tagged: 5500km

a 1950’s volvo, dirt roads, and marion’s schoolhood friend leading us down the roads of different era of her childhood: hogsback, south africa. marion’s 30th birthday present had been a ticket to south africa, and here we were.

diary | 01 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

this is one of my favourite photos ever, for reasons i can’t entirely explain. hogsback felt a little like a scout camp: tin roofs, furnishings from another age, and lots of walking.

diary | 01 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

having spent the previous day editing the live cinema documentary while the others were out a-walking, i seized the turn of the weather to make a dawn sprint up the nearest hill. well worth it, amazing 360° views showing the plains beyond and the mountain ridge cloud forest rising up that made hogsback feel like some kind of displaced england. but here we have the three hogsbacks, the rising sun, and some proteas just to prove we’re really in sa. and photoshop cheese, pfft.

diary | 03 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

in africa, got to check out the locals, right? lions: check. apparently the rest of the party were worried about being eaten. i was worrying about focus. strange how a lens displaces you.

diary | 04 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

what other animal has poise, a mohican, snarly tusks… warthogs rock!

diary | 04 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

the hero of addo - and yes, against elephants fighting, rhinos mowing, giraffes silhouetted against the open sky - has to the dung beetle. driving is tricky as you have to avoid them, being a protected species and unable to fly out from underneath your wheel, but what heroic effort they make, and look rock hard in the process.

diary | 04 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

church, church, church, church or church, anybody?

diary | 05 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 05 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 05 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

the title says it all. look closer.

diary | 06 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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…

diary | 07 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

…bigger, and emptier. straight roads to the horizon: yep, thats namibia.

diary | 07 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 07 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

space: check. quiver tree: check. definitely feeling like a namibia i remember deep inside.

diary | 07 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 07 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 08 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

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.

diary | 08 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

“surreal colonial relic” lüderitz is where i spent a formative year producing the local newspaper of an african town, along with two equally fresh-from-school girls. and small towns being small towns, despite the fifteen years i’d been away, it wasn’t long before beers were appearing with the still-as-eccentric büchters. giel du toit, where else but the yacht club bar.

diary | 09 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

desert dunes reclaiming an abandoned town once full of riches… ahead of global warming, kolmanskop fell foul of a crash in commodity price, and now its carcass sits 10km outside lüderitz as a tourist attraction. wandering the abandoned “hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theater and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the first x-ray-station[3] in the southern hemisphere”, seeing the play of light and shadow on the dunes and dutch architecture, its almost embarassing to have a camera: where to start.

diary | 10 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

i knew the lighthouse keepers. my head exploded as i read neuromancer at the top of the lighthouse. but now it is automated, and the couple divorced. so it goes.

there is, however, a coffee shop there now. with additional sign reassuring locals that it does serve beer despite the name. better, and unlike town, it hadn’t closed just because it was saturday. progress!

diary | 10 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km