Swakopmund! and other pictures.

Photos from the Komku End-Of-Year trip to Swakopmund on the gorgeous coast of Namibia, smack dab in the middle of the Namib Desert. This is true desert, nothing but sand and a few dark spots that are vaguely identifiable as plants. We saw the famed dunes, but I didn't get any good pictures. It just means I'll have to go back...

Driving into Swakop.

The gorgeous, minimalist coastline. The sea is full of life, however - kelp and seaweed and jellyfish rolled in and out with the tides of this somewhat chilly corner of the Atlantic.

Displaying the aforementioned kelp...

An oasis en route to Swakopmund.

NOT in Swakopmund: voting at the Huiku Trust Annual General Meeting, for the new board members.

One last Kalahari Sky... and now I'm off to Victoria for Christmas! That's right, on Sunday I'll be flying home to spend my first Christmas at home for the past 3 years. From sand and swimsuits to mist-drenched evergreen rainforests, and possibly a bit of snow. Next update from Canada (or perhaps from the airport).

Namibia Trip - in Photos

The journey begins - Car1, packed full of our tents and bedding.

The hippo pool at Tholo Safaris. It's beautiful but completely artificial - the area would have been a seasonal pan, but it was landscaped a bit and then pumped full of water from a borehole so that it is always full. Now hippos live where they would otherwise never survive, in the middle of the Kalahari. Stranger things have happened... did you know that if you want to, you can go shoot a zebra in Texas? Or a sable antelope... oryx... springbok... impala... any number of African game?

Traditional dance at Dqae Qare - this is the oryx dance, in which two dancers pretend to be dogs, helping the hunter chase down the oryx, usually played by one of the most agile dancers, holding two long sticks up to mimic the horns of the oryx. Extra flash and weird lighting is courtesy of a tourist group from Britain.

Viewing some run-down traditional dwellings at the Omaheke San Trust camp site in Namibia.

At Omaheke San Trust in Gobabis.


At Treesleeper Campsite in Tsintsabis. The stairs you can see just behind the sink lead up to the "tree deck," a platform on which you can pitch your tent or just sit and relax.

Inside one of the bathrooms at Treesleeper.


Lizard!



Crafts and jewelery displayed at a Ju/'hoansi village on Nqa J/aqna Conservancy.




Giant baobabs on Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. I have always felt that baobabs got a bad rap in Antoine St.Exupery's "Le Petit Prince," and until I saw my first baobab, I always had a slightly suspicious feeling about them. They were the scourge of the little prince's planet, after all! But in reality, baobabs are the most mystical, incredible trees I've ever seen.

Dreadlocks & Movies

On Saturday, December 5th, I went to Maun and employed the excellent Mma T to crochet my hair into dreadlocks. Yes, folks, that's right: crochet! Using the tiniest crochet hook in the world, its handle wrapped with innumerable rubber bands to give her a better grip, this unfailingly cheerful woman spent eleven hours knotting my hair into dreadlocks.

Set up on the floor of my friend G's house, we watched five movies between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.:

1. Children of Men, which was not exactly what I'd expected, but becomes more and more wonderful the more I think about it. I was expecting the wonder to be in the plot, but instead it was all in the atmosphere and the imagination of the dystopian world that was created. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given Cuaron's earlier films... I ought to go rewatch Great Expectations. When I watched it the first time, I think I was too distracted by the stirrings of adolescent hormones to really appreciate it.

2. Garden State, which was just as charming as I had been led to expect. It's the New Jersey I always believed was out there and never quite found... A particular brand of delightful, quirky, utterly unique Americana that I will always continue to search for. You have to go looking for the boats at the bottoms of abandoned shopping mall construction pits, or even the strange loopholes in hardware store return policies (that would NEVER happen in Botswana!)... Those bizarre and beautiful "only in America" phenomena. I remember going to look for things like that with a friend at Princeton. We drove miles and miles on a freezing cold fall afternoon, searching for a cavernous and reputedly satanic abandoned train tunnel that we'd read about on the internet. In the end, all we found was some offensive graffitti and a barbed-wire fence. Luckily we made up for the disappointment with another American phenomenon: really good, really cheap pizza.

3. Crank, which was just as terrible as I thought it would be, and therefore just as awesome. Apparently you don't need a big budget to create ridiculous action scenes. Jason Statham will never do Shakespeare, but he knows his place in the Hollywood pantheon and he fills those boots to perfection. (I am also, admittedly, a sucker for appallingly bad action movies.)

4. 88 Minutes, awful though it could have been so good. Sorry, Al Pacino.

5. The Fifth Element, which I have seen many times before and still love. Bruce Willis is the man, Milla Jovovich is an unearthly beauty, and apparently the costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier!?!

Halfway through.

Complete!! I've always wanted dreadlocks.

A brief history of Jenn's Hair: I did not cut it till the age of 19. Prior to that, it was gently trimmed, first at a place in Victoria called Tickety-Do's, which provided its pint-sized clientele with tiny personal TVs to watch Disney movies while their hair was cut. They also had a picture book of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which started my lifelong obsession with Jessica Rabbit. When I outgrew Tickety-Do's (which was later revealed to be a money-laundering front for some local drug dealers), my mother trimmed my hair for me. I always intended to cut it - my vague plan was to wait till the moment was right, get dreadlocks in the whole waist-length mane, and later shave it all off . However, one day in Kenya, on the biology department's Semester in the Field trip (which began this whole blog!), I thought idly to myself, "what if I cut off all my hair, right now?" After that, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and a few days later we had an impromptu fireside ceremony in which, armed with a head lamp and a pair of scissors, my friend Mark chopped off nineteen years of hair.

Since then, I've had a few "real" haircuts; I've shaved it off to a half-inch again; I've cut it myself, reaching around the back blindly with a pair of scissors and hoping for the best; and now I've finally fulfilled that original dream of dreadlocks. I'm very happy with them. It now remains to be seen how long it takes before I get tired of them and shave my head once more! (The next time, I intend to Bic it to the skin.)

Huiku Study Tour: Outtake 1

A pan on Nyae-Nyae Conservancy

From the 17th till the 28th of November, I took the Huiku Trust board on a study tour through Ghanzi and Namibia to view other San community-run tourism projects.

TRIP SUMMARY:

We began the trip in Ghanzi, picking up the board members from their settlements and parking at the Bokamoso hostel in D'Kar for a couple of days. During that time we visited two Tholo Safaris camps, and I madly raced to finish the ADF quarterly report. Next we drove to the Dqae Qare game farm and spent two nights there, seeing the facilities and chatting with staff. Saturday morning we clicked off the safety and set out on a massive road trip through Namibia. To give you an idea, I covered almost 4000km over 10 days, on roads ranging from good-quality paved road to 4WD 10km/hr sand road.

In Namibia, we entered via the Mamuno gate, drove to Gobabis, and saw the Omaheke San Trust (2 nights). Then we drove to Windhoek, stayed one night in the Cardboard Box Backpacker's, and proceeded the next day to Tsintsabis Treesleeper Camp. Two nights in Tsintsabis, and then onwards to Tsumkwe and two nights at Tsumkwe Country Lodge in order to visit the Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. Then a gruelling one-day journey back to D'Kar through the Dobe gate, dropping off the board members, and finally returning to my house at 9:30PM. I woke up the next morning at 6:00AM to drive the rental car back to Maun.

OUTTAKE ONE:

We're driving through Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. This is an interesting and largely successful San community project in Tsumkwe, north-eastern Namibia: they have a large area that they manage as a conservancy, which has a healthy and diverse game population. They make most of their money off of the hunting quota, which is quite a good income; however, (in my opinion), they severely under-utilize the potential for photographic and other tourism income. They also mismanage the redistribution of benefits to the community. However, they do an excellent job of managing the conservancy, and they DO milk the hunting quota for all it's worth – they sell, for example, three or four elephant hunts a year, which bring in huge amounts of money. There was ample sign of elephants everywhere we went on the conservancy – with typical disregard for international borders, many of them cross Nyae-Nyae en route to the Okavango Delta.

Anyhow, we're driving through the conservancy. Half of the board members are in Car 1, with the guide. I'm driving, and we're in front. N is driving the second car with the other half of the board members. We've been driving in near-silence, watching the scenery pass by, when suddenly I hear some muttering in mixed Nharo and Setswana start up behind me. All I can really catch is the word “plastics,” meaning plastic grocery bags.

The place we stopped

Suddenly, the muttering cuts off, and K shouts “STOP THE CAR!” Obediently I stop, and everyone leaps out, plastic bags in their hands. The other car stops behind me, and within a few seconds the occupants of Car 2 are also running around brandishing plastic bags. I cannot figure out what is going on.

They spread out and then drop to the ground and begin carefully picking through the giant boluses of elephant dung scattered on the roadside. After somehow identifying the best parts, they chuck the dung into the plastic bags and avidly continue collecting.

“What are they doing?” I ask N, after a few moments, completely bamboozled by this mysterious behaviour.

“Oh!” he says, laughing. “This will make you very strong! You make a kind of soup, and bathe in it before sleeping. It is the belief of these people that it is a medicine, it will make you strong – when other people are trying to witch you, you do this thing with the dung, and then their witching you won't work.”

“Yes,” P adds, interrupting his cheerful dung-collecting, “this is very good medicine.”

So I watched and waited as they ran around collecting as much dung as possible, and learned that the careful sorting was to avoid any insects that have burrowed into the dung. Once they had about two bags each, as well as some twigs from a toothbrush bush (don't know it's English name, but it's a bush whose twigs can be used to brush your teeth – I tried it, but didn't like it very much), we all piled back into the cars and continued our tour. There was a visible glow of happiness and excitement on all of the board members after this episode; I guess it's a very highly-valued medicine in Ghanzi, where there are very very few elephants. I wonder if it's as prized in areas where elephants are common.