|
|
The Lure Of Namibia
By ELINOR BURKETT
Published: August 24, 2008, New York Times
AS the first rays of the sun pierce the thick darkness of the Namibian
desert, sinuous ridges of quartz sand ignite in a firestorm of seared
orange. Then the sky lightens to the new day, revealing the sea of sand
mountains, their crisp edges and perfect curves wrought and polished by the
expert chisel of the Kalahari and Atlantic winds.
With the tracks of yesterday’s visitors to the Sossusvlei dunes burnished by
the breeze, you can’t resist trudging — perhaps plodding or crawling — up at
least one of the pristine hills, some towering to 1,000 feet, instinctively
looking for shimmers of water. But from the top, there’s no sign of the sea;
it retreated millions of years ago, back when continents were drifting
wildly.
What’s left is a dazzling geological display of possibly the world’s highest
sand dunes, extending for 400 miles along the coast and more than 80 miles
inland. Those naïve enough to believe that a dune is a dune is a dune are
faced with a dizzying array of sand configurations: parabolic dunes with
dynamic slip faces, long and narrow transverse dunes, dunes petrified by
ancient climate change, and star dunes formed by winds that buffet them from
all sides.
It’s the sort of environment that evokes foreboding, although the greatest
danger is probably a broken fan belt or a serious case of hysteria induced
by the appearance of an enormous dancing spider. But for miles around —
13,000 square miles, roughly the size of Maryland — there is no radio signal
to relieve the silence, no town to break up an empty plain with a horizon so
horizontal that it fades into a mirage. Only the skittering of the
occasional hardy gecko suggests that you’re not the last vestige of life on
a seared and waterless planet.
Such a forbidding panorama hardly seems the stuff of a compelling journey.
But Namibia, a country of stark beauty and riveting contradictions, should
be at the top of any serious traveller's want-to-visit list.
The landscape is otherworldly, from the ocean of blood red crests along Dune
Alley at Sossusvlei (pronounced SOSS-oo-vlay) to the gravity-defying rock
formations and petrified forest of Damaraland, in the country’s center. Even
beside the main highway, there are enough elephants, giraffes and springbok
to satisfy those who can’t imagine a southern African trip without big game.
And the mind-boggling juxtaposition of women draped in skins that covered
animals a week earlier against shopping malls offering a full selection of
Ray-Bans, or of face powder ground in a mortar and pestle cheek by jowl with
shiny Hummers, leads you into the heart of a modern Africa tangled by time,
defined by the collision of centuries and traditions.
Namibia isn’t easy, especially for travellers whose notion of a vacation is
dashing from one sight to another, or for urbanites who need regular fixes
of bright lights and noisy streets. Except for those with pockets deep
enough to arrange chartered flights between the dunes and the Damara
homesteads, it demands patience with corrugated gravel roads and mile after
mile of what poets are fond of calling terrible beauty.
“LOOK, a different kind of nothingness!” exclaimed my husband, Dennis, his
New York candor more prosaic than poetic, as we drove around Namibia last
January. The austere landscape had shifted from barren scrubland to enormous
jumbles of rocks that looked as if God had forgotten to straighten them up.
Yet there is something beguiling about the bleakness of this place that you
miss if you bop across the country by air, from warthog to lion, from sand
spout to watering hole. Namibia is as much about the environmental and human
interstices between sites as about the sites themselves.
By far the most mesmerizing of those sites is in the northwest corner of the
country, in Kunene. This is not tourist Africa, which is fast becoming one
gigantic game park, or the show Africa of tribesmen and women who dress up
like their grandparents for visitors but go home and don jeans before
heading out to the local disco. This is dusty, chaotic Africa, where donkey
carts are more common conveyances than buses, where animals are killed for
clothing as well as for food, and where words like globalization and the
Internet have not yet entered the popular vocabulary.
All the paradoxes of modern Africa seem to be concentrated in that remote
corner of Namibia, and they are at their most glaring inside the OK Grocer,
on the edge of the dusty town of Opuwo, just 100 miles south of the Angolan
border. There on a morning in late January, two Himba women, their breasts
bared, their waists draped with multilayered goatskin miniskirts, ogled the
rich German-style cream cakes on display. The glass of the showcase was
already streaked with red from the mixture of fat, ash and ochre-coloured
mud with which Himba woman coat their bodies and hair, their homemade
version of Clarins Hydra -Wear.
In the adjacent aisle, a stout Herero matron examined the meagre selection
of vegetables. Decked out in her traditional garb — a long-sleeved and
long-skirted dress that could have been a costume for a Victorian period
drama if not for the hat, an oversized, cloth-covered pan with what appeared
to be a baguette sitting on top — she culled disapprovingly through a bin of
potatoes and harrumphed before she hiked up her prodigious skirts and walked
out.
At the checkout counter, a Timba teenager waiting for the clerk to ring up a
pile of cooking oil, salt and beans sported the beads and brassiere that
distinguish her from her Himba cousins, although one of her breasts was
hanging out, whether as a fashion statement or because she’d gotten up late,
it was unclear. Behind her, a young white woman flicked her ponytail
impatiently; all she was buying was a single jar of cocktail olives.
Outside, two bull-necked Afrikaners sipped tea in the garden of the adjacent
coffee shop, and a Himba man in a Cal State T-shirt and a two-panel skirt —
short and gathered in the front, long and straight in back — distractedly
herded goats down the main street while chatting on his cellphone.
I seemed to be the only person in town who found the scene noteworthy.
On a continent where centuries of European encroachments have inexorably
eroded tradition, Africans who cling to outward manifestations of their
culture are the rarest of sights. And there’s perhaps nowhere in the region
where outsiders can mingle with them more easily, more casually, than in
Opuwo.
But Namibia is nothing if not unpredictable, and just a day’s drive from the
OK Grocer, you can find yourself among
meticulously coiffed Germans shopping for springbok-skin photo albums,
handcrafted silver jewellery encrusted with malachite or mandarin garnet,
and elephant-hide belts in the elegant boutiques of Swakopmund, a surreal
seaside town that feels like a cross between Brighton-by-the-Sea and
Bavaria.
For decades until 1914, Namibia was a German colony, South West Africa, and
even 94 years after Germany lost it as the spoils of defeat in World War I,
the Teutonic imprint on Swakop, as locals call the city, remains
unmistakable. The standard plats du jour are schnitzel and bratwurst; the
architecture of the old prison, the train station, the jail and dozens of
other structures is late 19th-century Munich; and the streets are so tidy
that Kaiser Wilhelm, for whom the main avenue was named until the government
changed it six years ago, would be proud.
The only clear sign that the town is actually in Africa is the throng of
black workers who pick up the trash before it can hit the ground. Blond
children scoot around on bicycles, elderly German couples take their evening
constitutionals along the waterfront and teenagers who look surprisingly
like California surfer dudes guide tourists through an utterly un-African
extreme sports scene: sand boarding, sand sledding, sand skiing and sand
sailing — none of which includes a dune lift, so all of which demand
repeated uphill slogs through the sand and the inhalation of lungfuls of
Namibian dust.
With its traffic lights, pubs and trendy restaurants, Swakop provides a
delightful respite from the grinding isolation that is most of the country.
But the illusion of Europe embedded deep in the heart of Africa vanishes
barely a mile from the centre of town.
Minutes beyond the city limits, it’s hard to recall that chimera at all. The
scene becomes a panorama of desolation, of rocks and scrubby trees, lava
fields and herds of goats. The occasional Damara and Herero homesteads bear
no trace of the Germanic penchant for order; they are tiny mean huts cobbled
together from sheet metal, elephant dung, car doors, truck canopies, straw
and whatever else is at hand.
This is a wild land of enormous skies, nomadic herders and vast farms with
the thinnest possible veneer of modernity. For decades, the Skeleton Coast,
north of Swakopmund, buffeted by impenetrable fog, perilous cross currents
and treacherous reefs, has been a graveyard for ships, and Kaokoland, the
ruggedly inaccessible northern mountains shrouded by the mists of the
Atlantic, wasn’t fully explored until the second half of the 20th century.
Where Namibia meets both Angola and the sea, hunters and gatherers still
wander remote mountains. In a country twice the size of California but with
just two million inhabitants, the major cities, Swakopmund and Windhoek, the
capital, feel like prefabricated alien entities plopped down without any
local roots.
EXPLORING the back roads on our own in a rented 4 x 4 truck, we found
ourselves drag racing with ostriches — and discovering that despite their
awkward gait, they usually win. And we wound up eating lunch at the old
German fort at Sesfontein that looks so much like part of a movie set for a
film like “Beau Geste” that I couldn’t help but wonder whether Gary Cooper,
Ray Milland and their pals from the French Foreign Legion were about to ride
up on their camels.
In Damaraland, we wended our way around the Brandberg, Namibia’s highest
mountain (8,440 feet), and lingered at the gallery of 6,000-year-old San
petroglyphs at Twyfelfontein. If you’re as lucky as we were, a
desert-adapted elephant will saunter by before you check in at a luxurious
lodge where the wine is always at a perfect temperature, and a much-needed
massage may be available.
Namibia might have a lot of nothingness, but that nothingness can be viewed
with sundowners from the verandas of any of dozens of high-end lodges and
tented camps or at one of the plethora of guest farms that provide a glimpse
into what feels like the last redoubt of white colonial Africa.
While the game-viewing at Etosha National Park and along the Botswanan
border is among the best in southern Africa, Namibia is one of the few
countries where visitors are likely to see serious game outside of a park.
So you don’t merely check off animals or the sights marked in guidebooks as
“highlights.”
You can be waylaid by the unexpected baboon sitting atop a fence post by the
side of the road, by the odd shovel-mouthed lizard, or by the huge
haystacklike homes of sociable weaver birds. After a week, it felt ordinary
to spot an elephant tusk as we drove down the road or to glimpse a giraffe
chomping on a tree when we pulled over for a sandwich or ran into town for
milk.
But when I dream of Namibia, it is not of the Big Five, or the little
antelopes and warthogs, but of the OK Grocer. As I
wandered out of it on my first day in Opuwo, my mouth still agape from the
richness of clanging cultures, a Himba woman approached me, covetously
eyeing the sleeveless short dress I’d bought at Banana Republic and offering
to sell me bits and pieces of her own outfit — a necklace or two, a beaded
ankle bracelet, a woven container of the ochre mixture she smothers on her
hair.
I was more covetous than she was. I would get an original; she would wind up
with off the rack. But even as I purchased a fabulous ankle bracelet made of
metal beads wrought from melted wire, I flashed back to the women inside the
supermarket and their obvious hunger for the most untraditional of cream
cakes, at least in Himba terms, and couldn’t help but wonder how soon the
woman in front of me would trade in her goatskins for clothes like mine.
Go soon to Namibia. The rhinos will always be there, but Banana Republic
might be as well.
ELINOR BURKETT divides her time between the Catskills and Zimbabwe, where
she teaches journalism.
Copied from: http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/travel/24namibia.html
JACANA HOME PAGE
|
CLASSIC VIDEO CLIPS
|
JACANA ASTRONOMY SITE
JACANA PHOTO LIBRARY |
OLD MAUN PHOTO GALLERY |
MAUN PHONE DIRECTORY
FREE FONTS |
PIC OF THE DAY
|
GENERAL LIBRARY |
MAP LIBRARY |
TECHNICAL LIBRARY
HOUSE PLANS LIBRARY
|
MAUN E-MAIL, WEBSITE & SKYPE LIST
|
BOTSWANA GPS CO-ORDINATES
MAUN SAFARI WEB LINKS |
FREE SOFTWARE |
JACANA WEATHER PAGE
JACANA CROSSWORD LIBRARY |
JACANA CARTOON PAGE |
DEMOTIVATIONAL POSTERS
  |
|