tagged: adventures

time for a little enumeration:

• up at 5am
• two hours drive to sossusvlei
• due to flat tire episode, schedule squeezed and emergency cash used, now scraping coins together
• all cash machines for these particular 100’s of kilometers have decided they don’t like my cards
• rather than 4x4 taxi tour around dawn, epic endurance desert walk lasting into the afternoon
• walking back out of the desert trying for the last drops of the three bottles of water
• as well as not losing the ring, didn’t lose the car keys to the desert: on goes the aircon, in glugs all those half-drunk bottles of water cars generate
• five hours drive to nearest town. gravel roads. through rain storms. over a mountain pass with boulders scraping the bottom the car.
• atm has closed “fiften minutes ago. but don’t worry, the next town along has banks and restaurants, and the road is tar from here”.
• next town is a 100+km. car can go very fast on straight, tar roads. we are very hungry.

so its at this point, at 5pm, exploring bold new tests of exhaustion and still before breakfast, that a bridge guarded by a thousand monkeys appears as if straight out of a rudyard kipling story. one of the more surreal emergency stops i’ve ever had to do. took a minute or so to have the where-with-all for the camera to be got out, before we passed through it really was covered with them.

diary | 13 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

aged 19 i’d promised myself if i ever was to ask that big question of someone, it would have to be here. and so it was.

moreover in a day where circumstance truly played havoc with our lives, such a test of endurance and commitment couldn’t have started something better. and i get to say i almost killed my girlfriend – no: fiancee! – in the process.

diary | 13 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

the plan had precedence. i’d done it on zero budget, hitchhiked hundreds of kilometers, rode the side plates of a 4x4 in the warmest clothes i had as the freezing pre-dawn desert flowed around my feet… but this was not to be history repeating. so instead of romantic ideas of walking around a serene crescent dune as sun broke across it, we have taken the three steps forward and fallen the two back, climbing up the face of a mountain as the noon sun approaches.

amazing once you’re there though. with nobody else insane enough to still be around at this time of day, at the top of it all you truly are the epic.

diary | 13 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

…well that is the highest looking dune in the desert known for the highest dunes in the world. guess where we’re going.

diary | 13 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

this whole trip was pretty much built around getting back to sossusvlei. orange sand, blue sky, trees on one side lush, green and alive and the on other salt-wizened casks with the air of having been petrified eons before. oh, and if it wasn’t surreal enough, oryx walking around - they might as well have been unicorns. the colours are primary, but its the early morning light that carves across the twisting contours of the dunescape and makes every surface a study in texture. such were my memories from a final hitch-hike zen adventure before returning to the uk to start university.

2010, and the reality is a bit more sun-bleached, and its a few hours later into the day that started overcast. but the texture is still there… 700px is just not enough here, but you can start to see.

diary | 13 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

to come: amazing thunderstorm spectacle over the wide vista leading out from the petrified dune cliffs we’re standing on.

diary | 12 jan 2010 | tagged: photo · adventures · 5500km

…everybody must have their own, that perfect drink at the perfect place at the perfect time.

diary | 12 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

i will never tire of driving through endless, epic landscapes on a single dirt track surrounded by oryx. pure magic, pushing the landscape beyond the sublime. cameras don’t quite cut it here.

diary | 11 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

a long way from anywhere, we’re driving out of what couldn’t have been a better rally stage if it had tried. i think to myself, quick roadside stop. get out the car, hear a quiet noise. not a good one. engine? no… thats air from the tyre, its still hard but that has to be the sound. business finished, turn back to the car, and the tyre is completely flat. not the best situation in which to replace your first tyre, but i couldn’t help wonder at the timing. ok so the twisty, hilly, gravel road was as likely as any to cause a flat, but thinking i needed to get out the car, and then stopping at the exact minute in which the tyre completely deflates. subliminal something.

diary | 11 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

when the bottom fell out of deutsch-südwestafrika, all the fine horses were abandoned to the desert with the retreat (well thats what i was told at the time). which makes for a bizarre sight a century later.

diary | 11 jan 2010 | tagged: adventures · 5500km

lüderitz looks pretty much exactly the same, but its definitely not the place as i left it. it was like the wild west, a diamond rush bringing young divers seeking their fortune from all around the world coupled with a still fresh from independence fishing industry push. in the original diamond rush that made the town, ordering champagne at the bar meant a crate, not an individual bottle. when i was there, we drank in the same bar and the life-skill was passing the neverending bottles of spirits around without passing out soon into the revelry. now, all is quiet, and the newspaper i made also in quite different times. it had reached the impressive full-colour tabloid spread the previous year, but since now had already closed down once and a repeat wasn’t looking so unlikely.

sitting in the time capsule bauhaus apartment we rented, it felt like a tardis, time melding outside.

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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