My Travels: Light and Dark in the Namib Desert

Light and Dark in the Namib Desert

What hit me this year with not a cloud in the sky for five days was the wall-to-wall feeling of light in the Namib Desert. For the last two years I had been blessed with rain and dream clouds, with spectacular orange and red sunsets and sunrises.

Now this time it was not only during the day that we had this light. We were blessed with the energy of the full moon, and there was still wall-to-wall at light at night, with only the stronger stars of the constellations and the planets visible in the night sky.

The best appreciation of light in this special and beautiful place was gained in a balloon flight early on morning. More about the balloon flight later. In fact, I was up later than usual, only 5 a.m., to launch at about 6:15 am.. But that meant leaving Little Kulala Lodge as the orange rim lit up the length of the eastern horizon behind the Naukluft Mountains at 5:30 a.m. and arriving at the balloon launch site fifteen minutes later.

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The moon moving down into the earth’s shadow.

What was most impressive about the morning light was not the sunrise, but rather the setting of the full moon, with the softening of the harsh moonlight being burnt away by the eastern warmth.  What follows next with the moon setting in the earth’s shadow is nothing short of spectacular. From the air you can clearly see the dark shadow the earth casts on the horizon in the west as the sun rises in the east. As the moon descends it enters a fuzzy lighter zone called the penumbra, and then finally the dark zone of the real shadow, the umbra. This  point in time, with the sun, earth and moon almost aligned in the heavens but short of an eclipse, is an observer’s delight. It lasted for about fifteen minutes, and is so beautiful I had to remind myself to breath.

 

Then suddenly it was daytime. The dunes lit up soft red for five minutes and then shadows started falling.

 

My best moonrise was at sunset a few days earlier, sitting on the dune called Big Mama above Sossusvlei, having recovered from the exertion of the climb and again, waiting with slow breathing for the moonrise.

 

Moonrise over Sossusvlei

Moonrise over Sossusvlei

The earth’s shadow formed but the umbra was narrower because we were looking over the Naukluft Mountains. The sun set suddenly, with a blush of redness on the dunes and the sudden dimming of the bright eastern light. Unlike the east coast of Africa where the twilight does not exist, here in the desert the twilight lingered for almost an hour. Slowly the earth’s shadow would become night, but before that we saw the orange rim of the full moon rising. In the shadow and the dust of the autumn sky from bush fires over the Kalahari the moon rose like a soft face. I almost recognized it, and smiled to myself, spellbound in the beauty of this light and dark.

Sugarman and Serendipity

On Friday I had lunch with a friend who collects cameras. He has just had a video released about his passion.  “The Collector.” You should watch it. He closes by saying “if I die it doesn’t matter, I did something that I love.”

So did Rodriguez, I thought.

My friend asked what I was doing in Cape Town. “ A conference?”

 “Oh, no. I came to see a concert.” I paused; “Rodriguez” I said, looking for a hint of recognition from the other seventy-year-old dreamer.

I flew down to Cape Town on Thursday for the concert by Sixto Rodriguez. I am not a concert junkie, but this was one I had to attend.

I had heard reports that his previous concerts were awesome.  But I did not know what to expect. I did not know how he would respond to the audience; when he recorded “Cold Fact” he used to play in bars with his back to the audience. I did not know how much he would talk. No one had said anything about that detail. After all, he was our poet, and we needed to hear words from him.

The curtain dropped after the supporting act by Newton’s Second Law and revealed Rodriguez in the centre of the stage, floppy black hat covering a lined faced hidden behind tinted black-rimmed glasses. A worn black jacket hung loosely off his shoulders and a blurred black and white scarf hung in front, covering his black vest. He held an acoustic guitar and starting strumming immediately. He launched into his first song. It was the last concert of his South African tour. Three days after the close of his concert the film gods will be meeting in Hollywood to decide if the film about him, “Searching for Sugarman” warrants an Oscar for the brilliant documentary about a story of hope and dreams. About passion and love for music.

He did speak during the concert.  He drank lots of water, and something special from a white hotel teacup. After sipping from the cup he would pause away from the microphone, wait for the audience, and then move forward for some more talk or a song.

Girls were shouting “I want to have your baby” and “marry me”; he just smiled.

The audience shouted out wish lists of songs. “Thank you for your time”. He drank some water, then from his white cup, moved forward and thanked the audience for their time. And he meant it.

After he sang “The Establishment Blues” he spoke at length. South Africa was wilting under the hell fire of the death of a young rape victim and a week later the arrest of their darling sports hero, the Blade Runner. Rodriguez said:

“I am a musico-politico.  We need to address violence against women. We need more women in power.” He paused to drink. He was pensive. “Come to think of it, you know, we need a lady Pope!” The audience cheered and laughed.

It was an audience of white middle class dreamers. Most of them now had jobs, a house, three kids at university and a wife. A man in front of me stood jiving to some songs with his wife. They may have even had their first dance at their wedding thirty-five years ago to  “I think of you”.  They were still in love. I could see that.

We were all in love with Rodriguez. He represented our life under Apartheid and now sweetens the dream that has become a reality for us. In this New Age of self-discovery he has affirmed that we should never lose our passion for the things we love. Especially if the world seems to want us to lose that faith. He gives hope to the middle aged that they still have time to reach the pinnacle of self-discovery. After all, here he was playing to an audience that loved him when he was in his own words “a sound seventy”.

Out of the nowhere some strange but familiar cords were played, and he burst into song with “Blue Suede Shoes”.  He looked so happy. Afterwards he needed a few sips from his cup and a second bottle of water. He spoke.

“I love playing the classics. You know, we love playing music. We do it for the chicks.  We do it for the money. We do it to be acknowledged. Most of all we do it because it’s fun.”

After he played “Sugarman”, while he was drinking water, the audience started up and sang the whole song back to him; he stood back in awe of the love they showered upon him. He just smiled. Later he told a Mickey Mouse joke.

At the end of the concert he said thank you. “The last time I felt so young was when I was in Cape Town.”

He was helped off the stage but came back for an encore. He played three songs to a continuous standing ovation.

Back to lunch with my friend “The Collector” the next day:

 “Hmm, I still have his L.P.. The once with him in the bubble.” My friend got up and walked into another room. “I’ll give it to you.”

 He walked out of that room with the album cover that held the vinyl, a dream from decades ago that has been washed clean by the modern age. The dream’s beauty has finally been revealed.

 Serendipity: that I went to a concert by Rodriguez and am came home with a forty two year old piece of history.

 Thank you Rodriguez, The Collector and Pawel for the ticket. Oh, and thank you serendipity!

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Conversations about Coming Home

Last night I attended a talk by Ian McCallum at the Yellowwood Café in Howick. He has just completed his expedition from the west to east coast of Southern Africa linking various elephant migratory routes and publicising the need for environmental action by focusing on pachyderms, a key species in the ecology of wild Africa and India. You can read about this trip on www.tracksofgiants.org

There are many things that struck me about Ian. He has an aura about him that is not just because of who he is (he is a qualified and working psychiatrist, author, poet, wilderness guide and expedition leader) but rather because he knows he is because of everyone and everything else. He is a true child of uBunthu: “I am because you are”.

He is thankful for everything and everyone that has coloured his life and allowed him to connect to this earth. He is practical as well, and made a strong point in the beginning of his talk of thanking everyone for very little thing they may do for the environment, no matter how small the action. It is these small actions that will make the groundswell that can change the world we leave to our children.

He told of a talk he did at Epworth primary School earlier that day. It was in a room filled with caricatures of wild animals. It was a happy room. He asked the children what they would feel if there were no more animals left in the world.

After some hesitation the first hand went up. “I would feel sad”, the child spoke.

I am sure Ian danced about the stage as he did with us, filled with energetic passion for the earth. He looked for more answers. It came from another child: “I would feel it was our fault!”

And the last child spoke out, sadness stinging his face: “what would we leave our children?”

His expedition was not so much about the giants of the bush as much as the giant within each of us that can change the world. We can all achieve so much, if we commit and try. The tragedy is not that we do not achieve, but that we aim too low.

At dinner I spoke with Ian about his first trail, which he undertook in 1981 with Ian Player and Maqubu Ntombela. It had a profound effect on him and his understanding of the world and himself. I remember it doing the same for me. The Wilderness Leadership School Erythrina leaf emblem encapsulates a simple philosophy of co-existence with the environment and one’s self: each of the three leaflets represents a core relationship in man’s life: Man to Man, Man to God and Man to nature.

I asked Ian why he had chosen psychiatry. “Because it was the one thing I did not want to do. So when I asked myself why I didn’t want to do it, and investigated it, I found it to be the very essence of medicine.” It echoed in me. I remember my time in the bush bring a clarity to my soul to explore the mind through medicine. I never got to being a psychiatrist, but certainly benefited from them.

Ian said of his first trail that he felt like “he had come home.” I know the feeling, and his inspiring talk made me feel like I had seen home again.

The Costa Calla Chronicle: The more things change the more they stay the same.

Home for a day

It is a long time since I wrote for the chronicle. At the house in Costa Calla I have five bound books of my musings over the years 2000 to 2005, when I used to go up almost every second weekend and take pictures and walk.

The more things change the more they say the same. That is what I thought on the way back, as we drove through a light shower before Pietermaritzburg. I went for a stroll on Sebastian’s Walk on Saturday afternoon. The bush at the start of the path to the sundial that counts only the happy hours has grown over to form an arch now. But the sundial remains; the brass is weathered and moss is growing on the mini Stonehenge rock that supports it. Some people were fishing on Evergreen and a dog jumped in to challenge his master’s trout. The master won.

Later that afternoon thick storm clouds rolled in from the east, black and billowing, ominous with lightning striking ever closer. The ridge from Evergreen to our house is igneous, and our place has been struck three times by lightning in the last few years. So I walked back to safety.

At home Ines was sitting before the fire, reading. Some things do not change. They just stay the same. She made supper and we chatted. After a solid sleep in the quiet, because after the storm the mist descended and enveloped the house in a sponge of silence, we woke and went for a walk. The sun was out and was warm. I worked up a sweat as the road climbed into Holbeck. We saw a pair of bulbuls, loyal to each other, as we entered the mist belt forest. We heard Piet My Vrou’s calling, along with a Narina Trogon. Heard but not seen. The forest allowed you to be a child again, at peace with the spirits of the great old trees reaching through the canopy to the sun. The road has dried out after all the rain, but every spring was burbling water that you could smell so sweet as you walked past. The bigger streams were torrents as they raced down the slope to the Umgeni below.

At the crest of Mbona Mountain we paused and descended into the valley, to the house. We passed a herd of Blesbok and zebra, with a few young of each, their curly clean pelts soft and clean against the obscenely green grass. They were on a slope with the gun blue waters of Amber behind them. After breakfast I took my camera and spent some time photographing them. It was hard not to think back to the Masai Mara, where on my last day I saw a million wildebeest and one hundred thousand zebra on the marsh. Now I was looking at five zebra and twenty Blesbok.

Zebra above Amber

We had lunch outside on the veranda. We had to move the table under the roof as the midday storm unleashed big juicy drops of water. Fortunately there was not much of a squall as we caught up with Bernard and Janet.

It was good to be back, and to know that the changes we saw and heard

My Travels: A visit to a Masai Village – Part 2

The village is poor beyond the comprehension of someone from places they call developed. The village children wore western clothes, shorts and shirts, dirty and faded. The woman wore bright blankets, barefoot with dream catcher ear rings. The higher the status of the woman, the more fancy was the dream catcher hanging from her ear.

Measures of poverty are unseen on a single visit: Health, or ill health, can be measured by poor dentition, but the infant mortality rate is unknown. AIDS has marked Kenya as well, with most Safari vehicles brandishing an AIDS education bumper sticker proudly. The skin of the villagers is dry, scarred, and some of the children had open sores.

The woman collect water in 25 litre plastic barrels and carry these from the water point. This might be a hand pump or a flowing river in season. There is no obvious filtration system, and I did not smell any chlorine or bleach. They boiled the water for tea, but this was winter. What about in summer when you wanted a cold draft of clear water to slake your thirst? There were no fridges, stoves or any other modern electrical appliance we might think we could not live without.

The Masai moved in to Southern Kenya 300 years ago. They established themselves as successful cattle herders and warriors. Slowly their life was infiltrated by a cancer that included colonisation and then globalisation. They still live in houses that resemble their original dwellings. They still barricade their villages with thorns. They still occasionally kill lions with their bare hands and spears. But even if their children wanted to become great warriors as in the past, it will not be possible. Things have changed so much. If the same children want to dream of becoming anything else it must be to be a city man, dressed in smart clothes with a car and mobile phone. What measures have they left of success, when the old system is dying and the new system is corrupt?

As the young men came home with the cattle, they offered to show us how they drain blood for their blood milk mix. The placed a belt around the cows neck as a tourniquet to bulge the external jugular vein.  One of the men stood back with a bow and arrow and shot from point blank. The arrow bounced off the thick hide. He repeated the shot, over and over, until in the darkness we abandoned the village, sick off the pain in the cow’s eyes and the ineffectual blunt arrow.

Soon they will not  kill a lion anymore. One day they will not even be able to see a lion anymore.

 

My Travels: A visit to a Masai Village –Part 1

The interesting thing about wildlife viewing in East Africa is that the Masai are an integral part of the scenery. These tall and regal cattle herders work in the reserves as guides (like Wilson), askaris and managers. They live in the adjoining conservancies, where cattle still graze.

We visited a small village in the Naboisho Conservancy. It was late in the afternoon and storm clouds had built up, threatened to rain and withdrew as we drove along the almost impassable track, rutted so badly from vehicles crossing it when the clay was wet. The road looked like some piece of modern art, rutted, ridged, wet and dry.

“Wilson”, I said, “We don’t want to go to a tourist village. Show us the real thing.”

“Yes, we are going to a small village like mine. You will like it.” He was very proud that we were visiting. His conservancy was only two years old and they were all super keen to make it work. We arrived at the village which had a brush and thorny barrier encircling it. The diameter was about seventy meters.

The clouds closed in as we arrived. We walked through the narrow entrance that was closed at night using thorn branches. There was an inner stockade which was covered in cow dung, and as the rain came down the wetness cleared the strong animal smell. This stockade was where they kept their cattle at night. The poles were over two and a half metres tall, closely placed and formed an impenetrable barrier. There is a program to facilitate the Masai buying mesh and barbed wire at reduced rates to further reinforce the stockade. If a lion takes an animal from a secure stockade then the government pays out the owner. The Kenyan constitution is being modified at the moment: they are debating the monetary value to be paid out if the lion takes a human life…

The adult women all greeted us with a handshake. The children all lined up, inclined their heads and waiting for a greeting which left me feeling like the Pope blessing the masses: each one had to be touched on the head in greeting. It was quite moving. The men were out, some working at lodges and some just chatting. The older boys were out with the cattle. As we looked around we saw a herd of thousands of wildebeest moving south on the horizon, a reminder of the reason I was in the Mara.

Wildebeest passing on the horison

The village was poor. There was no running water or latrine facility. The mud houses were low, with small doors and tiny ventilations slits as windows.  The buildings were laid out in the outer circle, between the stockade and the outer thorn barrier. We went inside and sat with one of the woman, asking questions through Wilson who acted as an interpreter. There was no natural light coming through the slit in the wall. The slit was smaller than a shoe box on its side, and it was dark and overcast outside anyway. Each house had a solar rechargeable lantern donated by an American benefactor. At least this did not add smoke to the small fire which burnt in the hearth.

My Travels: The Grass of the Mara

Now that I have grabbed everyone’s attention with great herds of wildebeest and innumerable sightings of big cat, let me tell you what really impressed me about the Mara this winter.

The grass.

There are a few large plains, set in long wide valleys or on high plateaus on the Mara. There are hills they call mountains in the distance that form the edge of an escarpment. There are no steep slopes on the Mara, for they really are part of the endless plains. There were some areas, especially in the adjoining conservancies that were overgrazed, but equally so, in the reserve after a million wildebeest had moved through, there were also areas that were flattened. Over the last few years the park manager has controversially allowed the Masai to graze their cattle in the reserve overnight because of the recent droughts. Many times the cattle remain with the good pastures into the day and tourist view, and nasty letters get written to the East African Wildlife magazine.

There are huge stands of Redgrass, triangular inflorescences amassed to form a thick smudge just above the horizon. When you lie down low and look through the grass the world changes. The great expanse closes and yet remains open. There is movement and texture palpable, and as you touch it, it seems to roll away like a ripple in a quiet pool of water. Sometimes it seems as if you are looking through a rice paper wall, with the sun casting shadows of animals in the soft light as it rises or sets.

Other areas are covered in taller thatching grass. This makes perfect cover for predators to stalk their prey. We watched a cheetah edge into this tall grass and break out twice to try killing a young wildebeest. The first time the mother of the wildebeest chased her off, and the second time the cheetah was tired and missed completely.

We lay under the car in short grass near vultures on a kill. Their unfeathered necks curved lazily with the grass, their bodies and wings hidden by the weave of khaki. When they flew out of the grass into the clear blue sky they entered another world.

We spent a morning watching the sunrise. Come to think of it, we spent every morning watching the sun rise. It was a good way to start the day. We had been trying very hard for a few days to capture silhouettes of animals in the soft golden light. After a few days we found a large plain sloping slightly into the rising sun and spent an hour running parallel to a stretch of giraffes moving along the horizon. The grass stretch from us to the edge of the world, changing as the sun rose and lit up every stalk and inflorescence. It is easy to see why a picture is worth a thousand words: