Namibia

Climbing Dune 45 in the Namib Desert

Namibia was incredible.  So beautiful.  We spent 2 days on the Atlantic coast in the small town of Swakopmund.  That's about 30 minutes from Walvis Bay, the town we flew into, and the center of a major fishing industry, including more than a dozen large seafood processing plants.

Right across the highway from the plants is worker housing, some relatively new and decent concrete bungalows.  For the less fortunate, however, the walls of those newish houses provide one solid wall for  the not-so-solid shacks they build with whatever materials they can find—scraps of tin, cardboard, plastic sheeting.  Unemployment in Namibia is reported (according to the guy who owned the guest house where we stayed) to be 43%, which I would find hard to believe except that it is 34% in S. Africa, which is much more prosperous.

Koppies that dot the desert

Namibia has lots of mining, but most of the country is desert or dry grasslands.  We did see some cattle, goats and horses as we drove from Sosusvlei (an area of magnificent dunes) to Windhoek (the capital), but no farming at all.  Our travel was in a small part of the country, though the drives from Swakopmund to Sosusvlei and from Sosusvlei to Windhoek were each over 5 hours on mostly graveled roads (which are in surprisingly good condition). 

Cocktails at Kulala Desert Lodge

Dunes near Sosusvlei

The Sosusvlei dunes extend over 60 miles to the Atlantic from where we were staying in a remote and lovely desert lodge.  Our full day there, we climbed 2 dunes, each about 300 feet high.  Good exercise and really beautiful.  There are large pans in this part of the desert (probably everywhere) where water collects during the occasional (as in every 5 years) cloudbursts and deposits clay in the bottom of the basins among the dunes.  These pans get very hard.  Some have had trees growing in them during wetter pasts (1000 years ago) and now there are hundreds of dead trees kept standing by the hard-packed clay.  Quite stunning amidst the red dunes.

Dead Pan

In the evening we drove up onto a knob to watch the sunset over the dunes.  Lovely. 

Morning at the dunes

We talked to our guide for several hours about his life and dreams.  He has a 7 year old son who lives with our guide’s mother in a village far north of Windhoek--and we were way southwest.  Staff at our desert lodge work 6 weeks and then get 2 weeks off.  It often takes our guide 2 1/2 days to get to his home village to see his son because there is no public transportation.  So, he has to hitchhike there and back.

Don and our guide, Christof, enjoying a "sundowner"

Our guide wants to start a business in Windhoek so he can make enough money to send his son to a good public school, which will cost him about $500 per year, way beyond his means now.  He also wants to be closer to his son.  He said the public schools are very bad.  We went through several villages on our long drives (very far apart and very poor) and saw lots of kids out herding animals or playing in the dusty streets, when they should have been in school. 

Kulala Desert Lodge

Namibia is still very tribal, as are most African countries, so the ruling party, SWAPO in Namibia (the former liberation movement), provides most of its limited aid to members of its own tribe.  This is not unusual, but does make it very difficult for other tribes to advance.  I remember being in Moshi, Tanzania a couple of years ago and talking to a very bright young man who spoke perfect English and was selling T-shirts to survive.  He wanted to go to the international university in Moshi, but couldn't get in because he was not a Chagga (the local tribe in Moshi).