A Different Dirt

Our friend Fatty Goodlander has a wonderful us-and-them riff about "dirt dwellers". That would be his shorthand for the part of the human race that lives on land.

He maintains that the customs of that particular tribe of humanity are particularly hard to fathom. It's a tremendously entertaining spiel. And really, if you're going to stoop to that lowest and most common human failing of deciding who is and isn't in your tribe, and who is, and is not, therefore worthy of being considered fully human, you might as well go big. It's us sea gypsies vs the other 99.9999999%!

But, dear Fatty, I might ask you to consider the view that there is dirt, and then there is dirt. As in, not all of the solid bits of the earth are equally bad.

Take, for instance, the farm at Omandumba, Namibia, where these pictures were taken. The campground there was...  Well, scroll down to the picture of our rental truck between the boulders, and you'll see how good it was. No other campers, the stars screaming-bright at night. We were just absolutely in heaven.

And although there were no other campers around, there was a San (aka Bushmen) "living museum" about 300 meters away. The living museum concept seems like a cool way for semi-traditional peoples in Namibia to benefit directly from tourism. You pay for a tour, and they demonstrate traditional bush skills to you. The people at this museum rotate between the living museum and their village on the border with Botswana, two or three months a time in each place.

I was over the moon hearing a click language being spoken. I haven't read up on it, but San culture, and language, are impressively old. The language is famous for having a number of sounds that are made by clicking the tongue or throat. Trying to repeat the San names for trees or animals was as fun as it was unsuccessful.

There is also something a little seedy in the living museum scene. Get a picture of the naked Africans! Big-time out-there travel moment! But we managed to look past that.

The really interesting interaction was off-hours. The campground had the only water source, so the San would come over to our camp in the mornings and evenings to fill their bottles. It was always a pretty large group that came over - usually ten or so, including kids. Everyone would be wearing western clothes, and their demeanor was quite shy. That was the picture to get - something about the western clothes spoke of a culture in transition. But it just seemed too too intrusive to grab a camera at those moments. Better to just interact as equals as best we could instead of devolving into the photographer-subject relationship.

The site was also crawling with ancient San rock art. Ancient as in millenia old. That was pretty cool. And seeing it while listening to San speaking about it in that click language...that was worth the trip, for sure.

More soon...

Namibia Red

Our time in Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier parks were oddly private. The campgrounds aren't very interactive places, though of course we did meet some simpático souls.

But the actual event of each day in those parks, the driving around and looking at the wildlife, gives you a one-off experience. No one sees quite the same park as anyone else on any given day. Your own particular experience is driven by your own luck and patience.  In the case of the Galactics, our days tended to be heavy on the bird side of things, and our bouts of watching any particular group of animals, no matter how close or how spectacular, tended to be limited by Eric's six-year-old patience.

But then, after a few days of travel and sidestories here and there along the road, we arrived at our next marquee spot - Sossusvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib Desert.

Here, the experience is much more standardized. It's all about seeing the dunes, especially at sunrise or sunset. The place is a bucketlist kind of place that features on most foreigners' visits to Namibia.

We almost didn't go. We were trying not to do too many things in Namibia, and skipping Sossuvlei would save us a bushel of driving. (See six-year-old patience, above.)

But one of those simpático souls and an old Namibia hand besides told us that we would be absolutely mad to skip Sossusvlei. 

So we went. And we were very glad we did.

This next set of pics is from the morning when we drove out to the dunes at sunrise.  We parked the rig halfway along the four wheel drive track and walked up the nearest dune to that point, thereby missing the bucketlist crowd on the dune ridge at the end of the track.

A dune of our own. What bliss for the Galactics.

Of course, as these pictures were being taken, Alisa was warming up to the most spectacular bout of travel sickness visited on any of us during the whole month. She won't soon forget Sossusvlei.

Yes, we did bog the rig in the deep sand. My fault for losing speed while trying to shift up to second in four wheel low. That might have been the boys' very very viscerally favorite moment of the whole trip. "Dad bogged! Get out and help! It's like playing in the sand, except we have to do it!" A number of other rental rigs were bogged and left in place, their renters nowhere to be seen. We got great amusement out of that.

And I don't have the bird book handy to jog my memory on the identity of that passerine. But it is attempting to drink from the water tap on the truck. Life in the desert. The boys let a puddle run out on the sand and soon had a whole flock at their feet, drinking deep.

More soon.