Thursday, July 14

The Namibian Desert is not a desert. When I saw it I thought of descriptions I’d read of the San Joaquin Valley before modern agriculture brought water. The valley bottoms are dry most of the year but there is enough rain in the winter to support low growing shrubs and one species of Acacia tree.

But there is something here in Southern Namibia that looks desertlike:

Sand. Red sand. Huge piles of red sand. The world’s largest sand dunes. But the sand got here in a strange way. To the east is the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. The winds blow west. The sand moved with the wind to Namibia. Then the prevailing winds from the Antarctic carried it northward to its present location.

What you see to the right are tourists climbing Dune #45 (they're numbered). There are hundreds of these dunes in the Nambian 'desert'.

The Namibians have cast their lot with tourism. Instead of trying to convert the valleys to agriculture with their own version of the Central Valley Water Project they have sealed off thousand of hectares of land for wildlife and nature. There isn’t a town of any size within 200 kilometers of here. But tourists are trucked in by the hundreds to climb the dunes (see picture above), trek through the dry valleys and wonder at rocks and oryx and springboks. The strange part of this is the herdlike way that the humans behave. This morning at 6am there was a traffic jam worthy of the Long Island Expressway at the gate of our campground. The gates open each morning at 6. The sun rises at about 6:45. And every tour group has its charges safely tucked into the African travel vans that they all use. Once the gate opens the idea is the race down the two-lane road to Dune #45 (yes, they are numbered). Once at #45 the tourists are released to race up the dune to photograph the sunrise.

I did get a photo of the sunrise:

This is the first three days of my eleven-day tour. We started out in the middle of the country at Windhoek, and drove about 225 miles south to the campground. Tomorrow we return to Windhoek just in time for me to embark on the eight-day, northern trip to Botswana and Zambia.

The sad part of all this is that I haven’t been able to find a friend among the twelve fellow travellers on this trip. Most of them are agriculture teachers at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Two young women are middle school teachers from Manhattan. Thrown in a woman from Germany and a woman from Holland and you have my group. But only two of these folks are in my age range and my natural shyness undermines my ability to feel comfortable with strangers. So I definitely feel like an outsider.

On the positive side I quickly realized that this is a part of the world that I never would have seen except for one of these tours. There just isn’t anything or anyone near here. You just can’t hop a minivan or stick out your hitchhiking finger and get here. It is a beautiful region. This photography thing is not my usual schtick but since I took pictures I might as well use them:

Of all the countries I've visited in the past six or seven years Namibia seems to one to earn "Most Likely To Succeed". It has problems (40% official unemployment although many of these are working illicitly); the residue of apartheid (though race relations here seem light years ahead of South Africa); lack of industry (but they just discovered oil of the coast). You just don't feel the tension here that you feel in South Africa. Downtown Windhoek gives the appearance of a multi-racial democracy.

Tomorrow I leave on a five day trip northward, ending at Victoria Falls in Zambia. After that I don't know where I'm going, maybe to

Zimbabwe, maybe Mozambique, maybe Angola or Tanzania. I've spent too much money already but still have enough to wander if I choose. Or I may simply find a hotel in Zambia or Botswana and relax for a few days to conserve funds. I was lonely on the southern Namibia trip and I'm mostly hoping I can make some friends on the northern tour.