Does the Pentagon Know?

So out in the middle of nowhere, we came across this bio-weapons lab...

And then some joker wrote this on the back of our truck:



(everywhere you go in Damaraland, people are trying to sell you gems, etc. or key-holders. Yep, lots of key-holders. With your name carved on them. The first time a guy came up to me and asked my name out of the blue and how to spell it, I was kind of wondering what was up and then seconds later, he handed me a personalised little beauty with "BOB" etched into it. We all ended up with one. After that, whenever someone sidled up to the car and casually asked what are names were, we would tell him and then volunteer that we already had key-chains and the poor guy would look crestfallen... but one only has so many keys...

Spitzkoppe: Where Philippe Could Have Bought a Kid

Savanna

We almost didn’t go to what turned out to be perhaps my favourite place in Namibia: Spitzkoppe, a fabulous mountain in the Demaraland. We were all glad that we did, though. There’s a superb community-run campsite around the base and some of the campsites themselves are soooo cool. Check the pics, if you don’t believe me. The granite rocks are easy to climb and the views out over the savanna were breathtaking, especially at sunset. Then, when the stars came out…magic.


Sunset at Spitzkoppe

We hired a guide to take us around right when we arrived and he was pretty good – although he did seem more interested in the Liverpool match on the radio… After he showed us the main cave drawings at the site, he rang the pueblo and directed us over so that we could see a real Demara village. Well, not the swankiest place I’ve ever been and when he further elaborated that we would be visiting the house where they make their own beer, my stomach had distinct Memories of Amoebic Dysentery in Honduras… The crew at that place were exceedingly friendly and we drank a bit of the beer in the end (tasted like a meady lager) and then bought a big bottle of it for 2 bucks. As I bought the suds, Philippe was busy talking to some of the more lubricated locals, one of whom first offered to give Philippe his dog and then told him that he could buy his latest baby for just 500 american dollars… ay yai yai… We booked it out of there and thought we were heading back to our campsite, which still had to be set up before it got too dark, but no, our guide told us to drive up to a nearby shed and said that he needed a drink and a cigarette! So out he hops and pops into a Namibian cantina… he told us to have one too but we all demurred although I’m sure that it would have been one helluva story had we got hammered and then driven back the few kays to camp…


Campsite at Spitzkoppe

Dali’s Giraffes

Giraffes in Etosha Park

Last night at the first campsite in Etosha, I had one of those moments of overlap – not déjà vu, per se, but rather when scenes in your mind’s eye not only coincide with learned images that have become archetypes of common imagination (think: the posters in a 1st year’s university room), but also with what the retina is taking in at that very moment… This happened as two very skittish giraffes, having finally drunk after almost an hour’s equivocation, moved away from the watering hole adjacent to the camp (you can sit some 20 metres away and sip beer or wine behind a small stone wall and an inclined fence that in no way would stop a mildly perturbed lion). With the roar of an only briefly-glimpsed big cat ringing in their ears, these lanky beasts glided into the hazy darkness that marked the boundary between the yellow floodlights’ ken and the dark savanna’s inky reach. They moved further and further and in that precise instant of nether, they became for me Dali's giraffes, my mind stretching their limbs and knobby joints, elongating their necks even more than nature had already generously intended… they were the dream at the edge of an artificial day carved out of the night for tourists’ pleasure, striding shadows in negative, spotted tall yet diminishing still…

With Apologies to James Merrill…

Last night I dreamed the dream called “Clean”…

Tonight is the last night of the “4x4 camping in the wilds of Namibia” phase of the trip. I can’t say that I’m going to miss that green tent attached to the cab of the truck. No sir. Ready for a real bed again and most of all, ready to be able to escape the heat and dust. Did I mention the dust? I feel like grass-cutting/landscaping Bob from many years back… and yes, ha ha, even my carefully cultivated “priest’s hands” are gone; those of you who have only known prissy dressed-up Bob probably wouldn’t have believed that I would eschew the Oriali and Hiltl and bespoke for desert gear and cargo pants... It’s good to change things up a bit, though—and that’s part of what this is all about—but yes, I am looking forward to being clean again… : )

What is more, these last couple of days have been especially hot and this morning in the shower (showers! a benefit of staying here in Etosha’s swank campgrounds), I realised that my core temperature has probably gone up a few degrees as I kept pushing the cold water tap to the right and then felt deflated when I realised that it was already as far as it would go… Swakopmund’s cool breezes are looking particularly attractive right now…

Addendum: Ok, so that last night in the tent was pretty brutal – VERY HOT – no air flow whatsoever and on top of it, the rains have started and with them, the mosquitoes… little bastards… and SO LOUD… it was possible to hear them buzzing outside of the bloody tent and I spent a good couple of hours battling the ones that penetrated the less-than-hermetically sealed canvas box… wouldn’t have been so bad but in your heat-exasperated, sleep-deprived state, the fact that any one of the buggers may be about to inject you with malaria gives things an added edge…

Addendum #2: Am now back in Swakopmund, where it is gloriously cool here beside the Atlantic, just south of the Skeleton Coast.

Namibia Part 1.

Dune 45.

So how does one get as far away as possible from sitting in an office at St. George Campus of the U of T? By going to fucking rural Namibia… to the goddamn desert, that’s how… This very thought came to me yesterday, as I lay in bed (in a tent attached to the top of a 4x4 truck) and tried to get to sleep over the sounds of various critters prowling about outside… The fact that I had never felt so dusty and dried out only heightened the utter disconnect between my circumstances 2 weeks ago and what I’m experiencing now. And this is good. This is partly why I’m on this trip and why I agreed to do the rural Namibia odyssey: to get out of my comfort zone and to challenge myself, to deal with new things (like driving through sand dunes at 100 kph, or on a more serious note, worrying about things a little more primal and base than tenure decisions or book contracts such as “will we find a safe place to sleep tonight?” or “what the fuck do we do if this truck breaks down?” or “how do I reconcile the sheer disparity of experience between myself and the man who assured us that our truck would indeed get through the soft sand at the entrance to Homeb and that no, the jackals wouldn’t be a problem at night”). Being utterly disconnected from everyone is hard for me and man, here in Namibia, when you leave a big town, you may not see another soul on the road for hours… seriously. There is NOBODY out there, let alone an internet kiosk that lets you stay in touch. You’re lucky if there is cell coverage (we have Sarah’s unlocked Sony Ericsson phone… “you’re gonna be a rock star…”.



Campsite at Sesriem

As for the desert, I like it but shit, I would never live out there. The constant dust in everything, the parched land and skin is unreal. At the same time, the beauty of the sun rising over the giant dunes between Sossuvlei and Sesriem is something that I will not soon forget. We got up at 4:30 so that we could pack up the truck and drive the 45 km to the aptly named Dune 45 where we climbed up the spine of the sand dune (not as easy as it sounds) with about 50 other people and then watched the sun come up from the top… And if that wasn’t enough, we then kept going the other 20km to Sossuvlei proper and hiked in to Dead Vlei, a totally surrealistic landscape of dead trees in a dried lake with majestic dunes serving as backdrop… totally stunning but man, oh man, very hot out there.

Dead Vlei

Checking things out in Homeb.

Sunrise at Dune 45.

When we left that park we were headed towards to Walvis Bay and had it been me, we would have just stopped at the first empty campsite we came too because we didn’t have a permit for that night and my mind was still working on the Canadian assumption that there are park wardens, etc. Well, if there are any in Namibia, we haven’t seen them… In any event, Philippe convinced us to push on to Homeb and after some scary incidents involving sand (full disclosure: we got stuck in some soft sand earlier in the day at the popular dune site and needed help getting out, so we were very leery) we made it just in time to set up before full darkness fell. A local man from a nearby village brought us some firewood and started it up for a small fee. I cooked some venison steaks and rice and we ate well far, far, far away from anything in the rest of the world.

When Helene and I first arrived in Windhoek a couple of days ago, we had to wait almost an hour and a half for Philippe to pick us up because he had made the car guys replace the 4x4’s two front tires. I am very glad for that wait given the roads we’ve been on. Luckily for us, Phillipe is used to driving long distances on gravel roads in Quebec and when he saw the wear on the treads he told them “no way.” We went to do a grocery and then 20 km later were in the outback… only gravel roads (the graders are heroes here as far as I’m concerned…) and magnificent scenery that continually changes as you traverse regions.

The Jack Bauer in the Desert look... ha ha!

We arrived in Walvis Bay this morning and checked out the waterfront while looking for flamingos that we learned later, are still up in Etosha National Park… After a quick trip to see a salt plant, we drove to Swakopmund, a German colonial town that will be Helene’s and my base next week as we job shadow a contact who does AIDS awareness with children. This place is crazy – SOOOO german and here in southwestern Africa… Namibia is truly a diverse country…

Here, I got to use some internet but may well be incommunicado for another week until we return on Monday next. I hope not, because being slightly connected helps keep me stress-free… and writing and reading emails from friends as well as news from home helps me deal with the culture/class shock, which is not inconsequential this time round…

When Dead Space Comes Alive

Driving back from the East, madly trying to get back to Cape Town in time to drop off the car and not have to worry about finding a safe place for it during the night, I saw something that utterly transformed my impression of a banal space that I had always taken for granted and thought was either wasted, or deserted or both... the grass islands where expressways meet, on-ramps converge and service roads end.

In the outskirts of Cape Town there are massive shanty-towns with very spotty entrances/exits, which means that people walk kilometres, jump fences and-- mum, close your eyes-- dash across 4 lane highways to get home after work. When you drive into these zones, the normally plain and static highway architecture suddenly becomes vibrant, chaotic and disturbing fluid... you have to avoid people running in front of you and, at the same time, resist the temptation to watch in the rear view mirror to see if the next group made it or not... because there may be more people in front of you.

But people crossing carriageways happens everywhere here in South Africa... what was singularly different about this particular area, though, was that when we passed the green verges, we saw groups of kids on them... and they weren't just sitting or hanging out, they were running, jumping and playing soccer... Simple really, given the lack of green space in the township housing area... So their means of compensating has been to occupy the most readily available piece of grass... and reclaim a space that is never used, except by grasscutters (a trip back in time for me) and illegal garbage dumpers. They have brought to life a dead space that previously only held blank aesthetic value -- a green frame for the concrete roads. Still, if the ball goes out of bounds here, it is really out of bounds... completely dangerously so...

But what does one do when there is no alternative?

Leaving Cape Town

Today was a very relaxed day. Did laundry in the craziest but cleanest laundromat I've ever seen... there was an old raving South African dude (the owner's dad) who came in like a hurricane and flustered everyone... the place was spic and span, though, so who's complaining?

Helene was feeling sick from the bobotie that she ate last night... although the place where she had it, Mama Africa, was awesome: great ambiance (tourists mixing with locals mixing with visiting hipsters) and the live band was incredible. One of their songs was the equivalent to a similar band's entire set in Canada... We also both agreed that the woman standing in front of us hanging out with her friend and fiancee was the most sublimely beautiful African woman we had ever seen. And there was soccer on the telly! And beer! Man, GREAT place! Endorsement!

This afternoon, we walked around the Bo Taap neighbourhood and had a great coffee at a cute place called Rhubarb Room before walking down to the market area and buying almost all the rest of our plane tickets at the Flight Centre (Cochin-Calcutta and Amsterdam-Barcelona still pending). So now we have dates for our trip to Maputo in Mozambique, Dar and Zanzibar (not that one Nestor...) and to India via Qatar airlines on 11 Dec.

The internet is down at the hostal so I did some work on the captions and acknowledgements for the Barcelona book and then came here to a local internet cafe to send the file back to Toronto.

The minibus comes by at 5am to take us to the airport for our 8am flight to Windhoek, where Philippe will pick us up with the 4x4... Then it's out to the bush. I think that we'll be in a town of some sort at the week-end, so that will probably be the next update... because I'm guessing there is not much in the way of internet coverage in the Namib Desert...