A Brief Overview of Two Weeks in Namibia

November 9-24 2013:  A few kilometers outside Windhoek, Brian (moves like a spring, permanently sunburned, London accent thick as the London fog) announced there were baboons in the road.  I saw a few black-ish lumps that magically became, as we drew closer, actual baboons – and lots of them.  Over the next few hours there were warthogs, eland, goats and sheep and cattle, jackals, steenbok and a mongoose, plus hornbills and various hawks, all surviving in a world of dry riverbeds, dry grasses and thorny bushes.

Sunset spreading to the Waterberg plateau - the view at suppertime at CCF

First impressions set the stage of an experience.  Brian’s energy, Matti’s enthusiasm and the flourishing announcement, to our small van-load, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – the Waterberg,” drew up the curtain on a transformative two weeks.  A few hours later, I was sitting down to dinner, gazing past a twin-peaked termite mound at that Waterberg, a magnificent and mysterious plateau of striated rock, as it reflected the brilliant fire colors of the setting sun.  And it kept getting better from there.

A very small sampling of the critters who visited the Kindergarten waterhole
on Friday 15 November 2013

My volunteer experience at the Cheetah Conservation Fund was mundane and extraordinary, tiring and invigorating, fascinating and even more fascinating.  I raked goat yards and cheetah pens, fed and walked dogs, listened to a ruckus of bird calls every morning, and one day spent twelve-plus hours in a hide, counting zebra, tracking warthogs and trying to determine the ages and sexes of various oryx.

Feeding the kitties

I have fed a lot of dogs in my life, but I’ve never before measured out Ultra Dog Superwoof Ostrich & Rice flavor kibble.  I have fed a few cats, but never before thrown two kilo chunks of donkey meat over a three-meter fence for a cheetah.  Three of these cats, purring together, sound as loud and rumbling as test-time at a Boeing factory – but so much lovelier.

All cats love string toys, I guess.

When they play, they chase a scrap of cloth on a string – but at 50 or 60 kilometers an hour, tails swinging to the side as they take the corners at speed.  They stalk, they wait, they pounce, and when they catch that rag they hold onto it – sometimes carrying it off under a tree, and trading it reluctantly when Juliette or Jenny offers a meat cube on a very long handled spoon.

On my second afternoon at CCF, after the amazement of traveling a country that has scores of deeply-carved rivers without a drop of water, I had the joy of watching the clouds mass, and hoping – seeing them darken, and hoping, hoping – feeling the wind cool and quicken, and crossing fingers – celebrating the first few drops with caught breath – seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling the rain take hold in earnest and exhaling joyfully, arms outstretched, face to the sky.

On my last morning at CCF, I watched the sky lighten above the Waterberg from a dusty, green plastic chair outside my rondavel, and then catch pink fire, radiating molten gold, copper, rose gold as scores of birds chirped, sang, called, cooed and whistled, and a kilometer or two away several small but powerful roosters crowed their heads off.  A tiny duiker – unmarked, narrow ears instead of the steenboks’ oversized, stripey ones – skipped over and nibbled the ground under the acacia tree maybe ten meters from me.

Sunrise over the Waterberg plateau,

Spinning as the rag reverses course.  The rag is pink, on the right of
this photo.  I brought the battered cloth home with me; a great souvenir.

Any one of those experiences would have been worth the 17-hour flight, and I haven’t even mentioned bouncing along in a well-used bush vehicle while Matti spots ostrich 300 meters away, or Chavoux eloquently catalogues causes of human-wildlife conflict, or Rob spots a bit of rhino scat he can show us – note the precise 45-degree angle at which the rhino’s teeth cut through twigs.  Reaching into Amos’s head-cone to provide the ear scritches he appreciates so obviously, fending off curious goats, ferrying donkeys’ heads to the boys, tweezing ten hairs of various sizes and colors from the remnants of a scat sample.  The two weeks contained about a year’s worth of new experiences.

Heading home, about a hundred miles out of Dulles Airport, the pilot announced that the temperature in Washington, DC, was six degrees below zero centigrade, or 21 degrees Fahrenheit.  It seemed unreal.  The Namibian savannah needs rain, and all my thoughts are of dark clouds lowering – and when can I go back.

Laurie Marker, founder of CCF; Tiger Lily, no longer interested in posing;
and me, not ready to leave yet.

Days 46 through 48: Jetlagged in Jo'burg

Stinks, actually.

Traveling all ‘round the country was amazing.  I cackled with glee, I clapped my hands (three times fast, then grabbed the wheel again), I pulled over when I wanted to and felt the wind, sniffed the seals (no one ever says, “Stop and  smell the marine wildlife,” but it’s worth doing), gazed at the stars overhead and the moonlight on the ocean.  I looked at highways in a new way, met people with new stories and felt myself coming alive as I never would have if I’d curled up on myself and tried to burrow deeper into the life I’d been living.

At the same time – that’d be spring 2013 – that my essential self knew to drive around America, it also knew that the next thing to try would be a trip to someplace brand new to do something useful.  The organization called Earthwatch came highly recommended by friends as a mentor for that.  Earthwatch offers paid-volunteer opportunities around the world working on archeological digs, wildlife studies and other research projects.  So I made a spreadsheet and compared a few of their more interesting opportunities:  cost, duration, distressing-ness of local government, probability of leeches, weather, etc.  My final choice, from amongst things like dolphins in Greece and water in Mongolia, was cheetah conservation in Namibia.  I had just a few days after finishing the road trip to start my malaria medication, unpack the Honda and re-pack one large and one small suitcase for two weeks of very new adventure.

Earthwatch and its partner the Cheetah Conservation Fund were very careful in directing me what to pack, so that part was pretty easy.  Somehow I never did get the bug spray they’d suggested, but mosquitoes aren’t supposed to be a big problem in that part of the country in November.  I did pack a few boxes sent over by the CCF office in Virginia, including one containing golf-cart parts that are difficult to find in southwestern Africa.  Given the cost, time consumption and difficulty of shipping goods in and out of that country, they make use of couriers as much as they can.  Then there were long sleeves for evening and short sleeves for daytime, a spare picture card for me and a few dozen for CCF’s camera traps, four kinds of strong sunblock, a rain jacket and my notebook.

Golf-cart parts in black case,
to be checked through.

The flight was 17 hours, including a one-hour stop in Dakar where we through-passengers remained on the plane.  Ann from Boston had the aisle seat, from which she described herself as ‘a DEET factory.’  She was going on safari in some of the wetter areas of southwestern Africa.  She is 60-some, maybe 70, with the thick, dropped-r’s accent of Boston’s outer neighborhoods.  This was not her first major excursion; she has been to China, South America, Australia, Egypt, Spain and Morocco, and 30 years ago visited, “I don’t know what to call it – Israel or Palestine.”  In between bouts of learning about Ann and sleeping shallowly, I tried to get some exercise.  The plane was configured so that I couldn’t do laps around the coach section, so I walked up and down my aisle, trying not to look suspicious.

One night to spend in Johannesburg, and no place to spend it.  Some kind of Travelers’ Aid desk helped me out (I got the impression their system was baksheesh-based), and after a bit Octavia from the OR Tambor Country Lodge arrived and guided me to their van.  It was a bit less than an hour to the Lodge, and Octavia offered a choice of music for the ride.  I asked her to pick, and she went with gospel – South African gospel instead of American at my urging.  Our driver, Ken, was from Malawi; Octavia was born in Durban, on South Africa’s southeast coast.  She grew up speaking Zulu, learned English young as a second language, and has picked up pieces of nine other languages.  She wants to learn Portuguese next.

None of this, of course, precludes the possibility that Ken and Octavia don’t work for a hotel at all, but are going to take me to a back alley somewhere and hit me in the head with a rock, and sell my three quarts of assorted sunblock on the black market.  Spoiler alert:  they didn’t.  They took me to the OR Tambor Country Lodge, about ten rooms strung together in an L-shape, facing a garden courtyard with the owner’s home on the third side and what looked to be pasture on the fourth.

No water in the fountain.  That's foreshadowing...

There were big, puffy, scentless white roses in the garden, and fragrant lavender, and even more fragrant gardenias.  There were birds calling in the early evening, and all kinds of chirping frogs or insects or both.  One bird said, “Wheet-wheet.  Wheet-wheet-wheet,” in a hospitable tenor.  More, different “wheet-wheet”s respond.  I didn’t recognize the call, of course; the only bird sounds I can confidently identify are roosters crowing and woodpeckers rapping.  I might get a whippoorwill right, but I couldn’t guarantee it.  Later, when I woke at midnight to think about jet lag, breakfast times and alarm clocks, the wheet-wheet bird would still be chatting away.

There was another that gave a drawn-out, whistling call that I liked quite a bit also.  Nobody seemed to reply, but I expect the bird can hear things I can’t.  It, too, would be awake in the wee smalls, but then it would offer only a single sustained note before dropping out of the night noises.

Before darkness fell, I was feeling pretty unremarkable.  A 17-hour flight is almost like suspended animation for me, with the weird dips into dozing and back out again, the food descending from above at random moments, Ann complaining, gently, of this or that airline policy, and my occasional too-brief ambles up the aisle and back down again.  It’s unreal time.  In contrast, the Lodge felt like very real life. 

I never quite figured out where it was, but I think it’s between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and a bit closer to the former.  One of the realities it offered was ‘self-catering facilities,’ which means the owner, or the manager, or Ken from Malawi (he’s the driver) will drive you to the Pick ‘n’ Pay to get some groceries.  For the Welsh couple in #1 and me, it was the owner, who crammed us into his not-tidy car and drove us by neighbors’ houses, and stretches of bare ground, and a warehouse or two, until we arrived at the grocery store, which rose suddenly from nothing.  I bypassed the display of biltong – dried meat in many curious shapes – and found a plastic tray of pasta salad with bland cheese and some not-Italian herbs.  The lodge owner got Kit-Kat ice cream for his kids, and the Welsh couple (taciturn, in the nature of their people) got something the owner microwaved for them, as the self-catering doesn’t extend to any kind of cooking apparatus.

A lot of people romanticized Africa for me before I left the U.S., but I had a hard time buying it.  For one, it’s an entire continent.  I simply cannot believe there’s something mystical that imbues this entire continent yet is absent from South America, North America and Europe (I’ve never been to Asia or Australia, and will probably never make it to Antarctica.  Leave Antarctica alone, that’s my motto.)  Really?  Gabon’s beaches, the Holiday Inn Harare, the Sudanese desert, a convenience store in Alexandria, the gardens of Constantine and the Pick ‘n’ Pay in Kempton Park, all magical in their other-ness?  Magical I’ll accept, and celebrate, but not more magical than the bison of Oklahoma, the mosses of Fairbanks, the autumn foliage of the White Mountains, or the thunderous falls of the Potomac outside Washington, DC.  Nor yet the corn soup of Cuzco, the Incan stones of Choquequirao, sunset over the Seine, the North Coast Cliffs of Derry or the Škocjan cave outside Ljubljana.

I watched for extra magic, but so far things seemed very normal.  Gardenia fragrance is magical, that whistling bird, too.  As expected, seen from the ground, the human imprint in suburban Johannesburg seems much more spontaneous than South Africa seen from the air – roads waver and bend, then twist back; a few shacks appear; then nothing but road and a group of three people, and a group of two, then a sudden grocery store, carefully landscaped behind a serious fence.  From the air, everything looks much more symmetrical and planned.  It is entirely wonderful, and entirely usual.  Here in this tiny speck of Africa, there’s no Dark Continent mystique I can find.  It is, in fact, brighter than moonglow.  Maybe it was a Dark Continent in days gone by; maybe it’s some other part that’s Dark.  Goodness knows this section offers very little shade.

Of course South Africa’s recent history is dramatic, and that was a constant in my thoughts.  But it is, so sadly, not unique in any way.  My own country offers occasional reminders of its brutalities – a drunk Athabascan staggering into the sled-dog museum to request a pen; a plaque memorializing Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who fought displacement of his people (the fourth time they were forcibly re-located, thanks); monuments to slave-owners and civil rights leaders; the wreckage of lives implicit in Detroit’s mangled neighborhoods.  There’s nothing darker in African history than the decimation of native populations by imperialists, colonists and smallpox, or 620,000 dead in a war over slavery, liberty and which rights trump which.  And while there’s plenty in South Africa’s history that’s just as bad, of course we can always look north about 4,000 miles and back sixty years, and European history looks darker than the black mud of the Niger River.

These were not the exact ideas that I entertained while consuming my salad in #4, the room with no key.  I was more thinking, “Recent history notwithstanding, it just doesn’t seem that different.”  Dinner finished, I sat for a bit in my room, with the windows open.  It was a beautiful night, and I hoped for the scent of gardenias to make it over from the far edge of the garden.  Most of what I got, though, was the neighbors tuning a radio, almost at random.  Or maybe the signal was bad and kept fading and coming back.  They were mostly bringing in pop music, including a countdown of something.  Number eight on the countdown was “Cups (When I’m Gone)”, but I got pretty well sick of that six weeks before in Kalona, Iowa, at the fall festival talent show.  I really didn’t need it 17 hours on an airplane away, especially when I started thinking about the razor wire around almost every store and home I’d passed in this country.

Fifteen years ago I knew an Irishman who’d trained for his finance job in Belgium and moved to Texas after a couple of years in Johannesburg.  He had some seriously alarming stories of colleagues being robbed and beaten in their homes, despite the guarded gates and ground-glass-topped walls.  He said it was routine for someone to be out of the office due to violent crime, like cold season year ‘round.  Everyone at the lodge assured me it was perfectly safe to leave my things in my key-less room, and certainly everything was still in place when I got back from the Pick ‘n’ Pay.  Still, part of me questioned my decision to go to sleep with both door bolts set, the chain on, and the windows open.  But I did enjoy hearing the nocturnal birds.  They made the dripping toilet less irksome.

The jet lag woke me around midnight, and I checked and re-checked my alarm and pretended to be tired for several hours.  Absolutely not sleeping, and getting achier and achier around the browbone, I decided trying to sleep was senseless.  Just thinking the word ‘senseless’ made me yearn to be... 

I laced up my hiking boots and stepped outside.  The horizon was showing a faint light, but I didn’t know if that was a rising sun or a distant city.  Passing through the lighted part of the lodge driveway, where the ruckus of birds was excessive, I could hear a choir of roosters forming from points west, north and east, so odds on rising sun improved.  That reminded me to look up, at the stars.  A moderately dark sky offered a moderate display, including Orion’s backwards Belt and a scrambled Great Bear or Big Dipper.

My walk was thwarted by a sturdy gate, closed for the night with iron bars and topped with electric wire that I bet wasn’t charged.  Since it was a) fifteen feet up a gate and b) electric, I chose not to test that theory.  The rest of the fence was topped with coiled razor wire.  The courtyard, with its floral display and a couple of statues, was beautiful but pretty small, so laps around it felt ridiculous.  Instead, I decided to climb the interior fence into the pasture area, where I thought a swimming pool might lurk.  I don’t know about the pool, but two handsome dogs I had met earlier through this fence were lurking – or maybe just sleeping.  I believe we all know what to do with sleeping dogs.  But my meandering woke them before I realized they were there, and they came charging at me, fast and barking furiously.  I felt like a cartoon character, frozen with one foot off the ground, arms ready to pump, and eyes grown gigantic.

I am not physically nimble enough for sprint and scramble – remember there’s a fence to climb – and I don’t like the idea of turning my back on an alarmed animal.  So I murmured softly, backed up slowly, and held out a friendly fist.  I wrote this journal entry (longhand, by the light of the rising sun, accompanied by a smell of cinnamon and ruckus of roosters and every other bird on the ark) with an unpunctured, though slightly befurred and spitty, hand.   The greyhound was delighted to greet me, tail wagging and body writhing; the boxer-like pup was too leery to come over for pats.  I still thought it the better part of valor to move slowly toward the fence, and exit discreetly.  The dogs barked disappointment as I made my way back to guests’ quarters.

My headache had cleared up as soon as I stepped out of my room.  I suspect the people in #3 of smoking as they tuned their radio, and smoking some nasty, extra-strength foreigner substance.  Not one of the fun substances; just extra-powerful smokiness.  I essayed a sun salute on the wet courtyard grass, and that worked out a few kinks.  The dawn light was sufficient for writing in a journal, on the step outside my room, but gradually I grew chilly, started yawning, and decided to try for a nap.

Not enough water in the tower to waste on a fountain.

The nap was a very long time coming, but finally I fell asleep, around 6:00 or 7:00.  When my alarm went off at 8:29, I needed two minutes of confused dreaming before I clawed myself out of the exhaustion-swamp, and into the reality of jet-lag, a chirping clock, and 30 minutes until breakfast.  I spent ten minutes fumbling into some sort of clothes.  The main gates were now open, so I could stagger ten minutes along the road, and ten minutes back.  The neighborhood would have qualified as decidedly upscale back home, with fancy landscaping and huge yards.  Each house was protected by walls, wires and dogs; each had a small water tower in the yard.

Despite very serious brain-fuzz, I could appreciate a marvelous breakfast of custom-scrambled eggs and fresh papaya, prepared by a quiet, black woman in bright clothes.  Teeth cleaned, I joined the former owner of the lodge, now its manager, for a ride to the airport.  He was the default driver, he explained, as Ken from Malawi had called in sick this morning – after receiving his pay in cash last night.  Oh, Ken.

The airport was very like every other airport, but with biltong where the Anchorage airport would have ‘moose poop’ candy and Heathrow would have Big Ben tea towels and Lima would have Pan flute CDs.  The plane to Windhoek didn’t even have biltong – I could have been on the Dallas to Denver route, or Glasgow to Dublin.  Except when I looked out the window, of course.

Suburban Dark Continent