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.)

Zoo(m)

I've got a new camera - this won't make much difference to the quality of the blog pix, because I have to resize them down - so several extra millions of pixels won't translate into much, given that I don't print photos either and I only ever look at them on a tiny laptop... But the new camera has a much better zoom, which certainly does make a difference.

Thanks to bro Garry for the acquisition consultancy.

Above: invasive snooping at the zoo.

Polygamy

A rather large cultural difference in SA is that polygamy is legal - it's considered to be a part of traditional African culture. President Jacob Zuma famously has three wives, which gave rise to considerable speculation about how he'd deal with the "first lady" issue when elected - he solves this problem neatly, in SA at least, by arranging for them all to appear with him at public events (generating a whole new genre of gossip columnage along the lines of "which wife was best dressed/ had the best seat/ got the most attention/ was most gracious to the hoi polloi?" etc.) Zuma also has an unknown number of children - up to eighteen according to the papers - from at least five different women (he had two other wives, one dead, one divorced).

In the SA Sunday Times today there's an article on a Mr. Milton Mbhele who took the notion a step further by marrying four wives on the same day - there's a nice photo of them in nearly-matching white dresses. Milton met these ladies at various times and has built separate houses for them - and fathered seven children with them (along with another three from other relationships). He frankly admits that having a single mass wedding was partly for economic reasons - it was cheaper than having four separate events (which presumably would have included a lot of the same guests, at least on the groom's side). Mr. Mbhele is a bank manager and can presumably afford to maintain four wives, even if four weddings would have been a stretch. The article mentions that Mbhele paid the traditional bridal price - lebolo - for each of his ladies: ten cows, eight cows, seven cows and seven cows respectively.

Mbhele is quoted as saying that he loves his wives equally and that there's "good competition" among them - "But it is healthy competition. From cleaning the home to respecting me, they are all so well behaved." Only one of the wives is quoted, the new Mrs. Zenele Mbhele, who said of the arrangement "We get along well. We visit each other often." The Sunday Times reports this item with no hint of criticism - in fact, it's only news because the four weddings took place at the same time - but it seems to me that, legal or not, there's something fundamentally very wrong about this whole concept, just because it's so unequal. It's impossible to imagine a female bank manager saying of her four new husbands (who she paid 32 sheep for) that they compete healthily in cleaning their homes and in respecting her - and the four men being perfectly happy with this - and with the bed-time rota. The tradition of polygamy here always seems to mean that men can have multiple wives and not vice-versa - so there's a rather massive sexist double standard built in.

(I should mention that on the same page of the Sunday Times there's an item saying that prisoners in Verne Prison in Dorset, UK, managed to get drunk and start a fight by consuming a hand gel intended to stop the spread of swine flu - the gel happened to contain alcohol - so I suppose every culture has its traditions that are resistant to change....)

Nambiti

After Cathedral Peak, I went to a game reserve - my fourth in nine months, which is right on the edge of being too many, but I won two free nights at the excellent Nambiti Plains Lodge in a prize draw, so I could hardly say no. The game-viewing routine was the standard offer: up at dawn, off on an open land rover for three hours or more, then breakfast - then nothing to do for six hours except eat lunch (or swim in the pool if you can stand the temperature - nights here are still cool even though the days are hot, so unheated pools stay cold; you're not allowed to walk anywhere, for obvious reasons, and this lodge didn't offer bush walks because they're still waiting for their rifle licence) - then back on the land rover at four o'clock for another three or four hours of bouncing around on bad roads (why, I wonder, is the suspension on land rovers so awful? I know they're heavy-duty vehicles but you would've thought a tourist-friendly version would exist by now... or perhaps risking back injury is part of the authenticity of the experience); stop for a sundowner, back to the lodge in the dark, then dinner, then sleep.

I still enjoyed much of this, and we saw quite a lot of animals; but I shared the land rover with a British family who were on their first visit to a reserve, and their enthusiasm ("WOW, a giraffe!! Isn't it HUGE!!!") made me realise how quickly I've got used to seeing wildlife in its "natural" habitat - and that I'm starting to understand the extent to which the game reserve experience is carefully managed. Nambiti has only been a game reserve for four years - it was farmland before and it's still littered with abandoned buildings - and it's still being stocked with wildlife to get it up to its "carrying capacity" - the ranger showed us the "release platform" where dozens of impala and wildebeest are trucked in and unloaded on a regular basis - "lunches for lions".

We didn't manage to see the lions, because they'd made a kill the day before so they were digesting slothfully somewhere - and our rangers couldn't get off the vehicle and track them... because they didn't have a rifle. But we did see three cheetahs, twice, and we noticed that they had plastic collars around their necks. The ranger was a bit unclear about why this was - "the ecologists are tracking them, studying movements and things"... but then I thought... hang on a second... if somebody knows where the cheetahs are, all the time, why don't they just tell us (over the standard land rover radio) rather than make us bounce around on these rocky tracks for seven hours a day? Why not tag the lions, too, before they're shoved off the release platform, so we can find them when they hide? In fact, why not tag everything and visit them in ascending order of interest, so that the guests have a truly satisfying bush experience?

I joke, cynically, but a wildlife enthusiast friend of mine says that a popular lodge in the Kruger has been caught engaging in exactly this sort of malpractice - to their immense shame they were found with tracking and GPS devices on board the land rovers. But this seems to me to reveal an odd sort of paradox - if we have the technology to locate these animals, why not use it? What's the fine moral or aesthetic line between actively managing the "stock" in a game reserve and being able to find it when you want to? There's a tacit consensus that the tourist expects the drama of having to hunt for a lion and perhaps not finding it - and any intervention which alters the odds is somehow cheating - in fact the experience becomes or stays a lot more like gambling. It also perhaps means (taking my cynicism up a notch) that the tourist is more likely to come back and try again to see that elusive lion, or leopard - as in any reward system, a certain level of failure increases motivation.

Having said all of that, I should also say that I still got a thrill out of seeing eland galloping past the collared cheetahs (too big for them, said the guide, but they jumped up and seemed to consider giving chase for a moment - and I'd love to see a cheetah take off from a standing start... so I'll undoubtedly be going back to a game reserve, gambling on seeing something really exciting, managed or not) - and the lodge itself was excellent - great food, sumptuous accomodation (with the biggest mosquito net around the bed I've ever seen - a tented room within the room) and perfectly pitched attention and friendliness from the staff and managers - and this is perhaps one of the best reasons for going to a game reserve: the game drives are often uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating, but for the rest of the time you feel relaxed, well-fed and pampered - and that you fully deserve this indulgence.

Cathedral Peak

Last weekend I discovered a very positive new aspect of SA - walking in the mountains. I stayed at the wonderful Cathedral Peak hotel in the Central Drakensberg, a four hour drive from Joburg. The hotel has a large number of rooms but is very well organised - first thing in the morning guides take small groups of guests on walks of various lengths and difficulty, and you can also ask for printed instructions and go off on your own - though you're asked to sign a register saying where you're going in case you don't come back. This seems to be safe, as long as you don't break a leg or step on a snake - the hotel is inside the fenced and guarded Kwazulu Natal Wildlife Protected Area, and apparently the only people you're likely to meet on the mountain paths apart from other hikers are marijuana smugglers coming over the border from Lesotho - you're advised to ignore them, and then they'll ignore you.

Grass (or "veld") fires seem to be a feature of the landscape all around SA at this time of year - I saw a live one from the motorway - a thin line of fire, not very high, which leaves most of the trees unaffected but scorches the ground. Apparently for many plant types this is a requirement of their life cycle - Protea seeds, for example, are only released with the heat of the fire, and then grow easily in the carbonised soil. On my first walk last weekend we spent quite a lot of time crossing a zone that had had a fire a couple of weeks ago - leaving an other-worldly landscape of black earth, blackened plants, and bright green shoots of new growth. Against the backdrop of the magnificent mountains, this was an extra dimension of wonder.