in Namibia and Botswana, I am of the belief that at least the black Africans, or the majority of the working people make as little as $2 American per day and can be expected to work seven days a week, which for some reason shocked me.  I still haven’t been able to grasp it, as things seem really integrated.  But, I have tried to be observant without being obvious about my questions, and I am really beginning to think there is a distinct difference in the work that is done and the wages paid.  It seems the whites own the businesses, majority of automobiles, homes, and have a technological know-how, that is the doorway into prosperity.   We were trying to find our way back into town and drove into the outskirts of Swakopmund and ended up in an obvious section of the town that was all black.  There were little one room tin houses, elbow to elbow, basically within the confines of a fence where the native people tended to their private lives.  Again I wondered, was this a township? They did not seem hostile to the three of us poking around in the backwoods of this particular neighborhood, but there was a certain palpable indifference that made me feel like this was not a place that I would wander after sunset.  It went with the many stories that we heard in Windhoek about never leaving the car parked on the street without somebody watching it, and never being caught walking alone after dark.  There is definitely a contradiction hidden somewhere as during the day, all seems fine, but after dark, strangers beware.

The girls at the Chameleon told of the neighborhoods, the townships, where they lived outside of Windhoek.   The stories seemed a little hard to believe, given the apparent harmony, and relative politeness between the races, but I noticed as we were leaving Windhoek for Swakopmund, more neighborhoods north of town that were comprised of the one room tin homes, the “townships”.  I started seeing more of these neighborhoods as we drove back on our excursion.  It was the norm.  But who owned all the nicer homes in the city limits? They couldn’t all be white owned, could they? I say this because we just didn’t see that many whites, maybe 5% in the big picture of things.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying there is any society that I have been in, dominated by one race or the other,  that is by any means desirable.  In South Africa, for decades and decades, the whites were brutally repressive; Now the African National Conference (the ANC)—pretty much the party Nelson Mandela started in South Africa which represented the majority of blacks—-is the dominant party and whites are on the short end of the political stick.  So given the opportunity, it doesn’t matter if black or white is in power, if that power is corrupt or at least not fair, the minority is going to suffer at the whims of the majority.  Namibia was unfolding as a bit of a mystery for me when it came to class—or maybe racial—roles.

Namibia

 

Allow me to back up.

It had all been interesting, and everywhere I went there seemed to be an experience worthy of the blogging spirit.  However, things were moving fast, and the internet had been only sporadically dependable.  It was not like travel in Asia where I holed up in a place I liked, scuba dived, interacted with the locals who often times had family in the U.S, and I could get to one place or another by public transport.  Here, it was a whole different experience.

We flew into Windhoek back around the 21st of July.  The city was 30 km from the small and isolated airport, but with three good sized jet liners having just landed from Amsterdam, Qatar, and some other unknown destination, I knew Windhoek was a destination of sorts, if not the U.S.  Nobody from the U.S. knows much about Namibia, let alone Windhoek, at least the people in my circle of friends.

We rented a car for five days and headed into the city.  Windhoek reflected a fairly modern atmosphere.  The central downtown was clean, relatively low-lying in the lack of sky scrapers, populated primarily by black Africans of modern attire, but intermittently dotted with whites of German ancestry.  Then there were shades of people in between.  There seemed to be a certain respect and harmony amongst people and in greeting and acknowledging various people, everyone was mutually polite, and often friendly.

The city itself was not huge, maybe 200,000, but there was lots of traffic, some fast moving avenues that when followed far enough, turned into two lane, paved highways, headed to the outskirts of the country.  Without looking on a map, I would guess Namibia was the size of Texas, and once you left Windhoek, the towns quickly became quite reduced in population, and far and few between.  Everyone, for the most part, seemed to use English as the universal language, with Dutch, Afrikaans, and local dialects taking at least a temporary backseat.

I don’t think there was much that couldn’t be acquired in Windhoek when it came to preparing for destinations in the back country, though finding what you might need took a little more skill.  The prices in general were about like the Philippines in my opinion: 2/3 of what things cost in the U.S.  And the restaurant we initially favored mostly served some good size T-bone steaks with the usual accoutrements, or stuffed chicken breasts in the $10 to $12 dollar range.  Meat seemed to be the standard fare.

Of course I was wondering where the “bad” side of town was where I could get into some kind of trouble.  But with Sierran and Uncle Donald as traveling companions, I did not want to seem eager to demonstrate what I do best, that is, dodging trouble, while mixing with the wilder side of locals in the hours past sunset.  We finally found the guest house that we had reserved via the internet, and a little to our disappointment, it was not in the center of town.  But being good and jet lagged, it was okay to hit the sack early.

The next day we moved to another traveler’s guest house, The Chameleon, or some such thing, much closer to the town center.  All about the gated Chameleon were posted warnings to not leave your car on the street—-anywhere, for the likelihood of having it broken into and robbed.  But, it just looked too improbable so we left our rental at the dead end in the road and walked back to the Chameleon, where we were immediately told that this was a very bad idea.  “Go get your car and bring it inside the gate”.

It was here that we found “tour” packages promoted and we collectively decided, this might save us a lot of effort in trying to trek our way across Namibia to Chobe National Park in the far reaches of Botswana and then across the border into Zimbabwe where we could experience Victoria Falls.  With initially unabated enthusiasm, we decided to book a nine day tour across the borders to Zimbabwe.  We quickly paid the price, and since we had at least 36 hours before the “tour” departed, we decided to take a tour of our own beginning early the next morning in a westward direction to the coast, to the town of Swakopmund.

It was a simple decision.  I had bought a map of Namibia, and it appeared the main road headed North to a town called Okahandja, and then turned almost due west all the way to the coastal town of Swakopmund.  But, Sierran was using his GPS and turned west immediately upon departing Windhoek.  I felt a little suspicious of the drab and indistinct “highway” marked as D-28 on the map that was the most direct route to Swakopmund, but who was I to say? Never mind that there evidently existed no communities except for one nobody would remember passing through, a quarter of the way out on this road.  I was game for the challenge, being fresh.

We couldn’t have driven 20 or 30 kilometers west on a lean and pocked one lane paved road when abruptly the road turned to dirt.  It wasn’t a bad dirt road as dirt roads go—-there was no scrub board, just inches of dust, as we raced up and down drops on a great deal of a twisting road through the hills and eventually into and around mountains.  The speed limit, when marked, always said between 80 and 110 kph.  Though we rarely felt safe driving 80 KPH.

The back country was magnificent.  It seemed like quite a bit of wild life: guinea fowl, a kudu, baboons where there was evidently a watering hole somewhere out of sight,  impalas, and lots of wart hogs.  The mountains rolled for endless miles beginning at about 5,000 ft. of elevation near Windhoek, while ending on a barren desert flat on the south east corner of the Atlantic coast.  It was a parched land of intense, bald rock formations stabbing at times, thousands of feet into the blue sky, around which were densely spotted rolling hills of winter scrub land.  The viewing was sublime, a mix between the Sonora of Arizona and the Sahuaro country of Baja California.  Occasionally a ranch house would appear and about every 15 or 20 minutes we would pass another vehicle so that was reassuring.

We stopped on a pass and looked in wonder at the endless miles of rolling, wilderness mountains, in all directions.  It was one of those feelings that left the heart fulfilled and made life seem rich for all its wonder.  I love staring across a rugged, lonely land, at mountains that vanish into the vague and unknown foreverness.   Wave after wave of mountain range just faded into the horizon all the way to the Atlantic, maybe into non existence for all I know.

We’ve been told, and have no reason to doubt that winter here is nothing like summer.  In winter all is dry, brown, desiccated.  During the day, it gets warm in the direct sunlight, but at night comes its reverse.  The Namibian wilderness is parched like a land that has not seen rain in years.  On road D-28, there were no towns and very few signs of human life except for a few scattered cattle holds.   For more than 320 kilometers, we kicked up a trail of dust all the way to the Atlantic coast, where we finally broke out onto a bleached, white pan of sand maybe 40 km from Swakopmund.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comedy of Reprehensible Errors III

The balance between what is exotic, beautiful, and unique, and what is potentially dangerous, forbidding and highly undesirable is a fine one.  It is said some people feed on the adrenalin of trial.  My heart is too feeble to be considered one of these individuals.  In a car, it is a delight to drive the back country as long as the car is functioning properly and all is well.  But to have an untimely flat, to run out of gas, to have something unexpected crop up, is a fast way to take pleasure into a realm of pain.  So far we had been lucky and over 600 kilometers of rugged dirt road had not been enough to make us regret cheap-skating car rentals to make a merciless drive down a forlorn dirt road where traffic seemed far and few between despite the popularity of the destination.  But now it was obvious we had made a wrong turn.

We had no doubts that eventually we would work our way out of the back country, towards civilization, but something was definitely not right.  The road was wide, but miserably rough.  There had to be somebody living in these parts, but we had just seen very little signs that offered us much reassurance if something went wrong.  The country was beautiful.  In one place we would see an eland, an antelope almost the size of a horse, grazing about every half mile or so, for many miles.  And there was always the mountain zebra, standing in the distance, motionless, just to remind us that we were not in Kansas.  I must emphasize that the landscape seemed alien, but after long periods of driving through mountain bends, over passes, along dried canyon stream beds, I would begin to drift into a familiar day dream, thinking I was somewhere in the Sonora desert or on the Baja when out of nowhere, an oryx would majestically appear, and then another and another, until a whole herd could be seen trotting off down a gully, between the scrub trees, and disappear.  Sometimes it was a springbok bounding out of sight.  And there was nothing quite as exotic as a zebra standing motionless on a mountainside alone, alert, but seeming in a sleep.

Sierran would be a great competitor in the Baja 1000.  He is a master at driving rough road as fast as the road can be driven.  And what makes all this even more remarkable is that in Namibia, you drive on the left side of the road and the steering wheel is on the right hand side with the stick off to the left.  I tried driving a couple of times, but it always took a toll on me: there was no relaxing for all the time I had to spend reminding myself, always, that I could take a turn and be on the wrong side of the road.  My younger son, Doron, nearly got killed in Thailand driving a motor scooter into oncoming traffic.  It only takes a second or two of forgotten judgement to pay a heavy price. But Sierran never seemed to forget, so he was always the designated driver.  But despite Sierran’s inveterate skill for driving Namibian roads, country or city, I occasionally found myself suggesting he slow down.   It was obvious that this was not going to happen, so I shut my mouth lest he suggest I drive.

We finally hit a stretch of road that seemed to be less wash board than what we had been driving.  It was a relief.  Sierran was scooting along at at least 50, maybe 60 miles an hour.  I don’t know if we had just left a turn or not, but all in less than 3 seconds, it was obvious our tire had disintegrated.  We came to a grinding stop.  Ah, yes, trouble.  It had been inevitable.  We all three climbed out and quickly assessed that we were going to have to figure out how to change the spare.  It didn’t look good.  The original tire had just exploded and the tread was about 30 feet off the road, and remaining on the axil, was a nub of ragged, synthetic rubber.  We couldn’t find the hubcap, try as we did.  The hub was bent, and the fender torn from where the tire had hit it when it blew.  It went well with the 1/4 inch of dust that coated the car.  Now the car really looked like it had been somewhere it wasn’t supposed to have been.  Before, it had only looked bad.  Now it looked wretched.

The reality of the situation was that the circle of opportunity to get off this road, to reach the bitumen road that drove north to Windhoek, suddenly became much reduced.  The next blow out was going to leave us stranded in a place, probably all night, with the real chance that we might miss our flight the next day.  We had no blankets, no water, and probably no way to start a fire, if for no other reason than to go as long into the oncoming cold night as we could before retreating into the car to spend the rest of the night.  And I was beginning to calculate how we would even get to a place after day break, where we could purchase another wheel that would fit, return, change it out, and high tail it to the airport as fast as we could in the hope of still making our flight.  It seemed like an “all-or-none” situation.   My stomach began to tighten with anxiety.

Sierran as usual, took charge and had the tire changed out in about 20 minutes.  My thoughts then went to the best scenario: with Avis of Windhoek International.  I was trying to imagine how much it was going to cost me.  In my heart, I was willing to pay a hefty price if there had been a guarantee that we would make it back in one piece.  But what could we say, the next day, to Avis? Hmmm….why did you rent us a car with such bad tires? Were we on a dirt road you ask? Don’t be silly, why would we do that? The fender is torn? Hmm…that one would be a little tougher to explain since they had taken photos of the car before we left.

Once the tire was changed out, a more immediate concern was now we had to drive 150 km of dirt road with no spare as the sun continued creeping closer to the horizon.  To have another flat with no spare on a road like this, this time of day, was basically the kiss of death.  And for us, it would amount to double trouble, no quadruple trouble because of our flight out the next day.   It was of no solace that now Don had a knot in his stomach  to match mine as the sun crept progressively closer to the horizon.  It was going to take a miracle to get back to Windhoek before dark.

But on we plodded, still a little faster than I liked, but hope was beginning to seem plausible.  We came to a junction which normally would not seem like much, but now there was the added chance, we might see another car and shortly thereafter, we did see one! Kind of a nice feeling.  And in an instant, the girl who offered an anxious wave as she passed, was gone. Thirty minutes later, we saw a car in the distance, possibly stranded.  As we approached, we could see it was an old beaten up car with a flat, and four Africans were standing outside, looking at a loss for what to do as they stood over their spare, facing a flat.

“Should we stop?” Sierran asked.

“I think so,” I replied, thinking to myself that this was karma.  We couldn’t just leave them; this could be us.

So we stopped and asked what we could do.  They said they had no lug wrench that fit their spare.  The spare lay there in a pool of dust as useless as a stone tire meant for Fred Flintstone’s car and it appeared it would not even fit the hub.   We three collectively thought that this was not good and we weren’t sure what could be done about it though we kept these thoughts to ourselves.  The driver, a nice looking young man rather poor looking, with his young wife, told us they lived on a farm 5 km up the road.  Maybe we could take one of the four to the farm and there he could retrieve a spare or a lug wrench, or both, or something like this, and that would solve the problem.  I was thinking we could drop the young man off at the farm and he would have somebody give him a ride back and the problem would be solved.  But none of us seemed to be thinking this dilemma out in any detail, just wanting or hoping things would come together and the problem would be solved.

Hmmm.   As it turned out, it was a long five kilometers to the gate and it was getting dark.  The gate was locked and we waited for him to unlock it.  It was apparent that we would have to drive him down the “drive” to the farm but now we would have to wait on him because on his return, he would have to unlock the gate that he had locked behind him.

Nothing was looking very good.  It was at least another 5 km back to the “farm” and the back road to the farm was pretty tenuous.  I put quotation marks around the word farm because in Namibia the farms were more like homesteads chiseled from the desert-mountain wilderness where maybe cattle ran in a semi-feral condition amongst the really wild animals.  When I think of farms, I think of domestic animals like cows, horses, pigs, chickens around a watering trough at the base of a windmill.   And I think of alfalfa or fields of wheat.  This was much more wild than that.  To live here, it took real survival skills.

We dragged bottom a couple of times.  When we got there, there was one nice house, some outbuildings with maybe 20 skulls of various types of horned antelopes nailed to the wall, and in the drive was a car.  It was an unexpectedly decent place.  Then there was a back area where I gathered the African and his companions must have lived.  He did not want to go to the apparent owner’s house, almost like he would be reprimanded for something.  I could only speculate.    Hmmm….he said perhaps they were sleeping, but it was obvious he did not want to disturb them.  We waited 5 or 10 minutes while he went through a couple of back gates to maybe where he lived or maybe where he could find help, or at the least, a lug wrench  or something that might be of use.  But it was to no avail and he finally returned.  He didn’t want to go the house, this time telling us that maybe the people living there were “in town” and he didn’t know when they might return.

We crept back down the track as empty handed as we had come in, from the house to the main dirt road, trying not to rip out the bottom of the VW, where he re-opened the gate, and we drove him back to his companions.  It was a difficult situation because we really had to be on our way to Windhoek because we had no room reserved, believing we were going to be back long before dark, and we had a lot to do before we departed the next day.  We sincerely explained that we could not remain there any longer because of our circumstances.  They were stuck until someone came along who recognized them or who would help.  I tried to imagine how they would be out of there before day break, but honestly, it did not look good.  The young man and his wife both sincerely thanked us and said they understood, but it was not a good feeling leaving them stranded there.  Just spending almost an hour there had left us to fend for ourselves in the dark, on a strange road in a strange land that abhorred the weak or unprepared.

We quickly pushed on.  Within an hour, we could see the city lights of Windhoek in the distance.  The road suddenly turned to pavement and our collective relief was palpable.  Now we had to find a place to spend the night and Don had a mighty urge to go to Joe’s, one of the most unique, grandiose, funky—and satisfying restaurants in Windhoek.  What were the odds of us returning to the Chameleon so late in the night and finding a room? And even more unlikely, what were the chances Joe’s would still be open at nearly 10 PM on a Sunday night? But the gods smiled on us in both instances!

 

 

 

Comedy of Reprehensible Errors II

…By dark we were back at the park boundary and went into a place known for its smorgasbord breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.  It was an exquisite place.  I have never been to an All-You-Can-Eat dinner that served such incomparably good food.  I am not surprised that this place presented itself because for the most part, I have never traveled to a country that served so much meat, in such a wide variety, as Namibia.  Meat was their piece de resistance.  We serve steaks.  They serve slabs of meat as thick as Oxford dictionaries.  We serve beef.  They serve every wild kind of browsing and grazing beast  and more: Kudu, oryx, gemsbok, zebra, springbok and for good measure, warthog,  though for some inexplicable reason I found myself shying away from animals of the wild.  And I am only touching the surface.  And then they had their sea food table,  and the salads, desserts, vegetables, exotic fruits, each in their own room or at the least, station.  And the meat was in the form of rib eyes, T-bones, sirloins, ribs, you name it.  And at every station was a chef roasting, and then subsequently dishing out the diner’s every wish.  And every diner’s table was out, under the stars of a southern hemisphere sky.  I felt rich if not completely famous.  Things were finally settling in and the trip was smoothing out as we approached our departure date.  Up until this point, the entire trip had felt a little like Mr. Toad’s wild and crazy ride.

So we ate our righteous fill and afterwards drove back to our immaculately shiny and orderly little room, resplendent in space relative to every night on the trip prior to this moment.  The silence was incomparable, muffled by the great dunes, the cool of winter on the Tropic of Capricorn, and the isolation—the kind of place where you knew you were far, far away from anything like home.  Those are the moments that make travel a sublime experience.  We had a full day ahead of us and we had to get a reasonably early start the next morning to beat the inevitable line that would be itching to enter the park boundary and head for…. wherever that road was supposedly taking us.  I still had not put two and two together and thought we were just going into an area renowned for its majestic and superlative red dunes.  It was all nice, but I still was not thinking of the petrified Sossusvlei.

Morning came crashing down on us like unremitting sin.  I am a night person and since I have been retired my nights have become progressively later and have transmogrified into the vampire killing pale of late day.  Please don’t force me up early.  But Don was a terribly early riser anxious to find his coffee and Sierran could get up early if the need was there so I really had no choice.  I disdained leaving the comfort of our lodging at such an unforgiving hour as sunrise.  But as we glanced out our cottage’s front window, it was obvious that the many Dutch travelers knew it was better to be early rather than late, so we were soon in line at the park entrance, cussing at being so far back, thinking about the disadvantage we now faced, being slow to start.  But once in, how great it was being on a newly paved road.  What a welcome relief to escape the brutal beating of that washboard of a road that had brought us to the back country.

The dunes got more orange and steeper, the plant life more sparse and alien-looking,  and Sossusvlei more inimitably foreign.  I can’t imagine what the first European explorers must have thought as they pushed through this region to the southern Atlantic.  Even native Africans, the Sans bushman, must have found this region to be daunting for the lack of water and the slow going the endless dunes must have created.  But I don’t know; the Sans people seemed to be able to survive any arid land.

We ventured here and there, exploring surrounding dunes, but I still was not sure what Sierran had in mind.  I kept thinking he wanted to climb a dune, but nothing really glared at me.  When we reached the end of the road, there was a dune that stood out in its uniqueness.  From a distance, it looked like a mighty line of ants was pushing up and out of sight of another dune, then reappearing on the ridge, headed for the top of this particular dune.  This was Dune #45 and I pointed it out to Don and Sierran.  Maybe this was where we were headed? Everyone seemed headed up that dune and I thought to myself there was no way I was going to climb it—I saw no real purpose to putting myself to a grueling test of endurance for maybe 3 hours when in fact, I was absolutely not dressed for such a hike, not to mention I had no water with me—-just to stand at its top spitting cotton balls for lack of hydration.   The pavement ended at a large dusty area that was a parking lot and Sierran swung the VW in and miraculously found a parking spot.  There was  some kind of a transport vehicle everybody was standing around anxious to board, open sided with enormous wheels for navigating its way across banks of dust and rolling ridges of sand.  I still had no idea where everyone was going, but now I began thinking they must be headed to the base of these dunes where they would all commence to climb Dune #45.

We lingered about the transport vehicle and Sierran reappeared with “tickets” he had purchased to wherever it was going.  Things were happening kind of fast.  Before I knew it, we were on our way, somewhere, I knew not where.  After a few km it stopped and everybody climbed off and we joined the crowd walking in a dense line north.  “What are we doing?” I thought.  Don hung like a shadow next to Sierran.  I asked him where he thought everyone was going and he replied he didn’t know, but he was determined to stick as close to Sierran as possible trusting as usual, Sierran’s judgement.  I thought to myself that there was no way Don would be able to climb Dune #45 if that was where they were going.  “Are you nuts?” I thought.

A few hundred meters up the trail I stopped Sierran, utterly mystified by all that seemed to be going on, though I seemed to be the only person in that queue that had not one clue to where we were all going, let alone why, and told him, “hey, you go on without me; I’ll wait for you guys down here”.  Sierran looked at me a little funny and said, “ok”.  And they continued.  I walked back down the trail, found a spot in the shade of one or two dead desert trees, and parked myself.  From there, I just watched people, by the hundreds, walking in an endless stream, out of sight.  Then much later the same stream would re-appear on Dune #45, though it appeared in much smaller numbers, trudging slowly, climbing, climbing, and I wondered to myself how so many people at the base of the hike seemed to vanish from the flow as it later reappeared on the ridge going up Dune #45.  Perhaps it was just the distance and it only appeared the higher the line of people climbed, the leaner the line appeared to get.  It had to be the challenge of the hike that was breaking the line of people down, kind of like at a certain point, it came down to every man for himself.  I was mystified.  But I was too far away to really understand what was transpiring with the hikers.

There were plenty of people older and in worse looking shape than myself pushing out of sight, apparently headed up the side of that monstrous dune.  Where were they all going? I kept thinking to myself that there was no way Don was going to be able to keep up with Sierran, but I figured that would work itself out.

In the meantime, I started playing around and I spotted a gecko, which I finally caught.  I began entertaining myself with my own little distractions, taking photos, observing various things, but of course, all the while wondering about where people were going.  Then about 1 1/2 hours later I spotted Sierran and Don coming back and I went over to intercept them.   I joined their company, got back on our transport vehicle that took us back to the “parking lot” where we then had the rest of the day to take our long ass ride back to Windhoek.

I really was dying to know what they had done because things were not adding up.  They got back at least an hour before I expected.  I finally asked Don where they had gone.  He casually said “Sossusvlei”, meaning the place that people come from all over the world to see, the petrified trees in the flat white pan surrounded by the iron oxide dunes.   I didn’t think I heard him right.  He was talking about the holy of the Holy Sossuvlei; I am sure that is what he meant—the Sossuvlei everybody who travels to Namibia wants to see.  It was the most epochal view that part of Africa had to offer.  It was more than a view—it was an experience that magically made time stand still!  I don’t know how describe it because it is one of those experiences that goes beyond words. You don’t intellectualize it—it just IS!

Sierran elaborated.  Yes, they had spent nearly 2 hours in that pan taking cell phone photographs, registering epic sights, gawking in awe at the preternaturalness of this lonely nook that may as well been on the dark side of the moon, frozen in a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and finally finding a little area where there was no one, and they had it all to themselves! And what the F was I doing? Sitting 400 yards away just out of sight—400 yards from one of the most iconic places in the faraway land of wild, dark Africa, a spot that ranked up there with the splendor of Victoria Falls, the might of the Pyramids of Giza, or the forlorn shore of Tanganika in Ujiji where Stanley met Livingston! And me, what was I doing a mere 400 yards away?  Playing with a f***ing palmato gecko! Twiddling my thumbs, Aaaurrghh!! If I understood correctly, and I thought I did, I wanted to scream.

I tried to keep my composure.   I asked Sierran why he did not tell me that that was where he was headed.  He said he thought I knew.

“Why did you think I headed back, if I knew?”I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.   “Because you were tired?” He was surprised but of course it was not like him to ask why I would not have wanted to see that sight being a mere 400 yards’ stroll away, to gaze in amazement at a sight people will go half way around the world to see, kind of like the statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower—-maybe I was too tired?!  So he had said nothing but “okay” (see you when we get back).  Don didn’t know either, but he doesn’t ask questions—he was just going to go, trusting that that would be the wisest decision.  And evidently it was.

At that moment, my anger erupted.  A volcano of  sordid filth spewed forth from somewhere in my gut that I guess must have been hidden in the core of my being, I shamelessly confess now.   I had not been so angry in years.  Everything I must have been harboring for months, or even longer, exploded.  I exploded with the most vulgar vituperations my soul could muster.   I was so f***ing crazy with anger and frustrations and cussed a mighty blue streak up one side and down the other at both Don and Sierran.  The anger seemed so convoluted.  It had to do with SO much, including, if not most of all, myself.  My eyes went crossed and my blood pressure shot through the roof of that f*cking Volkswagon.  I think I went insane.  I had gone half way around the world and came within 400 yards of the most famed place in Namibia, the quintessential sight of southern Africa— within 400 yards!—, AND DID NOT SEE IT! I was crazed.  Sierran just sniggered—that was his way of dealing with it.  I couldn’t have expected anymore.  And I am sure that if someone asked him about the whole affair, he could reasonably explain his part in it—and it would be more than acceptable.  “How do I know what dad is thinking if he doesn’t say?”  Maybe he was right.  And then, to add insult to injury, Don threw in his two bits and gave me a brief lecture about how I needed to take more responsibility and this was all my own fault.

I carried on for about 10 minutes.  If I could have detonated a nuclear bomb, I probably would have.  It was the emotions that put people into prison.  It took about 10 minutes for all my venom to be released.  I could have been pissed for days,  brooding profoundly for just as long, but then I realized that I just had to let it go.  Nothing in the whole world would or could change anything that had happened.  I could be angry for days if I chose, but why lose so much time, why simmer in the dark if I could somehow take a different perspective on it all, climb out of the dark of my anger, because after all, in the end it just boiled down to a perspective.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there probably isn’t a thing in the world we say, we do, we think, that isn’t the result of something within us about ourselves.  Maybe as humans we just don’t know how to go deep enough to see the truth.  And it is not simple behavior.  The Truth may be simple once it becomes a part of us, but getting to that Truth is a long and winding road.  I felt a deep sadness for my ignorance, and maybe the ignorance of our condition.  Then I felt a chuckle somewhere in my gut.  How ironic! What a lesson! Oh, how all of that had hurt.  And I realized that I just had to let it go.  Nothing in the whole world would or could change anything that had happened.  I could be angry for days if I chose, but why voluntarily surrender so much time to ignorance.  I don’t know exactly why, but then, oddly enough the whole ironic fiasco seemed a little humorous, as though it had happened to somebody else, which I am sure, would have made things so much easier, would perhaps have made me snigger a bit though I hope not.  It just happened to be me.

It was not long before we were back on the washboard of a road, calmly enjoying the changing scenery and most of all, the constant glances of exotic wild life as we sky rocketed along the rag tag dust of some real desolate road.  But something seemed wrong, it had been well over an hour since we had passed or had even seen the last vehicle on the road.  We had gotten gas in Solitaire pictured below, the one and only community in the back country, population maybe 35, and we thought we had taken the correct turn towards what would eventually lead us to Kalkrand, civilization.  But something was amiss…all these back roads looked the same, but nobody was on them…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comedy of Reprehensible Errors I

Anybody who has researched Namibia at all, knows that one of the most iconic images of that part of southern Africa is a region known as Sossusvlei in the central Namib Desert.  If you go to Namibia, you must go to Sossusvlei in order to get full credit for venturing into that part of the world.  As is my wont, I did not research it.  I just get a wild hair to go some place for some wild-hair-of-a-reason and then figure out what it is about a certain country or place in the world that people find intriguing.  It is not uncommon for me to not even know what language is spoken in a region—I’ll figure out how to communicate or get around when I get there.  Besides, if you are basically a one language kind of person, put your money on English to get you out of a language situation.

It wasn’t like there was no plan at all going into southern Africa.  Sierran had been with his good travel buddy, Martijn of Amsterdam, years ago, and they had an exquisite experience—one all travelers appreciate: going into a country completely unknown to them, and casting excessive caution to the wind, AND as a result, having soft core adventure produce in relatively big dividends.  But then you are talking two confident guys, eager to sample the night life in an unknown, foreign city as enthusiastically as they pursued, by day, ventures into the remoter corners of the country looking to see exotic wildlife and unique native people in regions where being accompanied by a back up jeep would be expected for all the possible things that could go awry—even though they passed on the latter.  Sierran had a very good idea of what we were in for.

So being the kind of guy who will be as lazy as permitted, I let Sierran do the driving and take us where he would.  But being too passive is always a mistake.  Animals did not evolve from lack of pressure.  We grow from assessing situations, reacting appropriately in a timely way,  and imagining how we can do things better the next time.   I made the mistake of not asking any questions.  I like to talk, to think aloud, and sometimes ask questions that seem self explanatory, at least to Sierran.  Maybe it is a nervous trait that comes so naturally to me these days, so much so that it seems like normal and appropriate behavior.  But Sierran sees it as an annoying habit I have so to keep peace, I keep most of my thoughts to myself.  My inner consideration is “let him do the driving and do what he does” in spite of the conflict I may have when I do not understand why he is doing something or what he is up to.  Nine out of ten times it will play out in a manner I will accept because he usually knows what he is doing.

We had just returned from a nine day outing to Zimbabwe.  We still had a few days left and Sierran had mentioned renting a car and driving to Sossusvflei.  To me, the names were all sounding so much like Sossusvlei, it did not stand out as the Sossusvlei so flagrantly boasted of, bragged about, and even flaunted on the cover of the Lonely Planet’s Namibia and Botswana book, which described this region of southern Africa as the holy grail of sights to behold.  I had forgotten.  I had forgotten what Sossusvflei was all about though I did remember reading about the remoteness of it all and seeing in documentaries how unique it was; the flat pans of white sand running in parallel streaks and swirls with the lead colored sand in separate veins, both stretching aesthetically like petrified rivers between the red iron oxide sand dunes of 1000 feet in elevation, some of the highest dunes in the world, and possibly the oldest desert on planet Earth, and a land which harbored the exotic and remotely existing baboons, mountain zebra, gemsbok, oryx, kudu, jackals, springbok, which miraculously, all the while, somehow survived in a region where the only moisture that ever came in was in the form of ethereal droplets of dew from the sea in the darkness of night that hung on a sleeping leaflet of some winter hibernating desert shrub.  Rain is practically speaking, non existent, especially this time of year.

I knew there were dunes that seemed merciless to climb because of the endless backsliding.  And there was Dune #45.  I forget why they called it this.  I was thinking it was the tallest dune, but I know now that that is not right.  But far more significantly,  I forgot about the place for which Sossusvlei was most known, the most iconic place in Namibia.  How could I forget that?  Where was my mind? It was a pan of white sand that artists, photographers, film makers from all over the world seek for the sake of somehow bringing to life this scene for the world to witness.  Maybe it was what compelled the Namibian government to even construct a road back into these nether regions to begin with.  It was this ghostly white pan of sand surrounded by these enormous red dunes, in the middle of which were the dead or possibly petrified trees standing like forlorn ghosts, frozen in time, dark as pencil lead, perhaps 500 years old.  At one time, in a kinder era, a stream had flowed through there, or possibly even a shallow lake had existed, and the trees were the living part of perhaps one of the most desolate and remote areas on earth.  It was the image of Namibia.  People came from all over the world to see this.

And we drove on to reach this remote region though my mind was a blank as far as details went.  I had no idea where we were going except it was beautiful.   We beat our little VW car rental to death on the most dusty wash board desert road I’ve ever been on, winding to and fro, up, down, and around for probably 350 kilometers, occasionally spotting an Oryx , Springbok, or a lone zebra.  We drove and we drove as fast as that little car would go—could take those roads.   We were warned when we rented that car: do you want insurance? “No”, (we know your scams.  We do not want nor need your insurance).  “We’ll be sure not to take this car down a dirt road”.  Of course.  Wink, wink.  (Oh, stupid me.  I put that rental in my name. I signed everything that said I would pay for any damages we might acquire.  And Sierran was driving, and nobody can drive a washboard road as fast as he can).  In the 350 kilometers that we drove, we encountered no other cars, only safari trucks, 4 wheel drives, and land cruisers.  They were travelers who seemed to know what kind of terrain they faced and for the sake of added safety, many of them drove in caravans.  But not us.  We were out to save money, and besides, ours was the Little Car that Could.

And then, many hours into the day,  we officially hit the asphalt road at the gate of Sossusvlei National Park, a most welcome surprise! Yes, for the last 70 km, the road was magnificently paved.  But unfortunately it was after 3 PM when we arrived and no one was allowed to enter.  Too late in the day.  I had no idea why that was.  I didn’t want to speculate.  But really? So we stayed outside the park.  There was a row of lodges, rentals, something nice.  This line of modern cottages must have been the better part of a km long and and each cottage, a part of a community taking advantage of a developing national park the size of which no other national park in the world could claim, so I read, only cost $164 which, when split three ways, was definitely affordable considering we were otherwise in that compact little car for the night without blankets or sleeping bags and  that would be no fun in the long and cold of a southern hemisphere night in Aug.   It was the first night in two weeks that we would evade a tent.  And it was the last room available.  How lucky we were.

It really was a quaint place, an oasis of remote civilization, so to speak, surrounded by a sea of fundamental loneliness.  We were so close to a little swimming pool that on the surface was so inviting, but the truth was, it was much too cold to lure me in.  It was the outdoor bar that caught my attention, something I felt pretty good about.  They had one tap for beer and for that I felt gratitude.  Nowadays I don’t drink beer too often, but when traveling, I find all my inhibitions regarding good judgement disappear along with the semblance of any self-control.  I have my theories, but I won’t hypothesize here.  So I purchased a cold draft beer, took a seat by the empty little pool surrounded by endless miles of an ancient desert and watched a wildebeast wander to within 100 meters while Sierran took a stroll to climb a local peak.  It all felt good.