NORTHERN NAMIBIA

Thirteen days of travel northward in Namibia and (other than the City of Swakopmund; pop: 20,000) we’ve seen three people.   Not a village, town or even a compound has crossed our path.   Where are all the Namibians?  Does anyone live here?

 It would take another few days before we bumped into the 2 million who call this place home.

In the meantime though, the scenery is spectacular.   Hundreds of kilometres of red sand desert or rocky wilderness.  Gorgeous rust-colored granite mountains or green valleys appear mirage-like, around a corner, lit up by the diffused sunlight of a foggy morning or  shrouded in ambiguity as stormy,  lightening-filled skies loom on the horizon.  It is the joining of the western and eastern thirds of the US; Big-Sky Montana, Utah and Nevada meet New England in the vast emptiness of the moon.

Namibia is not like the rest of Africa.   Tap water is potable.  Hot water, electricity and paved roads abound.  There are clean, well-lit and well-stocked supermarkets.  And unlike West Africa, the heat and frenzy of a desperate people are absent.

We drove along Namibia’s western shore, known as the Skeleton Coast for its treacherous shoreline.  According to the guidebook, early Portuguese sailors called it “As Areias do Inferno” (The Sands of Hell), as once a ship washed ashore, the fate of the crew was sealed.

Our first stop outside of Swakopmund was Cape Cross, home to thousands of seals sunning themselves and playing in the surf.  It smelled awful but it was so much fun to view the seals up close and personal – milking from their mothers’ breasts (what are seals’ breasts called anyway?), playing in the ocean and lazing on the sand beneath the boardwalk on which we walked, meandering among them.

We bush-camped at Spitzkoppe (“Pointy Head” in Afrikaans) and saw 6,000 year-old drawings painted in caves that sheltered the descendants of the original Man, and watched as both the sunrise and sunset transformed the valley into spectacular shades of orange, red, mint green and white.  (See photos at above link).

But the highlight so far was the visit with the San Bushmen including a night of camping in their village.  The San were the original inhabitants of Southern Africa.   Only 2,000 of the 30,000-member tribe remain in the bush,  hunting and gathering as they have for 300 hundred centuries – an astounding 30,000 years!.   The majority however are in transition.  This generation is the first to have moved permanently out of the bush, settling on land given to them by the government.  For them hunting is only done at the supermarket.   But the gathering of nuts, berries, medicinal plants, and beauty supplies is still practiced. 

We turned off the main road and drove along what can only be described as sand pathways which twisted and turned amongst the scrub, knee-high bushes and the occasional tree, traveling deep into their tribal past.  Arriving at last, we had our first encounter with aboriginal Namibians.

The main sources of income now for the San are government subsidies and tourism.  As we pitched our camp they changed from their “street” clothes into their bush costumes, transforming their village into a living museum, to teach us what it was like to have lived in the bush, completely dependent on hunting and gathering for survival.

 The San is a complex egalitarian society without hierarchy, and because they were never able to build up a surplus of food, full-time leaders and bureaucrats never emerged.  There were no aninals, crops or possessions; no ownership and no Chief.   While it has been noted in 17^th century literature that their lifestyle was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” recent ethnographic data has shown that “hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure time than members of industrial societies.” (Lonely Planet).

When the school bell clanged loudly at 7 am, children came running from all directions, darting barefoot in the sand and bush, scurrying between the donkeys and acacia trees to get to their classrooms before the bell stopped ringing.  We rose with them and spent almost 3 hours on foot learning about San traditions and their secrets of survival.   The San alphabet contains 4 different clicking sounds,  mesmerizing to hear – I could listen to them speak all day -  and extremely difficult to mimic (hopefully, the video at the above link will be audible enough to detect the clicks, clacks and snaps of their tongues and palates).    After dinner they entertained us with traditional song and dance and answered our multitude of questions with humor, patience and grace.  The night was cloudless and the southern sky was ablaze with stars; the Milky Way dazzled, undimmed by the bright lights of the faraway city.

The next day we were off to Etosha National Park, at 20,000 sq. kilometers it ranks among the world’s greatest wildlife preserves.  Its name, which means “Great White Place of Dry Water,” is taken from the greenish-white Etosha Pan, an immense, flat saline desert, and is home to a great diversity of wildlife, including lions, oryx, wildebeest, giraffes, zebras and rhinos, to name just a few of the animals we saw, some of which were crossing the dirt road we were driving on.  (No walking is allowed in the park – or even stopping to pee - way too dangerous to exit the vehicle.)

We are now in northernmost Namibia, on the banks of the Kavango river, which separates it from Angola, just a stone’s throw away.  Tomorrow we enter Botswana and the Okavango Delta, THE place to be in southern Africa, where we will canoe the delta for 2 days and nights.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi: Out of Africa always something new (Pliny, The Elder)

My last full day in Africa turned out to be just about the best.

We spent 4 hours biking through Soweto today and felt completely comfortable and not at all threatened.   The Township, with between 4-6 million people, is vibrant and pulsates with energy and the lively beat of life.  Created in the the early 1900's to segregate blacks from the white community, it was built only 17 km from the center of Johannesburg so that cheap labor could commute to the nearby gold mines, white homes, and other businesses.  While there is extreme poverty in the “3^rd class” neighborhoods, the 1^st  &  2^nd class areas are clean, well-maintained, walkable and typical of many Saturday morning lower and middle-class suburbs all over America.

We drank homemade beer from a calabash in a shebeen (pub), had lunch in a local restaurant and visited Nelson Mandela’s house.  We walked Hector Pieterson Square, the birthplace of the anti-apartheid movement which began when Hector, age 13, was shot dead in 1976 while marching peacefully for the abolition of South Africa’s racist laws.   Desmond Tutu and Winnie Mandela, as well as many black South African musicians and other celebrities have chosen to continue to live in Soweto, rather abandon ship and move to “better” (i.e. white)  neighborhoods, a fact that is so very different from the reality of African-American stars, professionals and successful business owners,  who leave their childhood homes as soon as possible rather than stay and improve the ghettoes in which they grew up.  

We would have stayed longer and taken the night tour of the local shebeens, jazz clubs and other music venues, but its dinner at a fancy African restaurant and early to bed.   I have plans for us to drive to Pretoria, South Africa's capital, tomorrow, only 50 km away.   (Ssshhhh ...... don't tell Yosy).   We don't have to be at the airport for our flight home until 5pm.

Hector Pieterson, 1976, in arms of his friend)

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno;

It is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia.

It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations.

It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

 It is all these things but one thing – it is never dull.

                                                                                      - Beryl Markham

                                   

SKYDIVING IN NAMIBIA!

We drove for 3 full days in Namibia passing only 2-3 towns, each with a population of less than 10, and all of them German.   Where are all the natives in this vast, empty land?

On its east coast, Namibia is home to the world’s oldest, driest desert in the world as well as the Kalahari, in the west, a semi-arid desert,  which is covered with trees and criss-crossed by ephemeral rivers and fossil watercourses.   Namibia’s clear blue skies stretch out as far as the eye can see into the open horizons and has one of the lowest population densities on the planet -  318,500 square miles (825,000 sq. km)  shared by only 2.1 million people – or 1/10  sq. mile per person – lots of elbow room for the ancestors of the German colonials who occupied the country in the late 1880’s.  The Afrikaans invaded the country at Britian’s urging after World War I, then known as South-West Africa, and proceeded to claim all of its valuable diamond and mineral mines, including uranium, as its own.   Apartheid was official policy here until 1990 when, with the help of Cuban and Angolan rebels, including Che Guevera, Namibia finally achieved independence.

Day 3 in country we rose at 5 am to witness sunrise over the red sand dunes and the nearby “sussevlei.”   The dunes, all of which are numbered, (we visited Dune 45, reknowned for its perfect viewing position), rise as high as 1,000 feet (300 meters) and extend to the Atlantic Coast.  The sand is extremely fine grained, deep rust red and undulate for miles, their varying heights hiding the horizon.  We climbed along the ridge of the dune, which is easier than climbing from the side.  But easy, it was not.  The sand is thick and heavy and I sunk up to my ankles.   Each time I stepped forward I had to remove a foot from below the sandy surface.   I finally realized that if I walked fast enough into the footsteps of the person in front of me the sand was more compact and easier to navigate (hadn’t MJ told us that before we started out?).   During the 20 -30 minutes it took to reach the summit, I had to stop several times to catch my breath.   I hope that the photos, posted at the link above, capture just a small fraction of the studpendous panorama that we discovered when the sun poked its brilliance out from behind the distant dune.

Mark dragged his foot like a heavy weight the whole way and reached the summit with the rest of us.    No help (pretend or otherwise) needed.  (See below post for explanation.)

Hungry for breakfast, we ran down the side of the steep dune, enjoying the warmth of the sand on our feet, falling and rolling most of the way to the bottom, where eggs and bacon awaited our arrival.

Next, we walked about 15 minutes to the “Soussevlei.”   A combination of both Namib and German words, meaning “dead lake.”  Once, about 900 years ago, there was a lake with trees here, fed by a nearby river.   The slow but steady enlargement of the dunes blocked the river from feeding the lake, drying it up completely and killing the trees.   Only their trunks and branches remain, slowly petrifying in the dry desert air.   We had no idea what to expect.   It was unique; a sight we had never seen.   Other-worldly. 

On Wednesday morning we pulled into Swakopmund, “Adrenaline Capital of Southern Africa.”   Just 2 hours later we were quad biking on the sand dunes, riding their crests and valleys, twisting and turning with the land.  Once I learned to trust the bike, I ran at full-throttle and the 3-hour trip ended with me wanting more.

The City of Swakopmund is a strange place.   A combination of German colonial buildings and vacation homes,  the architecture of both and the prevalence of the German and Afrikaans languages and people, are completely out of sync with the surrounding desert and its location on the African continent.   Its claim to fame is that it is the location of  the birth of Shiloh, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby as well as its designation as Namibia's second largest city, after the capital, Windhoek.  It is modern, clean, well-stocked and full of people – 20,000!   This is the first significant center of population we’ve seen since leaving Cape Town 5 days ago.  

I had heard since last year that the thing to do here was to skydive over the desert.   I was determined not to.   The risk far outweighed the benefit.   But I couldn’t help myself.   I signed my life away and off we went.

We were driven to the center of nowhere, about 15 minutes outside of town.   We knew we had arrived when we saw the plane -  a zebra, polka-dotted, single engine, Red Baron thing, with no door,  that looked like a relic from World War II.   Once the 5-minute briefing was over, I donned the jumpsuit, and was chosen to be the first to jump (It must have been the “B” in Bernstein – I should have registered under my maiden name – “Waldman").  

We jumped tandem  with professionals who have a well-known reputation for safety and skill.  As I climbed into the plane with “Jack,” I was suddenly not at all nervous, although I hadn’t slept the night before and was praying for bad weather so that the jump would be postponed.   He had a way of making me feel relaxed and comfortable.   As we climbed to jump altitude (10,000 feet – 3,000 meters) I relished the view from the open door.  It was simply stunning.    Except for Swakopmund  (named for the Swakop River which empties into the Atlantic at the southern end of the Town), all I could see were sand dunes - thousands and thousands of sand dunes -  stopping only when they met the coast, swelling, heaving, surging, undulating as far as the eye could see, then quickly flattening out as we climbed higher and higher.  

When it was time to jump, my jacket was attached to Jack's and I sat in front of him, between his legs, with our feet dangling outside the plane.    I think he pushed.   All I know is that we were suddenly airborne.   I saw the plane disappear into a tiny speck above me as I felt the adrenal rush of 35 seconds of freefall – 185 miles per hour – with total clarity, vision and calm.   Once the chute opened it was as if I was floating through air, breathing effortlessly as I swam in a cool, calm lake  for the remaining 7 minutes of flight.  The landing was painless and easy, and the Group and Yosy had seen everything from down below.   They all cheered as I touched down.  It was time for Victim # 2 to make his way to the plane.

But I was still flying.