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::TRAVEL NEWS::
LE Newsletter -
July 3, 2008
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Explore Sands Of Time In Namibia
Source:
www.thestar.com -
Catherine Dunphy,
Toronto Star
(June 26, 2008) Sossusvlei,
NamibiaThe
show of rock and sand found
in Namibia may be the most dramatic in the world. Certainly it's
unsettling, maybe even scary, the way it hammers home nature's
gorgeous potency ... and our small place in it.
This arid southwest African land of two great deserts the
Namib and the Kalahari pushes up against one of the loneliest
coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps better known in some
quarters as the birthplace of Brangelina's toddler, Shiloh Jolie
Pitt, there are still places in Namibia where neither roads nor
people go. And fewer than two people per square kilometre live
here; only Mongolia has a lower population density.
As one campground owner said: "There's plenty of room. We like
it that way." He also cheerfully noted the nearest doctor was
300 kilometres away.
But every year, more than 800,000 tourists swell the country's
1.8 million population. Most are Germans come to see the
mythical land they owned until the end of World War I when the
League of Nations handed it over to neighbouring South Africa.
(Namibia won its independence in 1990).
The rest are eco-tourists and amateur photographers lured by
Namibia's timeless show of untrammelled and all-powerful nature.
Dramatic mesas, buttes and geological monoliths thrust up and
out of arid plateaus and the plains of grass shimmer green-grey
into the middle distance. (The grass will disappear, though,
within a month or two of the dry season that starts in March.)
At Fish River Canyon, there are cracks and fissures second only
to America's Grand Canyon. The huge Etosha salt pan anchors one
of the largest and most pristine game reserves in the continent.
Namibian tourists rent helicopters to hover over the restricted
Skeleton Coast (named for the victims of all the shipwrecks
there), balloons to traverse the Namib desert, and 4by4 vehicles
to handle desiccated ancient river beds. They surf sand dunes
near Swakopmund and hike many kilometres from any lights or
sound to sleep under beds designed to open to the dazzling night
sky of the southern hemisphere.
Yet these are just opening acts, all of them, for the show at
Sossusvlei, where the world's largest sand dunes shroud huge
clay pans in the heart of the Namib Desert, the Earth's oldest
desert.
We drove for about seven baking hours, much of that on a dirt
road through the Namib Naukluft Park, a strange and beautiful
and terrifying terrain that was, well, empty. No fences, no
telephone poles, no Monopoly-sized homes on a far away horizon.
The only sound was the desert breeze. I was travelling with my
husband and my in-laws, but I could taste the loneliness.
After three or four hours, we spotted a sign marking the Tropic
of Capricorn. As we approached, it seemed a mirage, looming
roadside out of the parched clay, and we clambered out of the
car. We said we wanted a photo of a marker quite literally in
the middle of nowhere, but really, I think, we needed to touch
something even a sign that showed we weren't the only ones
who'd ever travelled this long sand-swept road.
Respite came at the aptly named town of Solitaire which, as it
turns out, wasn't a town (although our Namibian map sure made it
look like one) but a way station decorated with rusty hulks of
old cars and trucks half buried in the sand.
Still, there was gas and clean washrooms and tomato-and-cheese
sandwiches on homemade bread.
"Hey, California's burning," said the chef himself, a big guy
with a friendly, heat reddened face who tracked current events
and noted the top stories such as a father in Austria
harbouring his daughter and their children in a basement for
years on a blackboard near the entranceway.
Not recorded was the death just the day before of an 8-year-old
boy from France, killed when his father accelerated through a
sand puddle for that is what the pockets that accumulate in
dips in the road look like and lost control of his rental car
on the road we had just travelled.
"Twelve tourists die a year. They go too fast and too close to
the edge of the dirt road," the chef clucked.
Chastened, we drove away at a much slower pace. The sand shifted
constantly under our vehicle as if throwing off our presence. At
our lodge that night, we decided not to see Sossusvlei on our
own but to take a tour. The deciding factor? Our guide would do
the driving.
It was still dark at 5:15 a.m. the next day when we set out with
Rian but by the time the park gates opened an hour later, the
morning light was clear and still.
Nothing prepares you for the sweep and scope of Sossusvlei's
majestic sandscape. Sculpted throughout million of years by the
wind, the voluptuous red dunes alternately glow like burnished
coals or pulsate in hot glory. They are living sculptures,
always changing. At a height of more or less 300 metres, Dune
45, located a logical 45 kilometres into the park, is putatively
the tallest dune, and the place where most people decide to
scramble or attempt to scramble to the top.
Rian is dismissive of it and them.
"It's not the highest, the wind is always shifting the tops of
them," he says, glaring through the 8 a.m. waves of heat at the
trudging tourists. "There's nothing to see at the top there
anyway."
Instead we leave Dune 45 and drive on to the Dead Vlei, through
sand so deep our 4-wheel drive becomes stuck. Deflating the
tires doesn't work; we shovel hot sand with our bare hands out
from under the chassis until finally the car lurches forward.
Vlei is the Afrikaans word for a pan or flatland and the Dead
Vlei is littered with the twisted corpses of Kamel thorn trees,
one-dimensional dark figures against the flat light of a
pummelling sun. Rian tells us he once had to break up a
pornographic photo shoot right here, when he worked as a park
ranger, and it seemed like the right place for such a sad
activity.
Rian has decided we will climb the dune also named Sossusvlei.
Perhaps not the highest dune, at least not today, in his mind
it's the only summit worth reaching. It is now late in the
morning and I am sapped from the heat, from the incessant
assault of hard, dry blowing sand. I stand at the foot of
Sossusvlei, looking up, up, up at the curved crest of the dune.
It resembles a scoliotic backbone of some enormous prehistoric
creature and I just know I won't make it to the top. There's
nothing solid. It is all sand, all treachery.
Still, I take a step, my foot sinking deep and fast, a wave of
fine sand gushing round my ankles into and under my socks.
Another step, another sand rush.
I am the last in our group, whose footprints vanish in this
unforgiving sand before I can reach them. The particles are so
heavy, each step is laboured. Yet when Rian urges me to keep
going, I do and at the top I stand with my family and gape at
the spectacle of 360 degrees of sweeping sand dunes speckled
with baked pans some with silver grey clay, some dotted with
those dark dead trees.
"Now you can say you have stood at the top of one of the largest
sand dunes in the world," Rian announces with precise pride.
Later, with surprising gallantry, he takes the arms of me and my
sister-in-law and holding them high as if leading us in a
minuet, takes us straight down the dune's flat windward side.
The drop is steep if not 90 degrees then not far off and the
sand cascades in front of us, carrying with it small blue-black
bugs like surfer dudes.
Our grinning husbands lope past us, but we continue our stately
pace, sinking into Sossusvlei's steep side with every step.
The dune envelops us. This ancient and inspiring dune is safe, I
suddenly realize, protective of whoever and whatever's around
it. I'm almost sorry when I reach level ground.
Catherine Dunphy is a feature writer at the Star. |
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::LANGFIELD
ENTERTAINMENT:: ENTERTAINMENT NEWS WITH A CANADIAN TWIST::
