Psychic with an international reputation

The main intersections in Johannseburg are nodes of commercial enterprise - people walk up and down the lines of waiting traffic collecting for charities (which may or may not exist), selling a wide variety of goods - phone chargers, soft drinks, fruit, mirrors, paintings, toys, footballs - and handing out flyers for any number of services. Yesterday I was given a flyer - purple and green text on a blue background - which extolled the gifts of PROF. LUMUMBA AND .ALI (sic), "psychic with an international reputation" who can, apparently by checking through water and a mirror, tell you all your problems before you mention them. Their specialities include:

• bring back your lover even if you broke up long ago
• remove the bad spell from your life which keeps taking money away from you
• ensure that a single person gets a perfect partner in a shortest time
• attract customers into your business and turn your trade into a favourite among clients
• Masai root joice for weight loss
• Masai remedy xtra for enlarging the breasts to size "D" naturally
• Masai remedy for tightening the breasts making them smaller and firm to the size of your choice permanently
• remove witchcraft, curse or haunting and send them back to your enemy
• make you see your enemies in the mirror and make demands on them
• recover stolen property
• bring super natural luck into your life to win chance games like lotto, casino, dice, black jack machines, etc
• Masai gel for men, mainly intended to enlarge the penis both in girth and length naturally making it big to the size of your choice and strong
• and many more."
  

An initial consultation costs a mere 100 rand - about nine euros. This is certainly fantastic value, but I have to confess that the sheer range of expertise on offer makes me a mite skeptical; but perhaps that's just my cynical side coming out.

The colour jacaranda

In Johannesburg the jacaranda trees are in bloom again - which means I've been in SA for nearly a year, the seasons will start to repeat themselves from now on (though it still seems very strange for the weather to be getting hotter as we head towards Christmas - today I heard a Christmas carol in a shop; surreal.)

I'd never really thought about exactly what colour Jacaranda flowers are - but a poet said to me the other day in passing, "I'm still trying to work out what colour jacaranda is..." (this was Francesca Beard, who was here for work, check out her website - there's an MP3 archive of her performing her poems) - and this made me look more closely - and the answer is: it depends. Yesterday on the way back from work I drove through a storm along an avenue of jacaranda trees and they looked grey against a slate sky. With the sun behind them they're pale blue. In the morning light they're violet. They change all the time. But whatever the real colour is, they're wonderful, and they add an extra dimension to spring in South Africa.

(Above: taken from my balcony: electrical storm; the jacaranda at the end of my balcony, morning and evening.)

Plunder

The wonder and excitement of my Namibian holiday have begun to fade, distanced by two weeks back at work... all I have left are the memories, the photos and the objects I picked up along the way.

Above: vertebra from an unknown animal found on the Skeleton Coast (any suggestions?); carved Makalani palm seed; decorated snuff box (snuff is still popular in Namibia, apparently); wooden tortoise; rock from the Namib desert, split by heat (the pieces still fit together perfectly if you line them up); bead lizard.

Skeleton Coast

Namibia's coastline is known as the Skeleton Coast, according to some accounts because of the large number of shipwrecks that have happened there, over 500 of them over the centuries (ships get lost in the morning fogs, a feature of the area, and heavy surf and strong tides wash them up on the beach); according to another version the name arose because it's such an inhospitable part of the world that most humans who venture into it, shipwrecked or not, end up dead.

North of Swakop is the Skeleton Coast Park. We didn't drive very far into it because the distances are again huge, so we stopped at the first ship wreck we saw - a fairly recent one, by the looks of it - it still had its paint and didn't seem broken up (it's called the Ze'la - I couldn't find any reference to it on the internet so if anyone knows how to find some information let me know). I would've loved to get on board and see what was left on the ship, but caution easily won the day - this is not a good beach for swimming.

Above the tideline the sand was littered with... bones. Mostly animal bones, one presumes and hopes - I saw an identifiable carcass of a jackal, and we found an enormous vertebra which must have come from a whale - this was half buried in the sand so perhaps the rest of the skeleton was beneath our feet - it's hard to imagine bones that size being scattered around very easily or carted off by scavengers.

Why so many animal bones? Well amazingly enough the area does support quite a lot of wildlife - the plants survive on the sea fogs, herbivores graze the plants (including, apparently, elephants, giraffes and rhinos in some areas), there are a few lions to help natural selection along, and jackals, hyenas and crabs keep the beach clean. Leaving the bones. Skeleton Coast indeed.

Quad bikes

Another false consciousness uncovered: am I worried about the environment and global warming? Yes I am. Do I think that pristine areas of the globe should be protected from commercial touristic ventures? Yes I do. Did I quad bike on the Namibian sand dunes? Yes I did. And it was one of most exciting things I've ever done.

It's actually a great way to see the dunes - you're not going to get very far walking, so on a quad bike you see a hell of a lot more. And you can't really disturb anyone with the noise of the engines - there's no-one there. And there isn't much impact on the environment either - the sands are constantly shifting in the wind anyway. And quad biking's only allowed on a few square kilometres of a very very large area - so the purists can just go a bit further down the coast if they want to (in their four by fours) and take a look at a few thousand unspoilt dunes. And quad biking supports the local economy! Conscience appeased.

Himba

The Himba are a nomadic tribe who live in the north of Namibia. There aren't many of them left - less than 50,000 - so they're outnumbered by the inhabitants of little Walvis Bay - and their traditional lifestyle is apparently under threat, partly because their already fragile economy was disrupted by the war with Angola, and partly because their traditions don't really fit in the modern world - the Namibian government, for example, would like Himba children to go to school, which is a laudable aim but doesn't really combine well with the parents needing to constantly move their small herds of cows and goats from water hole to water hole in inaccessible rural areas.

Another problem is that the Himba have realised that tourists will give them lots of money for animal hair bracelets and other crafts, and will even pay just to take their photographs (ten Namibian dollars per person - about a euro) - and this is presumably a much better return on time and effort than pastoralism in an arid country. The Himba women I saw in Walvis Bay and Windhoek were in fact selling souvenirs and had presumably travelled there specifically to do so. Himba women cover themselves with butterfat mixed with ochre - their plaits are almost rigid with fat as well. Their hairstyles are magnificent.

There's probably a whole dissertation to write here about the ethics of tourism, and about the preservation of traditions vs access to the benefits of the modern world (medicine! irrigation!) - but I suppose this isn't the place, and I'm not the one to do it. I'm just one of the tourists with a camera.

Walvis Bay

As one would expect, the desert and the dunes around Swakopmund don't support much animal life. All the more amazing, then, that just down the road Walvis Bay (the only natural harbour on the entire Namibian coast) is teeming with life - seals, dolphins, pelicans, seagulls, cormorants and other bird species I didn't recognise; there are also whales in the right season. These animals live on an abundant diet of fish - and so do the human inhabitants - nearly everyone there (60,000 people) lives off the fishing industry. The fish, in turn, live on an unusually high density of plankton - the water is opaque because of this, a dense shiny grey like mercury.

Tourists can take boat trips around the bay - the friendlier seals are encouraged to come on board the boats, rewarded with fish - at your own risk you're allowed to touch them; this is certainly the closest I've ever been to a seal - the hard outer fur is cold and wet but if you stroke against the grain there's a layer of softer fur underneath which is dry. One seal - Sally the Surfer - has learned to swim up to twin outboards when they're running at full throttle and sit on the cushion of water between them, begging for food.

Pelicans and seagulls fly after the boat, waiting for the occasional fish tossed up in the air; dolphins swim around and underneath, but they're impossible to photograph, I discovered, because they're very fast and they appear above the water for a split second - in groups of three or four - before they dive again, often going under the boat to appear on the other side. Overall, the contrast with the dunes just the other side of Walvis Bay town is absolute - arid lifeless sand on the shore, with not even a blade of grass or an insect to be seen; intense organic activity in and around the water; geobiology illustrated in its extremes.

The dunes

Namibia is famous for its sand dunes - the biggest in the world, up to 300 metres high. I didn't see the biggest, but the ones near Swakop are impressive enough - and easy to get to (once you're in the area), they line the road between Swakop and Walvis Bay - there are designated areas where you can pull off the road, park, and walk; within a couple of minutes you're looking out across a vast expanse of rolling browns, yellows and ochres cut with razor-sharp shadows, a spectacular sight - and this meganormous beach extends all the way down the coast to South Africa. The dunes are constantly shaped by the wind, and so in constant movement - like a very slow replication of the waves pounding the shore just the other side of the road.

I also went to Dune Seven (giving creative names to things seems to be a problem around here), which is reputed to be the tallest in the area, but is a mere fifty metres tall. However Dune Seven is still very challenging to climb; for one thing it's unexpectedly steep - you can only go up it using your hands - and it's also, indeed, made of sand - and very fine sand at that - so at every step your foot sinks in about six inches and you slide back half the distance you thought you were covering. Many who start the climb give up, but I'm proud to say I made it to the top, puffing and wheezing and reflecting that it wasn't a particularly good place to have a heart attack, especially if I fell down the other side - and my calf muscles are still hurting now. But coming down is great fun, you can launch yourself and jump/slide and tumble and merrily undo the work of half an hour in ten seconds.

Swakopmund

Swakopmund is an odd place - it was the harbour for the short-lived colony catchily known as German South West Africa, for a mere thirty years - and was then British and then South African for the next seventy-five years, until it became Namibian in 1990. What's odd is that it still looks and feels very German - the architecture is "colonial German" (including some distinctly Alpine-looking chalets), and German is one of the main languages spoken, along with Afrikaans - English (the official language of Namibia) runs a distant third. The population is less than thirty thousand most of the time, with a massive influx of tourists in December - summer holidays for rich Namibians and South Africans. What do the permanent residents live on? Tourism mostly, and just down the road happens to be one of the largest uranium mines in the world - which offers guided tours should you wish.

The name of the town means "mouth of the Swakop", the Swakop river being an occasional source of water - Swakop comes from an indigenous name for the river and apparently means "opening for excrement", which was probably not the brand image that the early European settlers were aiming for - or perhaps they just didn't imagine a future tourist trade at the time. However, Swakop's image was given a boost recently with the birth of a new Namibian citizen, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. I went past the hospital and have to say that a visit from Brad and Angelina must have been one of the most incongruous things ever seen in this already very unusual place.

Namib Desert

I had to go to Namibia for work again and took the opportunity to get out of Windhoek this time and go to Swakopmund on the coast. The shortest way - if not necessarily the fastest - is a dirt road which is almost a straight line between the two places - it takes four hours to cover the 300 kilometres and you can only do it in a four wheel drive - and you need a certain amount of courage, because there is NOTHING on the way except scrub, rock, dust, and the occasional group of ostriches - no petrol stations, no human constructions, no humans, nothing except the road itself and the occasional signpost (not that you need road signs as such - there's only one turn off along the entire route). We saw five other vehicles - four coming towards us and one we had to overtake. Each vehicle raises a vast plume of dust, so it's actually better not to encounter anyone else.

The landscape is beautiful, though of course bleak and at times literally featureless - a flat grey-white plain and a heat-hazed blue horizon. I'm still getting used to how enormous the distances are in Africa - Namibia is well over three times the size of the UK, but with a population of only two million - and most of them clustered in the north of the country. It's humbling and slightly scarey to drive for four hours through a vast area of the world where human beings have made no impact whatsoever - and where no-one in their right mind would want to live anyway.

(As a footnote, when you finally come off the dirt track near Swakopmund, the road is actually made of salt, rather than tarmac - salt after all is plentiful near the sea - there are natural salt pans - and it works fine, the road surface is hard and smooth to drive on. The only drawback, apparently, is when it rains - then the roads become extremely slippery, like wet ice. But then again it hardly ever rains, so not a large problem.)