Namibian Skies

Luderitz, Namibia
16 May 2002

Sunsets in Africa dazzled with a palette of pinks and oranges. This is in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Photo by Michael Seto


The skies in Namibia draw your eyes upward. Its the thing you notice most in this enchanting country.

At night, the clarity allows you to see the Milky Way as a white streak across the heavens, including some of the dark spots in the universe. Below the Milky Way, a fainter white spot, like subtle cotton, is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a smaller galaxy orbiting our galaxy at 170,000 light years distance.

We city-dwellers (especially New Yorkers) seldom get to see the night skies; our vision instead a kaleidoscope of neon, traffic lights, office windows, and the strobes of sirens. Walking on concrete and asphalt, surrounded by wood, steel, brick, and glass; nature is something we watch on the Nature Channel. We lost touch with the universe, literally.

Standing on a sand dune in Sesriem, or in a camp sight in Etosha National Park, or on the top of the Fish River Canyon, stars form a blanket over our heads. Southern skies reveal another view of our universe, different constellations than ones in the Northern Hemisphere, though friendly Orion still twirls about down here below the Equator. Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and Jupiter dance in the night sky. The brilliant moon soars across the plain of stars.

It's eye-opening, literally, to drag my sleeping bag into a clearing where I can lay back and just absorb the breathtaking sight. How small we really are. How small and insignificant I truly am, when compared to the unmeasurable multitudes of worlds out there. My life's accomplishments and all my sound and fury but a bleat in the cacophony of cosmos. My interminable lifespan an eye-blink in the history of the universe. I think I know my place now.

Namibia offers the hard baked pan of Etosha in the North, the foggy Skeleton Coast, and proceeding southward, sculpted red dunes of Sossusvlei, and the scrub diamond area bordering on South Africa, where cars cannot stop along the road for fear that someone will pick up a valuable "rock" while relieving oneself.

In Swakopmund, we participated in all the "adrenaline" sports offered in this Jackson Hole-esque outdoorsy city. One group tandem skydived over the orange sand dunes along the coast. We all tried our hand at sand boarding, either standing on snowboards, or prone on a piece of wood that rushed us sled-like down the dune at 60 MPH. Quite a ride. One day took us quad-biking or ATV-ing over 35 miles of eco-friendly trails up and down these 200 foot sand dunes. I felt like Lawrence of Arabia meets the Fast and the Furious. I flung myself off one sand dune too fast and jumped off the bike as it rolled down the face of the dune. I was relegated to the "remedial" riders group for a few miles till I proved myself. Humbling.

It's been a rambling journey across this intriguing country, which is very modern and boasts a couple KFC's to prove its place among developed nations. I felt and even now feel very lethargic and apathetic. Organized overland trips tend to breed a follow-the-leader mentality - where we just pile off the bus when told, take some pictures, then set up our tents and cook and sleep. My situational awareness is flagging, I am a overland zombie right now and a bit stir crazy.

The five of us who joined the trip in Nairobi, started seeking only the unusual in our last game park drives, which we admittedly tired of after ten weeks, five countries and uncountable game parks! In our last park, Kgaligadi, straddling the border of South Africa and Namibia, we became obsessed with "pronking," a four-legged jump performed only by Springbok - one of many LBJs in Africa's ecosystem.

(LBJ = Little Brown Jumpie Thing, as opposed to the Big Five: Lion, Leopard, Elephant, Cape Buffalo, and Rhino). We drove by herds of Springbok, yelling "PRONK! PRONK!" out the windows and standing by with our cameras and ignoring everything else. (I eventually did get a couple good shots.)

I look forward to continuing my travels on my own. I loved the last ten weeks and highly recommend truck overland travel for the more remote and inconvenient parts of the world, but the freedom and requisite involvement of single travel beckons and dangles its own rewards. I miss the time to laze around and think on interminable bus rides across the countryside, time to ponder.