Eleven weeks in

It’s like this: one minute you’re at your desk wearing massive earmuff headphones and agonizing over someone’s consonants, and the next you’re out in the bush a hundred miles from anywhere leaping off the hood of a Land Rover with the staff of the Museum of Australian Democracy. Two and a half months in, I have to say I like it here.

This week makes my eleventh in Port Hedland, my fifth in my new house, and, thanks to the recent hire of Full-time Linguist Number 3, my last as the newest staff member at work. It’s been a very active eleven weeks, as there’s a surprising amount going on in this town if you’re willing to try anything, which I believe I may have a history of being. I’ve been to events hosted by the rec center, the library, the historical society, and the gardening club; I joined in on an impromptu half marathon, started a running club, joined a team for the 24-hour Relay for Life cancer research run, and am apparently going to soon be hosting a monthly swing and salsa night.

I even spent a weekend at the horse races in Marble Bar, a tiny speck of a desert village about two hours inland from here that boasts a couple hundred residents and the dubious distinction of being (supposedly) Australia’s hottest town, deemed as such because at some point in the not-so-distant past it recorded 161 consecutive days in which the temperature never dropped below 100^o.

I rode down there and camped with a lady I met at the half marathon, plus her friends, whom I met for the first time when we all got in the car together—a motley crew of very sunburned middle aged mining employees and cohorts, all of whom liked their whiskey and most of whom liked it for breakfast.

While Port Hedland is not exactly a destination spot for touring artists, I also got to see a traveling circus that passed through town, though I spent the whole show wincing as families of slightly overweight acrobats performed creepily Oedipal poses and lifts on each other with noticeable effort. Other than that, we don’t get much in the way of shows up here; the cultural centre has movie nights sometimes, but they’re usually about Justin Bieber and the entry fees are somewhere north of $15 a person, so I don’t anticipate stopping by there. Even with a join-all spirit I still have to have some standards.

The town itself, though, has proven to be a surprisingly agreeable place for joining and launching various activities. It’s large and active enough to have a decent array of things going on, and has a big enough population (somewhere between 15 and 20,000) to support groups and events, but it’s still small enough so that new activities seem to make a big impact. Like my new running club, for example: it’s the only one in the area, and its founding actually made it into the newspaper (i.e., small town), but I think at least a few people are quite keen to join (i.e., it’s large and active enough). It’s a funny little place. I actually quite like it.

But of course, I spend most of my time at work, and I’m happy to report that I really like my job too. I like my coworkers, who are intelligent and have good senses of humor—my boss once acted out what it might be like to slap me with a fish. I like the building—it’s quiet and full of light and has a ton of usable outdoor space. I like the people it connects me with—I’ve met some highly respected Aboriginal elders, as well as local leaders in both Aboriginal affairs and general town activities (not to mention the staff of the Museum of Australian Democracy, with whom I leaped from the hood of the Land Rover. Our organizations are collaborating on a traveling photography exhibit on the Aboriginal political history of the Pilbara region, and they came from Canberra for a visit a few weeks ago. I accompanied them on day trips out to two semi-remote communities and discovered along the way that they have a fabulous sense of fun.

And finally, in other exciting news, I have internet at home now! The cell phone provider up here (there’s only one) also offers little USB stick modems on which you pay by the kilobyte. Service is pretty decent if often a bit slow, but I’ve found that it reasonably fulfills the main purpose for which I bought it, which is the making of internet-based phone calls. Assuming a patient interlocutor in a quiet environment who doesn’t mind repeating things three or four times, it’s quite sufficient, and since obtaining it I’ve been calling Americans with gleeful abandon. If you haven’t yet received a staticky 8am phone call from Australia, then let this be your warning—you could be next! (Hint: say “Hello?” at least five times before hanging up. Sometimes the Pacific gets in the way.)

Between work, other various activities, and a longstanding penchant for procrastination, it takes me a while to get these posts up—but I’ll aim for another one within the next few weeks! Affection to all from down under!

Amanda in Australia?

I suppose I really am going to have to rename the blog this time! The following post was written over the course of several days last week.

Because the humor of coming to work in Australia and being put up in a prison was not lost on me, I was briefly disappointed to learn that I was not, in fact, going to be living at Port Hedland’s ex-detention center.

While some visitors to this remote northwestern corner of the country apparently do have the pleasure of staying in the repurposed jail (which, I was told, the government retains the right to de-repurpose at any time), I have instead been given three weeks’ accommodation at the somewhat euphemistically-named Port Haven Village, a miners’ camp encircled in wire fencing at the edge of the city airfield.

Actually, it’s nicer than it sounds. The camp must be almost brand new; I don’t know exactly when it was built, but my room looks like it’s hardly ever been touched before.
It, like all the others, is also surprisingly well-appointed: each single-occupancy bedroom comes complete with a mini fridge, electric kettle, flat screen TV, and even an itty bitty in-room bath with a complimentary bar of soap. (I tried to upload a video, but since it didn't upload in the 18 hours I let it sit, I think it's just not happening.)

Likewise, the camp itself is nearly all-inclusive. For better or worse, it was clearly constructed with the idea that the miners, most of whom are fly-in, fly-out workers from less desolate parts of the country, should never have to interact with or even see the local area at all. There’s a dining hall and a bar (the unappetizingly-labeled “dry mess” and “wet mess”); a small gym with coaches and fitness classes; a pool; a miniature Astroturf cricket field encased in netting on all sides, including the top; a shop carrying candy, emu jerky, and toiletries; multiple laundry facilities; a couple barbecue grills; and, though I don’t know what you’d really do with them, two holes of putt-putt. I imagine it’s quite like living on a military base, complete with street names that are clearly trying too hard to convince you of something, like Opportunity Way and Prosperity Road.

If the miners’ camp has exceeded my (low, though quite amicably so) expectations, though, the city of Perth, 800 miles south of here and where I began my Australian adventure, did so even more. I arrived in that city, the capital of the unassuming Western Australia State, on the afternoon of May 12, after having left Knoxville two days prior. On my antipodean journey, I’d stopped off in Chicago in the early evening, paused in Los Angeles after dark, and then outrun the sun all the way across the Pacific for a 17-hour night that ended with sunrise over Sydney. And finally, after passing my first Australian morning and afternoon in alternating states of fidgetiness and narcolepsy, I descended from a flawless blue sky and into the opalescent little city of Perth.

My first impression of the city, gained blearily from the airport shuttle bus window after falling asleep at the bus stop and almost not waking up upon the bus’s arrival, was of a network of busy, dusty roadways connecting a decent but rather uninspiring collection of shops, apartments, and American fast food joints. I wrote an email that night comparing it to Fresno, a city I’ve never seen but which I imagine to have a similarly anemic ambience, though at triple the size.

Well, I take it back. It was clearly meant as an insult, and I hereby retract it (though my completely unfounded distaste for Fresno still stands). Perhaps it was because I was in a stupor, or because my vision was as blurred as if I’d spent all night in the library. Perhaps it was because my diet for the past two days had consisted largely of airplane-issued cookies and bland mushy things slathered in the requisite British Commonwealth scoop of butter. But whatever the cause, when I awoke at 4:30 the next morning and ventured out into Perth, I was immediately struck by the plain agreeableness of this clean, safe, palm-treed, well-functioning, and calmly congenial city.
I had breakfast at a café tucked down a little alley, and then walked along the spotlessly-maintained riverfront pedestrian path for miles until reaching the University of Western Australia, where I enjoyed a pleasant lunch with an equally affable quartet of sandal-clad linguistics professors. I spent the ensuing afternoon in a delightfully perfect park overlooking the city (the view is pictured to the right--and the crooked horizon is due to its being upside down on the bottom of the earth, not due to the photographer, I'll have you know). I then had dinner at a swanky Indian joint right on the water where the dishes were priced, amazingly, at “whatever your heart feels” (a tricky sociological experiment indeed, as I’m pretty sure I overpaid).

The next day, Saturday, was much cooler and looked imminently stormy, so I was glad to be back at the airport after another pleasant café breakfast. While checking in, I considered my choice of seat on the airplane carefully, as I was determined to see my new country from the air on this seminal flight. I even sacrificed the exit row for the last remaining window seat.

That seat, unfortunately, ended up being right next to the propeller, which completely blocked the window. Perhaps even worse, it was also right across the aisle from an obese man who vomited the entire time. So though there was nothing to be seen out my window, I spent the three-hour flight with my head turned sharply toward it nonetheless, intently studying the side of the propeller housing.

And then I landed at the Port Hedland airport (see photo on left for the border between the airport and the miner's camp). It's a tiny facility where passengers and everyone else mill around together in one room and my new co-worker, Jess, somehow recognized me though I’d never sent a photo. Perhaps she’d Googled.

For my celebratory arrival dinner, Jess took me to a place she proclaimed as one of the most exciting dining options in the area: the mess hall at the miner’s camp where I’m living. As she explained, the whole office staff had taken a dinner outing together there the week before and had apparently come away immensely excited, as they’d grown quite tired of the other five options in town. And it was indeed good, and much more worldly than I would have expected from a cafeteria serving an outpost of burly men, boasting such delicacies as stir-fried tofu and grilled barramundi and baba ghanouj. At twenty-two dollars a meal, though (even for breakfast!), it’ll require more than some pureed eggplant to convince me (though I’ve since discovered that $22 is actually on the cheap side for a restaurant meal here—on my one off-camp restaurant outing, I had a $30 all-vegetable salad).

The next day, Sunday, I went to the art museum (which is, to its credit, really making the best of the ten pieces it’s got, all from Perth-based artists) with Nick, a short, gray-haired, chain-smoking, constantly-swearing, raspy-voiced and generous-natured female linguist from Melbourne who’s been filling in at the language centre while they’ve been waiting for me and who, as a fellow Port Haven resident, has been my guide and extraordinarily helpful chauffeur. (She’s leaving in a week, though, which means that I have precisely that long to a.) obtain a car, b.) learn how to drive it, as it will be a manual transmission, and c.) remember to keep it on the left side of the road.)

And then the following day was Monday: my first day of work. The photo below depicts our parking lot, company car, and some of the area behind the office--which is at the heart of town, mind you. Without laboring the details, I’ll say that it’s been really great so far. (I got to develop a brand new file-naming protocol for the office! No, actually, it’s really exciting. Posterity and archivists alike will hopefully be pleased, and I tell you I surely am.) I’ve also been tasked with putting the finishing touches on two illustrated, audio-accompanied wordlists before the funder’s big deadline in June. One of these lists will require traveling “out bush” to track down some of the three or four remaining speakers of the Thalanyji language in order to make additional recordings, probably sometime within the next week or two—so I’ll get to see some of the real outback pretty soon (I’ve heard they’ll roast you a kangaroo!).

Otherwise, all is quite well here! Traveling apparently wore me out even more than I originally thought, as I’ve been a somewhat sick with a low fever and sore throat since Sunday, and even had to miss work because of it on Thursday. I also had an allergic reaction to the chinstrap on my new sunhat, which resulted in an irritatingly itchy rash on my neck, and, if that weren’t enough, also redeveloped the same sort of non-itchy but nevertheless unsightly welts on my face (egads) as I did upon deplaning in Indonesia last year. Sigh. Perhaps I’m also allergic to the eastern hemisphere. In any case, it appears my immune system is a bit compromised. I’m hoping my lymph nodes will stop expanding before they actually pass my ears. But all things considered, I’m actually feeling quite well and have every hope of being in top form by next week. Which is when I’ll write to you all again!

Props to anyone who’s made it this far. I miss you all and send good thoughts from down under!!

The End. The Beginning.

Blatantly ignoring Tim's advice to lean out away from the wall.

The Englishman's name was Tim.

He and Justin and I hiked for four days through the Naukluft Mountains in western Namibia. It was obvious that no one working at the desk at the national park had ever done this hike before, because if they had, they would've warned us. It was without doubt the hardest hike I've ever done.

The trail is almost completely dry, so there are three hand-crank water pumps located at each of three shelters in which hikers are supposed to spend their nights. The first day, though, we didn't make it. It got completely dark while we were ascending a trail cut into the side of a hill, and when we found that the top of the hill was flat and sandy, we thought it best to wait out the night there. We had enough water for dinner and for cooking our breakfast oats, and we figured we'd make it to the shelter soon after starting out in the morning.

But before 9am the next day we'd lost the trail, and by the time we'd found it again, it was blindingly hot out and our water was almost gone. We were also much farther from the shelter than we'd thought, and hiked on for the entire morning sipping nervously at our dwindling water supply and wondering how on earth we could possibly have fallen so far short of our intended first-night sleeping spot. Tim suggested breathing through our noses to conserve the moisture in our mouths. We hiked in anxious silence.

Just before noon, we spotted the tin-roofed structure, and Tim ran ahead to find the water pump. By the time Justin and I caught up to him, he was gleefully cranking around a wheel half his own height; a second later, he ran down to the far end of a twenty-foot length of horizontal pipe and stuck his head under the gush of cold water that came out. We filled our bottles and felt relieved.

We trekked across high, hot ground for the rest of the afternoon, and that evening we descended into a marvelous canyon with a giant, somewhat ominous cross painted on a rock at the entrance, which we took to mean we'd entered the place called Cathedral Fountain on our map. The sun had long gone down behind the canyon wall and our shadows were expanding into a more general dimness when we came to the first of the chains. This one, a ten-foot length of thick metal, was bolted horizontally into a near-vertical rock wall over a ledge two inches wide. The ground was only ten feet below, but I was extremely intimidated and tried to hug the wall all the way across, despite Justin and Tim's exhortations to lean out and use my weight to brace against the rock. I was rattled at the end of that one, not realizing that there were four more ahead, and that the first was the tamest by far.

Three of the next four chains were vertical, which I quickly discovered is way scarier than horizontal. These three chains were bolted into seventy-five degree rock faces, requiring us to rappel down backwards--with our backpacks--over seventy-foot drops. I felt dizzy. When the last twenty feet of the first descent turned out to be almost completely smooth (ie, no footholds) and Tim yelled to me that there was no other way to get my footing except by leaning all the way out, I whimpered involuntarily and tried to lean as little as possible, hoping that my hand sweat wasn't profuse enough to make me lose my grip.

But we all made it down safely, landing exhaustedly in the boulder-strewn riverbed just as the stars were coming out. We still had to hike on for several more kilometers, stopping at every trail marker to search with the flashlight for the next one, before we came to that night's shelter. One look at the overflowing toilets, bat-cluttered ceiling, and rusty Psycho shower, though, sent us right back out to set up our tents under the trees, where we slept like the rocks on which we slept.

The next day we had to go straight back up the chains, which was less scary than going down. We actually reached our shelter and water pump before dusk for a change, and even tried to build a campfire before deciding that the chances of us turning all of Naukluft into one giant campfire were too high and therefore letting it burn out.

Chains aside, though, I think the fourth day ended up being the hardest. Our map gave us distances for the first three days' hikes (each was between 12 and 16k), but neglected to give such information for the last day. We assumed our final stretch would fall somewhere within that same range.

The final day's hike turned out to be 25k over a ridiculous elevation change. We saw a group of six mountain zebras thundering down a slope, though, and a big herd of oryx. We also ended up following the (frighteningly large) prints of a leopard and her cubs for several miles, though not by choice--they were walking on our trail. We never saw them, but the prints were so fresh that they couldn't have been more than an hour or two ahead of us.

The hike was long and seemed superfluously difficult that last day, and we once again found ourselves far from the end at dusk. After dark we got completely lost, but actually found the trail again by following a giant kudu that appeared mysteriously off to our right in the moonlight. We then lost the trail again just a few hundred meters from the very end, but we saw a light on in the ranger's house, so we went over and started yelling through his window. He came out and looked at us with bewilderment, probably wondering what kind of incompetent hikers could possibly get lost within throwing distance of the end of the trail, and walked us over to exact point from which we'd set out four days before. Atos Prime was waiting, and he beeped with excitement when we unlocked him. It felt good to be back. We set up our tents and dreamed about everything we'd eat when we drove into the nearest town the next day.

The next day, after hitting up a bakery with such force that Tim, a diabetic, had to check his blood sugar twice within five minutes, we parted ways and Justin and I went on to Sossusvlei and the great sand dunes for which Namibia is often known, when it is known at all.

It was like driving onto a page from Arabian Nights. Mountains of orangish sand towered over sandy lowlands, their tops blown into ever-changing ridgelines that snaked away for miles. We hiked up the rather uncreatively-named Dune 45 to watch the sun rise, the oranges and reds of the sand below us so brilliant that the horizon might have been turned upside down.

Watching sunrise from that sandmass is apparently a popular activity, as there were plenty of other people on top of the Dune 45 too. It was really interesting to watch as everyone explored the physics of this alien landscape. The ridgeline was narrow--maybe only two feet across--and the dune was really quite high, with very steep sides. If it were made out of any normal mountain material, rocks or grass or something, it would have been a horrifyingly scary climb. But since it was soft, very deep sand, people, myself included, weren't quite sure how to navigate it. Can you step off the ridge onto the steep sand slope, or will you fall? And for that matter, what happens when you fall off a sand mountain? Do you bounce and plummet? Sink? Slide? As we all walked up the dune in a hesitant single file line, it was obvious that no one was yet bold enough to find out.

Shortly after sunrise, though, people started taking hesitant steps down onto the sides of the dune. I did too, and found that while the pull of gravity made it hard to stand, I wasn't going to fall to my death, either. After exploring the top for a while, I ran all the way down the side, maybe a third of a mile. Though I sank halfway up my calf with each step, the angle propelled me downwards with delightful speed. It was like running in a dream, effortlessly fast with no fear of falling.

Two days later we were back in Windhoek. We nervously returned the car, and were shocked when we were charged for no damages and only a very-deserved cleaning fee. Atos had been places he'd never been meant to go. We'd dented the door, scratched the side, damaged the rim and sanded all the finish off the hubcaps. I'm still waiting skeptically for some bill to arrive.

Justin flew back to the US from Windhoek, and I continued on through southwestern Namibia by train and minibus. I even found myself in a surrogate "family" for a weekend, sharing the family room at a guesthouse with a Spanish couple, a middle-aged Italian dude, and a French guy. Then we all rented a little car together for a day, three of us squished in the back. I would've started a round of Row, Row, Row your Boat if any of the others would've known it.

I had to head south to catch my own flight out of Johannesburg, so I reluctantly left Namibia behind, crossing back into the intimidating expanse of South Africa. A few days on and off buses took me through dry little towns with names like Springbok and Nababeep, and then I hopped on a 16-hour bus and was back, much to my own chagrin, in Johannesburg.

I stayed, though, with an incredibly nice family I'd met briefly in Botswana, and they lavished me with food and entertainment and purring housecats. A problem with my flight delayed me a day, and the family was busy with work, so I moved to a backpacker's in Soweto, the giant township south of Joburg. I couldn't believe how nice the people there were. People said hello and made conversation on the street. Not a single person asked me for money. There, in one of the most oppressed parts of the metropolis, I felt safer and more comfortable than I had almost anywhere else in southern Africa. As much as I'm still not excited about Johannesburg , I have to admit that it was full of surprises each time I found myself there.

And then I was on a plane, and then in Singapore, and then Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, West Timor, and now Alor, a tiny island of far-eastern Indonesia. My cracked lips healed in a day. My towel molded instantly. And I found myself in a world as foreign to the place I'd just come from as it is to the home I left behind before that.

The Forgotten Country

Namibia was my favorite part of the trip. In fact, my longstanding fascination with it--with the fact that it's one of Africa's most sparsely populated countries, that much of it remains uninhabited and largely inaccessible, and that it has an extraordinarily forbidding climate and geography--provided the original impetus for the whole southern Africa trip.

The country did not disappoint. In Windhoek, Justin and I picked up our little rental car--a diminutive Hyundai hatchback with the delightfully superhero-esque model name of Atos Prime--and headed north to Etosha National Park. I was expecting the park to be somewhat like Kruger back in South Africa, and though they shared some characteristics, I actually liked Etosha more. The whole park is centered on the giant Etosha pan--a dry, highly salty lakebed that occasionally holds a little water but more often is just a vast plain of miles and miles of dry, cracked, salty mud. The pan's mineral content causes it to vary in color from shimmering white to light gray to sort of greenish (like the Statue of Liberty). And while the pan itself doesn't contain much life--it generally lacks both water and vegetation--the surrounding area is full of watering holes that support a prodigious variety of flora and (big, exciting, carnivorous) fauna.

We spent four days and nights in Etosha, camping at each of the park's three campgrounds (one night at the first two and two at the third) and driving slowly from east to west across the hundreds of miles contained within the park. As in Kruger, guests are strictly forbidden to step outside their cars anywhere besides inside the heavily gated campgounds, so we spent hours and hours driving each day. The pan itself was incredible: when it was in the distance, it reflected off the clouds above, giving them an eerily stormy look; when we came closer and looked out over it, it seemed like the ocean, stretching gray and flat out to the horizon at every point in front of us. The soil beside the pan was very sandy, furthering the coastal feel. At one spot, we were allowed to drive out onto the pan itself for about half a mile or so, until the land from which we came receded and the pan just swallowed us into a disorienting moonscape of sameness on all sides.

On our second and third mornings, we finally saw the lions that had somehow evaded us all throughout our South African national park trip. They weren't exceptionally close, but they weren't so far away that it wasn't noticeable how effortlessly they controlled the waterholes at which they lounged nonchalantly. We saw them in groups of two or three, and though they were always dozing, very catlike, after their nocturnal hunts, the dozens of other animals at the waterholes stood at complete attention, barely daring to drink and always keeping at least some members of their herd focused entirely on the lions. One lazy tail flick from the lions sent all others backing away. They were so impressive. They didn't even have to try.

Quite surprisingly, though, the highlight of Etosha was actually contained within each campground. All three campgrounds are contructed with a large (probably manmade) waterhole just to their west. A wall separates each waterhole from its respective campground, and the people-sides of the walls are raised up and lined with benches. From these spots, visitors can animal-watch all day and, as the areas are even dimly lit after dark, all night as well. On both the third and fourth nights, we witnessed one of the most amazing spectacles of the trip. A herd of 15 elephants, from enormous old bulls with broken tusks to babies so tiny they walked easily under the adults' bellies, came thundering out of the bush to drink. I could smell the dust they raised in their approach before I could see them, and when they came near, the dust was at first so thick as to be almost opaque. Then they all settled and stood around the watering hole, draining gallons from it with each plunge of their trunks. The males occasionally chased each other or charged an errant rhinocerous interloper, trumpeting and roaring--elephants roar!! SO loudly!!--with fantastic fearsomeness. The babies threw their adorable little trunks over each others' backs and nursed from their mothers. The giraffes observed them warily. The rhinos lumbered out of the way, looking grumpy. After half an hour or so of drinking, the herd would thunder away again, back the way it came, leaving a giant cloud of dust to slowly settle over the other animals that reappeared from the bushes, having backed away at the elephants' approach. We sat twenty yards away, close enough for the dust to sting our eyes too. Amazing.

From Etosha we went to the far northwest of the country, to a very sparsely inhabited region called the Kaokoveld. We drove for two straight days, and almost the only people we passed were Himba tribespeople living scattered villages of mud huts. The Himba are often photographed for (rather gratuitous) postcards due to their practice of wearing only loincloths (men and women). They paint their whole bodies with a deep reddish-brown paste as protection from the sun, and wear their hair in fantastic dreadlocks (also painted red) that they gather into spiky masses on top of their heads. They go barefoot and decorate their ankles with stacks of gold bangles. I tried not to stare, but I was admittedly fascinated by their appearance.

In the Kaokoveld, we bid farewell to paved roads and said hello to wild giraffes that grazed beside our car. (There were even "Caution: Elephants" signs by the more maintained parts of the road!) Justin drove the ill-equipped but spunky little Hyundai on roads that it was never intended to be forced over; we even crossed a narrow, rutted mountain pass so steep that we were both wide-eyed and silent for some minutes after we had safely come down the other side. I put my newfound stickshift-driving skills to the test on roads so full of boulders and furrows that they looked like riverbeds (and probably are, in the rainy season). Once I came upon a particularly imposing hill while Justin was napping. It went fine at first. I shifted into fourth, then third. But it wasn't enough, and the car began straining so hard it threatened to roll down backwards. And just when it seemed like it might, Justin sprang from his sleep with the words of the prophet on his lips:

"Downshift, DOWNSHIFT!!"

And I did, and the wheels spun, and gravel flew, and we lurched forward, up and over the top. And all was well for the moment.

A few minutes later, though, I hit a rock with the front wheel so hard that it dented the rim and stalled the car. By this point the accumulated nervousness from this and all the previous driving had made me so sweaty that dirty little rivulets were running off my palms and down the steering wheel, so I gladly forfeited the driver's seat. Thanks to Justin for shepherding Atos and me to safety.

The natural scenery was unbelievable. It varied from low brown hills with boulders and scrub bushes that reminded me of inland southern California to great red rock mountains reminiscent of Arizona and Nevada. We stopped once, in one of the only towns there was to stop in: a village called Sesfontein, comprising nothing but a few empty tin shacks and one large, fancy, overpriced German fort-hotel with disappointing food.

On the day we hit Sesfontein, we looked at our map over lunch and saw that there was nothing around for hundreds of kilometers. We began wondering if we'd be able to make it to any sort of town in which to spend the night.

We didn't. When the sun set we pulled off the road and set up our tent. As we ate tuna in the dark, a car passed and the driver told us he'd seen a leopard sitting on the side of the road about a mile back. We were both excited and a bit spooked, but never saw it, which may have been either a good or bad thing depending on the circumstances.

It was probably the most amazing night of the whole trip. I've never been somewhere so isolated. I felt like I'd fallen off the edge of the earth.

I was absolutely covered in dust. When I settled down in the tent I heard a maddening ringing in my ears from all the dust inside them. The dust was in my teeth and in our food. And when we finally rolled back into civilization the next night, we were like a spectre emerging from the desert, chalkly brown with cracked lips and knuckles and nostrils, a dented car, and a nearly speechless reverence for the place through which we'd come.

Two days later we'd go back. But this time, instead of Atos Prime, we took an Englishman.

Botswana to Namibia

I'm on the second hour of a 20-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur, and this airport has free internet kiosks (hooray!), so I think I can afford to kill some time...

NB: I think searching on Flickr for "wondergerbil at yahoo dot com" (the real address, that is) under the tab that says "People" might work.


Back to the delta in Botswana:

On one of our walks around Chief's Island, we tracked a lion by its footprints for a long way, which was both scary and awesome; I had a hard time deciding whether or not I actually wanted to find what we were looking for. We didn't end up seeing it, though, giving up after about half an hour. Sim told us afterwards that it must have been a male lion we were following; when we asked how he knew, he casually responded that a female lion would have turned around to fight us by then. Seems like he should develop a system for determining a lion's sex before beginning to track it, in that case...

Our two and a half days on the delta were overall very, very quiet. At night Sim would build us a fire around which we'd all cook and eat in somewhat awkward silence. He wasn't much of a talker, responding to most questions with a single word, and I felt rude talking to Justin in front of him, so we all remained largely mute. Sim's biggest contribution to conversation came on the first night when, after about an hour and a half of no one talking, he abruptly asked us if Jackie Chan was still alive and living in America. We confirmed that yes, as far as we know this is the case; Sim nodded thoughtfully and, thus satisfied, got up and went into his tent with hardly another word. The silence was sometimes quiet nice, though--nights on our little island were the darkest I've ever seen, and it was enough just to marvel at the billions of blazing stars.

On the third afternoon, Sim poled us back to the mokoro station, and we readied ourselves to head to Windhoek, Namibia's capital, the next day.

Windhoek, however, didn't happen the next day, or even the day after that. Turns out it's really hard to get from northern Botswana to Namibia. The day after returning from our delta trip, we caught a rickety old Chinese cast-off bus from Maun to the town of Ghanzi, about two hours east of the Namibian border. We'd been told that we'd be able to find our way into Namibia from there, and as the trip lasted only a few hours, we were hopeful we'd even be able to find a bus that same afternoon.

The fact that the Ghanzi "bus station" was a tree should have been our first clue that it wasn't going to happen. When we alighted from our bus and asked the few people loitering around the tree about getting to Namibia, they all mentioned a bus the next afternoon to some place called Charles Hill, which was still in Botswana but apparently closer to the border; they resolutely dismissed the notion that we might find our way there that same evening. We therefore pitched our little orange tent (which we'd fondly taken to calling "The Pumpkin") on the grounds of a hotel and passed a very pleasant evening with a friendly South African family who shared their dinner with us.

By 11am the next day we'd returned to the tree station to await our bus. We waited for several hours in the Botswana winter weather, unlike any I've felt outside southern Africa: blisteringly hot in the sun, but actually quite unpleasantly chilly in the shade. The air is so dry that the sun, as intense as it is, can't heat it.

The bus, a short, squarish contraption with more Chinese characters in the window, arrived around 1pm. As it neared the tree, I was surprised to see everyone waiting there jump up; as it slowed to a stop, people began running at it. I wasn't sure what was going on, but doing the same as those around me seemed like the best plan, so I started running too.

We might have made it if I hadn't gotten my head stuck to a tree branch. A branch from that same merciless acacia under which we'd been sitting for hours got completely, irreparably tangled in my hair. Yanking as hard as I could didn't even release it. By the time Justin had freed me, the bus had been mobbed by a crowd twice its capacity. People were shoving and jostling to get in the door; some hooligan young men were boosting each other through the back windows. Unwilling to be left out, I followed the example of the old lady in front of me and began stuffing my bag through the driver's window, but to my genuine amazement he stopped me, saying it was full. (Pretty much the only time anywhere in Africa I've ever heard a bus driver say that.) He also curtly told me that there was no other bus to Charles Hill that day, and then went back to wrangling the crush of people behind him.

We ended up hitchhiking across the border that night. An old man who was also unable to get on the bus showed us the designated hitchhiking spot; it was a remarkably organized system, no doubt due to the gaps in the public transportation system like the one we'd just witnessed. Most of the people at the hitching post were, in fact, other would-be bus riders from the tree station.

For the first couple hours we rode in the back of a pickup truck with five other people--seven total in the back, plus everyone's luggage. What a spectacle we must have been: four dozing African men, one older Herero lady in full traditional dress and headgear, and we two Americans. With my Western paranoia against touching or encroaching upon the space of any stranger, I struggled to find a comfortable position at first; the Herero lady, luckily having no such compunctions, solved the problem by shooting her hand out, grabbing my foot, and jamming it into an open spot just next to her own. And so we rode on, a motley band of hitchhikers, for most of the afternoon.

We turned at a road sign that read, simply, "Namibia", with an arrow pointing towards the empty westward expanse, and I watched as mirages turned the horizon behind our truck into pools of water that followed us across the desert. The drivers of the truck took us as far as they could, and at dusk we found ourselves again waiting for a lift with one other hitchhiker on a prodigiously lonely stretch of road. A few cars passed without stopping, and just as we were wondering what a night spent on the side of the Trans-Kalahari Highway might be like, a truck driver pulling a load of new cars stopped and picked up all three of us.

With the four of us in the cab of the truck, we drove on through the night, crossing the Namibian border and stopping about an hour later at a little eastern town called Gobabis. The ride was mostly quiet, the only excitement coming when I saw an anteater for the first time--excitement that was quickly quashed, along with the anteater itself, a second later as it ran in front of the truck and the helpless driver hit it.

The driver dropped Justin and me at a hostel down a narrow dirt road in Gobabis. We told him he didn't need to drive us all the way down the little road, but maybe we should've been more insistant, as after letting us out, he ran over the hostel's gate--completely over it, flattening it--while Justin and I sneaked away and made mental notes to hide if we saw him in town the next day.

But we didn't, and the next afternoon, on our third day of travel since leaving Maun, we found a shared taxi from Gobabis to Windhoek, and by that evening, we'd finally made it to the rather unimposing Namibian capital. From there we had only to plan our three-week trip around the country--a trip which turned out to be the biggest adventure we had in all our travels.

Flickr!

I made a Flickr page! I don't really know how to use it yet, and I've already met my monthly upload quota, but I imagine I can be found by going to http://www.flickr.com/ and searching for Wondergerbil. One day I'll add captions and change the photo names.

One Month in Namibia

Well, and a little in Botswana, too. But that would've made the title too long.

It's been forever since I've posted! I've had good reason, though: never in my life have I been in such remote places as I've been for the last month. There's no way I'll get it all down here, but I'll try, starting with our five days in Botswana.

We ended up arranging the dugout canoe trip through the Okavango Delta in northwestern Botswana. My Lonely Planet (which is surprisingly useless in this part of the world) says that it's the world's only inland delta, which makes sense, as the idea of a great river just sort of petering out in the middle of a continent instead of veering off towards an ocean is indeed strange.

To arrange a delta trip, we had to travel from Gaborone to the northern town of Maun on the 6am bus. Our taxi driver, who we'd called the night before, was quite late picking us up, and by the time we arrived at the station our bus was already packed full. Luckily, though, there's rarely such a thing as an African bus that can't be persuaded to fit one more, and so Justin and I and our bags and twenty other people ended up standing in the aisle. Having no idea how far away Maun was, we hoped we wouldn't be standing long; perhaps we'd even arrive in Maun after only a hour or two. After maybe half an hour of standing, I asked a man what time we were expected to arrive; had we not been packed in so tightly I might have fallen over when he said four o'clock in the afternoon.

Luckily, people were getting on and off at various stops along the way, and Justin and I progressed down the line of standees in a surprisingly orderly fashion, finally claiming seats after about three hours. We ended up sitting apart, and my seatmate, fortuitously, just happened to be a tour guide. I got his number, and he turned out to be instrumental in helping us arrange our boat trip the next day.

We skirted the Kalahari all the way to Maun, and I watched out the window with fascination as the reddish dust of Gaborone turned to the grayish-white powder of the north. We saw herds of cows, goats, and donkeys out the windows, guided through the dry bush by cowboys on horseback. We saw little villages of rondavels--cylindrical mud huts with pointed thatched roofs--sitting together with their faces to the road and their backs to the great gray Kalahari. And we saw, on the bus and on the roadside, groups of women from the Herero tribe, dressed in their ground-length, ruffled, Victorian-style dresses and foot-long sideways hats designed to resemble the longhorned cattle that their people herd. (The tour guide, Issa, told me that they'd taken their style of dress from the colonial ladies--obviously a century or two ago. And Justin remarked, not unkindly, that they looked like they had stretched coat hangers over their heads.)

But mostly, I saw nothing out the window--the vast nothingness of the bush, beautiful in its emptiness, and the whole reason I'd dreamed of coming to southern Africa. And as dusk approached, our bus surrendered us to the little town of Maun.

Maun (pronounced with two syllables: Ma-oon) turned out to be a really pleasant, funny little place. Donkey carts carrying loads of goods and people trotted along the side of the road, pulling through sand as deep as you'd find on a beach. We camped at a fantastic little place about 20 minutes out of town by minibus, a gorgeous spot literally yards from the banks of the Okavango River. (They told us, at least, that a fence had been installed upriver to keep the crocodiles away, and we luckily saw no evidence to disprove this.) The sunsets from that campground, which faced west over the river, were some of the most vibrant I've ever seen, with pinks and golds so unbelievably bright that they looked painted onto the sky.

An afternoon's walk was more than enough time to see all of Maun, which consisted of a few chain supermarkets and gas stations, rows of tin shacks selling candy and haircuts and rechargable phone cards, and a dozen or so delta tour operators. We got the phone number of a mokoro poler from some other campers and called him directly, rather than going through a company. (A mokoro is a wooden dugout canoe, the traditional, and still most efficient, means of transport through the delta when it's flooded. The boatman--or poler--stands at the back of the canoe and propels it by means of a very long stick that he pushes against the riverbed, which is never more than nine or so feet below the boat.)

We called our potential poler, Sim, and arranged for him to meet us at our campground to negotiate a trip; when he arrived, we were surprised to see that the translator he'd brought along was none other than Issa, my seatmate on the bus from the previous day! And after a slightly awkward but relatively smooth bargaining session, we had booked ourselves on a 3-day, 2-night trip through the delta leaving the next morning.

Issa arrived in a giant 4-wheel drive safari vehicle the next morning to transport us to the "mokoro station," a twenty foot-long stretch of open riverbed down a long sand path at which a dozen or so canoes were stored. Justin and I were in the back of the open-sided, canvas-topped vehicle, and though Issa was by far the sanest driver I've seen in all of Africa, I still got clocked on the head by a tree branch when the road narrowed. After a few more close calls, I gave up and sat on the floor in the middle of the back, safe from the branches that continued to scrape threateningly against the canvas top and poke through the open sides.

When we finally got to the "station," Sim was waiting there for us. We all got into the boat with our bags--Justin in the pointed nose, leaning up against his backpack, me behind him, with my backpack behind me, and Sim standing at the pointed rear with his small bag at his feet.

Sim had outfitted his mokoro with a tall stick on the nose. At first, I thought it was some sort of personalizing marker--that perhaps we should hang a pirate flag from it or something--but as the open waters of the station changed into the closed-in, reed-choked delta, we saw the cleverness of his set-up. Away from the main channel, the delta is only seasonally flooded; in these places, the grass grows out of the water as thickly as it would grow on land. In many places the grass stretched far over our heads as we sat in the bottom of the boat, ourselves only inches off the water; all we could see was the mokoro's nose breaking through the thickets in front of us, as if we were canoeing across a prairie. Sim's ingenious stick arrangement caught some of the spiderwebs that we broke through, soon becoming so wrapped in silk that it looked silver in the harsh sunlight. It couldn't possibly catch them all, though, and we were soon absolutely covered in webs, water spiders, and gnats that flew up our noses and into our ears and eyes. It was disconcerting at first, but I finally just had to give up trying to get them off, only looking down once a minute or so to check for the truly big spiders that occasionally found themselves on our vessel.

The water was pristine, and in places where the grass wasn't so thick, I could see all the way to the bottom of the delta. The ground under the water looked like no riverbed I've ever seen. It looked just like dry land, except submerged; very terrestrial-looking grass and even flowers sat motionlessly underwater, sunken garderns calmly waiting for the annual dry-out. The water was so clear and the ground under it so resembled a grassland that the canoe seemed suspended in the air, floating silently over an eerily still prairie.

We traveled for about three hours that first day, landing at a muddy little island that Sim, who actually spoke quite decent English, said was called "Kudu Horn Island". He told us that there were elephants somewhere on our (very small) island and that we might hear them shaking the fruits out of trees at night, but that we shouldn't worry, as elephants don't like to crash tents. We never saw or heard much wildlife on our island, though, and never explored very much of it, either; aside from the twenty or so square yards where we put up our tents, the rest of the island appeared to be impassably thick with vegetation. We couldn't see more than a few yards over the bush, and never ventured out into it, nor did Sim mention any more about what was out there.

We put up our tents there and made lunch (as part of our bargain, Justin and I had agreed to provide Sim's food) while Sim built a campfire and boiled a pot of tea. After lunch, Sim encouraged us to take the mokoro out by ourselves, and we found how truly difficult it is to propel the boat through tall grass. We were only gone about 20 minutes, and were content to leave the poling to Sim after that.

Later that evening, Sim poled us over to a larger island called Chief's Island, a spot of land about 4 km square and housing lions, elephants, hippos, all sorts of antelope, and plenty of other creatures you'd never expect to find on an island. We landed the boat and walked around the island, which was mainly a dry grassland (in the midst of all that water!) and was crisscrossed by footpaths worn in by animals and mokoro tourists alike. We returned to Chief's Island and other nearby islands several times over our two and a half days in the delta, but never saw too much in the way of wildlife. We saw several elephants (luckily all from a distance, as they can be quite dangerous and Sim loped along shockingly unarmed), even watching a few of them crashing through the shallows. We also heard plenty of enormous shaking and crashing noises as they shook palm trees with their trunks, and saw dozens of broken trees as evidence of this practice. We also saw hippos from the safety of our boat (they're even more dangerous than elephants), and watched dozens of water antelopes running and leaping through the shallow water as well.

Internet time is almost up, and I have so much more to tell! More soon--heading to southern Namibia by train tonight!