Vegetarians not welcome

Menus in Namibia tend to be weighted towards the carnivorous. Above: pork knuckle "guaranteed at least 800 grams"; "bushman skewer" of ostrich, crocodile, zebra, kudu, and, er.... chicken. We also ate warthog, hartebeest, springbok, gemsbok, impala and er.... snails.

(and yes, I've noticed the contradiction between the previous post and this one: we don't like to see our animals stuffed and hanging on walls, but we don't mind eating them.)

Taxidermy

On the way from the airport to Windhoek you see these extraordinary signs at the side of the road (first three photos) - on the way back we were curious enough to call in - the souvenirs were pretty standard and we only bought a single car sticker - but we were encouraged to visit the taxidermy workshop and sales point, which was a surreal experience: many of the animals we've gone to great lengths to see in their natural habitats had been captured, frozen in position like 3D snapshots - in hyperperfect detail. It was spooky; we agreed that we wouldn't like to be locked in overnight... Would anyone like to buy half of a full-size elephant to stick on your wall?

Walvis Bay - the return

I've blogged about Walvis Bay before - so here are just a few more photos to illustrate again the contrast between the richness of the marine life there and the barreness of the land - it's an amazing moment when you reach the sea after hours of crossing the desert.

Above: the jetty; jellyfish; pelican; dolphins following the boat; humpback whale with its head out of the water; seal colony (all the dots are seals - they bleat constantly like a vast herd of sheep; the bigger colonies can't be approached because of the SMELL); jackal on the beach (the small doggy shape near the water - they prey on seal pups); dolphins in the bay. There are sharks too but we didn't see any.

More desert

Above: rock mountains, sand mountains; the giant nest was built by a colony of social weaver birds - a small bird - the entrances to the individual nests are underneath. "Namib" means "vast", and the Namib desert is considered to be the oldest in the world - 55 million years; visiting it does feel like being transported to an alien, inhospitable, prehistoric world.

Sossusvlei

Back to Namibia for a holiday (yes I know I seem to get lots of holidays, but maybe that's because I flee Joburg every chance I get; the rest of the time I'm working very very hard, honest). We started at one of the main tourist destinations in the Namib desert, Sossusvlei, where you can see red sand dunes up to 300 metres high - and lots of them. Despite its fame, Sossusvlei feels very isolated - you have to drive for about five hours to get there from Windhoek, most of it on dirt roads, and the handful of lodges are clustered around the gate to the national park; once inside the park you drive for another SIXTY kilometres, through a plain bounded by the magnificent red dunes, to get to the actual vleis (there are several) - vleis are salt pans which are nearly always dry - we were told that the last time water was visible was four years ago, and the last time Sossusvlei was a lake was nine years ago.

There aren't many animals - a few gemsbok and steinbok, quite a lot of beetles (which defend themselves either by dashing for the nearest bush, if there is one, or otherwise by putting their heads in the sand and their bottoms in the air, as if they think they're less visible that way) and some birds around the few scrubby trees that manage to survive. The views are truly awe-inspiring, especially when the wind is whipping sand clouds UP the sides of the dunes and spraying them off the tops - you can see how these dunes slowly move in vast solid waves across the desert - and there's a hundred kilometre wide strip of them running for nearly a thousand miles down the Namibian coast. One of the great sights of the world.

Above: luxury tent (including instructions on what to do in a sandstorm - stay inside, and hide in the bathroom if it gets really bad - and the warning that "only minimum services will be provided" during such a storm); view from the tent; desert scenes.

World Cup - some modest proposals

The flags have disappeared off the cars, the media are desperately scraping the bottoms of barrels for the final stories about Spanish celebrations (and profound disappointment for everyone else), and I can gratefully return to ignoring football for another four years. I concede that there were a few exciting moments during the WC, mostly early on, but by the time it got to the final I (and I suspect most non-Europeans) didn't really care who won - and it was pretty dull and unedifying to watch 22 men hack at each other for two hours until eventually, by the laws of statistical probability, the ball went into a net - it hardly mattered which one. Like most of the other games it could've gone either way, and I'm sure that if you replayed the whole WC you'd get a totally different set of results - referee decisions and sheer luck count for as much or more than skill and determination.

The real problem with football, in my view, is that there aren't enough points. I can't think of any other sport in which a single point, struggled for over hours of play, can make the difference between winning and losing. The best side can lose because of a linesman being distracted by a seagull or because the ball happens to hit someone's hand, or someone accidentally gets kicked in a melee in the goalmouth. This is ridiculous. The game cries out for drastic reform. Football would be much fairer and far more interesting if there were more points. I therefore offer the following suggestions to improve the game of football and make the next World Cup more worthy of attention:

- have a points system for everything that happens: ten points for a goal, one point for a free kick, two points for a corner. Minus two for a foul, minus four for a penalty, minus one for spitting. Two points for actually dribbling with the ball (rather than just dribbling) and passing an opponent. Show the running total on the scoreboard for everyone to see.

- admit that football is a contact sport. Allow the players to crash into each other, cut each other down, hold on to each other's shorts and shirts. Let play go on, no stoppages. The players can wear body armour if they want, it's up to them - rugby players don't seem to need it and don't complain nearly as much.

- get rid of the offside rule. It'll be a tactical decision how many players hang around in each goal mouth; it's the same for each team, so completely fair. Only the goalkeepers would complain, because there'd be more goals. That's the point, we want more goals. (Alternatively, wire up the pitch so that any player running offside gets a faint electric shock; there'd be no more forward passing to players in an offside position, because they'd be writhing on the ground, incapacitated.)

- widen the goal; make it twice as wide.

- have a wild ball now and then, i.e. throw an extra ball on the pitch at random moments, like in pinball. That would keep the players on their toes. And we'd get more goals.

- have a random period of five minutes when the referee and linesmen can join in the game on the side they prefer - on the same side or different sides, as they like.

- equip the spectators with paintguns and two paintballs each - one green and one red. They can shoot the green ball at their favourite player and the red ball at the player they hate most. At the end of the game the player covered with the most green paint gets a reward, the player with the most red paint is banned from the next five games. (This would also encourage all players to keep running, all the time, to present a more difficult target.)

I'm thinking of applying for Seth Blatter's job - with the set of suggestions above I could transform the game of football into something actually worth watching.