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.