A Different Kind of Africa (Part 2)

Chameleon Hostel is definitely one of the best hostels I have ever stayed in—pool, bar, kitchen, tons of info. There is a great atmosphere, a great mix of people and plenty to do. I booked a bed for the night and asked the reception people about tours. The gal said there was a three day camping tour of Etosha leaving the next day, so I got excited. Once she called, however, they said they were full and couldn’t fit anyone else. I took their Master Binder of Tours and Things to Do, and sat down with my cheese and crackers to decide what I was going to do for the next four days. This was a serious low point. By the next morning, I was convinced I wasn’t going to go because a few different scenarios hadn’t worked out. One of the girls in the dorm room with me was living in Etosha and studying giraffes on a Fulbright, but there was no room left in the car she was taking, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get around the park or back to the airport once I got there. A couple other ladies were thinking of renting a car, but nothing seemed to materialize there either. But in the morning, the Safari Lady arrived and seemed to work some magic. A tour guide had come to pick up three guests for an 8 day camping tour of Namibia—Etosha, the Namib Desert, and Soussusvlei (the biggest sand dune in the world). Since there were only three people, the Safari Lady got them to let me jump on for the first four days in which they were going to see Etosha and the town of Swakopmund, and then part from them on Wednesday morning and take a shuttle to the airport in Windhoek. And I can still pay the three day tour price. Oh it was so perfect! So I gathered my stuff, checked out, and hopped on the tour. And thus began my sojourn into the tourism side of Africa. And what a strange beast it can be.

When you enter into the world of the tours, you are essentially buying a certain kind of experience. Tourism, at least in Africa, is like a veneer that is hiding the more unsightly things but with a thin shiny gloss. Hence Namibia has good roads, running (hot) water in all the campgrounds, punctual appointments, quality restaurants with non-local imported food. Namibia looks more developed because without these things the hordes of 50-something German couples would not spend their big Euros there. Many people on a shoestring budget don’t go this way. They hole up at backpackers’ hostels, hitchhike to see things, rely on chance relationships and meeting and a flexible schedule to get them around places. There is less security, and more unknowns, but less money and a greater adventure, I guess. I suppose I am somewhere in the middle. Even the “cultural” tours can be a little canned. Let’s make tourists feel good by showing them the “real” Namibia, the people in the slums and opportunities to photograph the oldest traditional and isolated tribe in their bedrooms. Animals, rather than people, are better viewed in this zoo-like way and a better use of my money. Suffice it to say, I am glad and way happy to be on a camping tour with three other people rather than the enormous buses full of wealthy German tourists and all their earthly needs met. Though even the camping tour is quite pampering.

So we were off to Etosha. Me, Karrie—a woman from Texas, her daughter Erin (who seems to run in the same public health circles in DC as I do—small world), and her college friend Lou, an anesthesiologist from Stanford. And of course Millner, our tour guide. The first day was a long drive from Windhoek to the park and we didn’t do or see anything much except drive. I understood why people get such a kick out of traveling on a whim. It was so much more satisfying how this trip worked out than if I had planned it. It made it more exciting. We camped the first night on the border outside the park, welcomed by some springbok and a wildebeest. It was a beautiful day until we go to the campground when Mother Earth decided she needed some water and it poured down on us. It was quite miserable. Here we were, this new group of people (and me with no rain gear either—I was soaked), who didn’t know how to set up these particular tents and not looking world to cooking in the rain and a further wet night. Millner ended up setting up the tents with minimal help from us since we didn’t know how and like a trooper managed a delicious hot meal that made us all feel better.

The next day was our major day in Etosha, our game drive day. Basically, Millner drove us around the third of the park tourists could visit and we would see what we could see. I was hoping for elephants, but it seems it is the time of year that they migrate to the restricted area of the park. Elephants are a nuisance to most people because they see them too much, but I get to leave Namibia without seeing one. Despite the lack of elephants, the multitude of giraffes, zebras, lions, and the rare black rhino sighting tried to make up for it. I always enjoyed seeing giraffes in the zoo and had hoped that seeing them in the wild would be something special. I wasn’t disappointed. Seeing them nibbling from trees right next to your car, then mustering their lankiness into an unnatural looking lope is kind of special. The lions we saw had obviously spent the morning gorging themselves on some animal and were very happy and lazy and the juvenile cubs were lying right next to the road seeming to pose for the safari-ers, crouching and drinking from the puddles in the road. We also saw tons of antlered deer-like animals—springbok, impala, kudu, and a wildebeest or two, even a dik-dik here and there. There were a variety of beautifully colored birds, land birds, ostriches, and road runners. Our hunt for cheetahs, leopards, and rhinos was unsuccessful. We spent the night in a campsite within the park which was a campground in a national park like I’ve never experienced. They had fences and gates which they shut at sundown as well as 5 star lodges and 5 star camping. This camp Okankanejo is popular because they have bungalows right next to a lighted watering hole, which in the dry season is sure to draw all kinds of animals. This time of year though, it is smaller. In the morning we watched a large herd of zebra come for their morning refreshments. This time, the putting up of the tents went much swifter and we were all in a much better mood since we were dry. That night we listened as the jackals called to one another and ran through our campsite scavenging for food. In the morning we packed up early, had some yummy bacon and eggs and headed out to see what other animals we might see before heading for the desert. We were able to see some more wildebeest, oryx, a few hyenas loping through the grasses and the elusive black rhino. Unlike the other animals we saw that were near the road and conditioned show-offs, the rhino remained a tease by keeping his massive head down in the tall grass and partially concealing himself in the stick bushes, never coming completely out in the open, prompting the passengers in the “rhino jam” to go to questionable lengths to get his picture—like climbing on top of the car. We tore ourselves away from the rhino and continued on to the next place—Aba Huab in the desert.

After several hours of driving we were dropped off at a local tourist site the Damara people preserve showcasing rock carvings by nomadic Bushmen 2,000 to 6,000 years ago. In this land of burnt red sandstone are some of the most well-preserved carvings in Southern Africa. Bushmen hunters left tributes, records, and maps of herds of valued animals—lions, antelope, elephants, oryx, rhino, and giraffe. The most famous engraving is of a five-toed lion with an exceptionally long tail and an animal in its mouth. The interpretation is that 5 toes represents a human incarnation and it was believed that shamans could connect with the spirit world through animal spirits, thus the lion is a transformed shaman.

The next day we drove to the city of Swakopmund, another German city on the coast, but bigger than Luderitz. We passed from the beautiful red, rocky mountains to the desert plains near the coast. In the afternoon we were free to walk around and visit the markets and craft shops. The next day was a “free day” to spend as we liked, but it was my day to go to the airport. We walked around that afternoon trying to not be bothered by the somewhat desperate craft sellers, stopped at a café, and walked through a couple stores. That night we cleaned ourselves up and went to the nice seafood restaurant on the water. I had a wonderful seafood kebab with several different kinds of seafood and tasty Chardonnay to go with it. Afterwards we headed to a local bar where I enjoyed a yummy Savannah Dry cider. It was the perfect way to spend my last night in Namibia.

A Different Kind of Africa (Part 1)

I decided about a month ago to take a spontaneous holiday and have spent the last couple of weeks in Namibia. My cousin Leslie has been there for the last eight months and plane tickets were suddenly rather cheap so I took off from West Africa to see a bit of the Africa everyone dreams about. I wanted to see big animals, meet other Peace Corps Volunteers, and spend some time with a relative I never see. As far as those three things, the trip was a complete success.

I arrived at the Windhoek airport early on Thursday morning sleep deprived and curious. I got from the airport to the bus station via a connection of Leslie’s and settled in to wait for the next several hours until there were enough customers to leave. Windhoek kind of shocked me. I didn’t see much of it the whole trip, but it’s a very clean and modern city, full of new buildings, new cars, painted houses with high walls, interesting looking restaurants—a city like anyone would find in America and better than most. The car that was to take me to Keetmanshoop was new, operational, clean and spacious, quite dissimilar to my normal travel experiences in Ghana. As customers filled the car, I began to get a feel for the people in this new place—the sound of Afrikaans, the enormous diversity in skin color, and the sound of one of Southern Africa’s many “clicking” languages. Very musical and fun to listen to.

Eventually we left for Keetmans and as I watched (and we flew down a very smooth and well-maintained road, might I add) the land changed from mountainous to mid-western flat with fields and great herds of goats and cows. We arrived too late in Keetmans to get a car to Aus, so I stayed with a couple PCVs in that town. Two volunteers were living in a flat at the hospital’s quarters with two other Czech volunteers. Electricity, running water, apartment style housing, fridge, oven, etc. Is this Peace Corps? One of the PCVs, Will, was heading to Luderitz in the morning and Aus was on the way, so we headed out the next morning to find a car.

Namibia is very sparsely populated—especially in the south. There are only two million people in the whole country. Towns in the south are few and far between, so at every town almost every car has to stop and refuel. People looking for rides and drivers looking for customers often find each other at gas stations. So Will and I hunkered down at a gas station for a couple of hours until a “combi” (large van) going to Luderitz picked us up. It was a couple hours to Aus and the land changed again from Missouri to Utah. As the grasslands transitioned to the Namib Desert, mountains made of sandstone blocks erupted out of the ground. Sand, shrubbery, cacti, strange looking trees, and empty riverbeds were all that could be seen in the mountain beneath the cloudless blue sky. Aside from the lack of sage brush, it looked so very similar to the land that was Leanna’s and mine playground for so many years. In here was Aus and the Klein Aus Vista lodge that was Leslie’s workplace. We sat and had lunch in the lodge dining room (you have no idea how excited I was about that ham sandwich) on the balcony overlooking the desert and began our three or four days of nonstop talking. After collecting some fruits and veggies from the bosses for dinner that night, we walked to Leslie’s house in Aus and then took the five minute walk around Aus. You’d think (or at least I did) this would be a village, but it’s not. Aus is like a little resort town at low season—there’s nobody in it. But, like Windhoek, its clean, modern, and with nobody walking around. And the local people are in a lower income neighborhood across the street away from the town. Of course the best part was the short nightly ritual we set up having good German beer (dear God it was so good) outside on the Bahnhof Hotel deck where a couple nights later I enjoyed a dinner of kudu and ostrich kebabs.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to do in Aus except hike, or maybe visit the nearby wild horses from which the lodge earns its living. Hence the Texas-Cowboy-in-Africa feel that the lodge exudes. So we hiked to The Lookout—the sort hike over the rocks between the peaks of the mountains that are the barrier between the mountain desert and the moonscape into nothingness on the other side. 

That nothingness we crossed a couple days later on the way to Luderitz, an oddly placed, old German colony on the west coast of Namibia. Originally settled by German colonists in the 1800s(?) mostly because of the nearby rich diamond deposit, it is an odd mixture of beach and desert. Ocean on one side, flowing sand dunes on the other three sides. We walked around Shark Island; a place once used by the Germans in an early genocide of Africans, but today is a very windy camping park, the history invisible to its modern uses. And we went to Kolmanskuppe, a town built a few miles out of Luderitz purely to house the workers of the diamond “mine.” In fact most of the diamonds they found were lying on the surface. For 20 some years in the early 1900s, Kolmanskuppe was a thriving little town complete with theater hall, gymnastics equipment, a school, an ice factory, and a hospital with one of the earliest working x-ray machines, then it was abandoned abruptly and the surrounding desert is slowly burying it. Now it’s a destination for history buffs and, oddly enough, photographers of all abilities wanting to play with the site’s light and shadow abnormalities. We spent the morning playing and experimenting with our cameras, or, at least, I did.

While in Luderitz we stayed with a couple PCVs who were living in a flat in town. Will, my hitch hiking buddy from earlier was there and we all had a great time swapping our Peace Corps experiences over a wonderful dinner of rice and rogan josh curry with chicken. Mmmmm. As Thursday faded and with it my first week in Namibia, I was trying to find a way to see Etosha National Park, a long way to the north. It was becoming more and more apparent to me that I would feel incredibly stupid and regretful if I left Namibia without seeing the best wildlife viewing it had to offer. None of the tours seemed to be working out with my schedule, since it is the low season so less tours are booked. Since Leslie had to go back to Aus anyway to work, I decided to just travel to Windhoek the next day, and hole up at the popular Chameleon Backpacker’s Hostel and see if something would “work out.”