the town i was a volunteer in for a year - fresh from school to produce the local newspaper and give the locals a relevant source of english, their new national language - was a strange town, and the single road leading to it was a fitting journey. a portal morelike, the landscape gets stranger and stranger, until you’re surrounded by a duel between desert and moonscape. the sand sign is no joke: sand dunes drifting across the roads; gale force winds sandblasting anything and everything.
and this is why gravel roads are bad. on the flipside (unfortunate use of language there), this, the first time i have actually come off the road in a car, was all quite smooth and … a controlled out of control. i’m kinda glad it happened just to know where the limit can be. gravel roads are a tightrope act, that is for sure.
if you’re coming up from south africa heading toward lüderitz, there’s a pretty big corner you want to cut. but its all gravel roads, and you don’t want to get stuck on one with hundreds of km on either side. so the ‘sod it, only live once’ right-angle turn off the main north-south road towards the fish river canyon felt all that sweeter to get there just for sunset. just epic. thats a 180° view, its canyons within canyons within canyons.
space: check. quiver tree: check. definitely feeling like a namibia i remember deep inside.
and when things get bigger and emptier, how far your car can go on one tank of gas gets really quite important. no such thing as a pop-up petrol station: getting a petrol can for the boot wasn’t an act of hubris.
…bigger, and emptier. straight roads to the horizon: yep, thats namibia.
after 1,000km and two days wonderful driving we hit namibia, the country i can still sing the national anthem of having spent a year there when i was 18. no longer the majestic pacific coast of the garden route, past the lush farmlands of ceres, now a farm stall means biltong and not much else, and the landscape around grows bigger and emptier, bigger and emptier…
here, all looks innocent. round the bend, the path peters out and you’re scrambling over 45° rocks with waves crashing around you. truly wonderful, and so refreshingly… well, the national parks service really don’t mind you being on the edge.
got to knysna comfortably before sunset, to join a vision of family life: kids swimming in the river, grandparents helping with the braai (aka bbq). a veritable idyll, quite the trick character-from-times-past james has pulled relocating his corner of the office from london to south africa.
