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.