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About Mondesa
On The Coast
by Robert Mellis
The Trans Kalahari Highway is what it says: a road, tarred, that
takes you from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and eastern Namibia
across the Namib Desert to the coast. It’s a hard drive, with few
towns and not a large variety of interesting sights. But the pain of
the trip is softened as you come rolling through the sand to the
outskirts of Swakopmund.
This outpost on the South Atlantic Ocean is almost like an oasis.
There’s that old German flavor to the buildings. But the sand, sand,
sand is everywhere.
We took a room at The Alternative Space, a wondrous structure built by
our host, Frenus Rorich. He’s an architect. Gregarious, smart,
informed and talkative.
As we relaxed around his fireplace (the temperature on the coast is
about 30 degree F cooler than in Windhoek) I asked him if he had
designed this house, with its white painted walls, arched ceilings and
round bathrooms. “Oh, no,” he said. “I built the house. But I would
never design something I want to live in. It would become too
precious.” We listened as he talked about making a house livable,
allowing children to live and enjoy the space. They have two boys, who
have stuck up their drawings on the living room walls and whose hockey
sticks have left a mark or two on the walls. “If I had designed this,
I would be upset when they change it or damage it. But it’s their
space too. So we all enjoy it.”
Frenus likes to design for extreme environments. So he loves Namibia.
His structures would not be perceived as avant garde. They are
infinitely practical. They protect you from the heat or the cold, from
the sand or the howling wind. He designed a farmhouse for a local
artist whose collection of woodcuts and oils adorn the walls of his
home (his commission?) The woman clearly specializes in nudes and
intertwining black and white bodies.
What a lucky find for us to have stumbled into the Alternative Space.
I spent a couple of hours working with the reporter in Swakopmund. She
was fashioning a press release into a boring story and I gave her a
batch of questions to ask to move the story to something worth
reading. Then I walked around town for an hour while she made her
phone calls. She rewrote the piece and then we edited it together.
After transmitting the story to Windhoek, I arranged to meet her the
next morning and go off to Cape Cross where seals are reportedly being
killed in an attempt the cull the herd and save the pilchards (fish)
that they love to eat – and fishermen love to catch.
Jo and I showed up the next day and there was no sign of Elma. We
waited for two hours, with attempts at phoning her on her cell phone
(no answer), calls to Windhoek to find out if she had called in (she
hadn’t). We began to suspect the worst, that she had been in an
accident. But we couldn’t figure out how to reach her. So Jo and I
drove south to Walvis Bay to look at the thousands of flamingoes that
feed in the lagoon down there.
The highway took us alongside the great sand dunes on our left. The
ocean was on the right. We found the birds, thousands of them, and sat
on the esplanade to meditate and watch as they snoozed on one leg, or
did a funny two-legged shuffle on the bottom of the lagoon, looking to
stir up some food. When they take off, the flamingoes run on top of
the water as though they are a great jet lifting off. Necks stick
straight out, eventually the long legs and feet stick straight back
and their huge red and black wings swoop, swoop, and swoop as they
lift themselves across the water. What a remarkable sight. And we felt
as though we sat in a holy place watching this great display of the
beauty of nature.
I made another attempt to reach Elma when we returned to Swakop in the
afternoon but the office door remained locked. I emailed and then
phoned Windhoek to say my visit here was a bust and I would be
returning the next day. Back at the office, Jean Sutherland, the news
editor, told me Elma had been hospitalized with food poisoning but was
expected to be home that night. She suggested I try to reach her again
in the morning.
I did that and Elma sounded pretty frail. I told her I planned to head
up to Cape Cross with Jo and we would become tourists.
The road north is awesomely desolate. It is made of salt, so no marks
can be painted on the road. You have to stick to your own side of the
road. Occasionally, you see expanses of lichens in the dessert. But
mostly it is just sand, sand, and more sand. It is so flat you feel
the sea could rise two feet and the land would be covered for 20 miles
inland.
We stopped to fill up with gas in Henties Bay. Then there was no
stopping until we moved up the Skeleton Coast to reach Cape Cross, so
named because a Portuguese explorer discovered the place in 1484 and
planted a cross. He also found thousands upon thousands of fur seals
which provided food.
The seals are still there. And the stench fairly takes your breath
away when you drive to the sea and leave the car. They loll around on
the rocks, barking at each other and calling for their pups. The bull
males, great monsters with thick coats and three times as heavy as the
females, seems to spend all their time asserting their dominance over
the other males.
We found the event so fascinating we soon forgot about the smell and
settled down to photograph and watch the seals. Black backed jackals
roam among the seals looking for an opportunity to grab any scrap of
food, dead pup, or dead bird. We saw perhaps five jackals, standing
quite close to us, almost daring us to come to them.
After spending two hours with the seals, we drove to the Cape Cross
Inn, the only civilization in the neighborhood. We had lunch
overlooking the ocean before returning to our car and heading south.
I fell asleep as Jo drove, an act of supreme faith in her driving on
the greasy salt highway. When we returned to Swakopmund, we searched
for an adapter plug for my computer, and then retreated to our
Alternative Space for our final night.
This costly venture to the west was a bit of a bust in the
professional sense. But we did enjoy the tourist aspects of the visit.
But my Calvinistic side chafes when I am not doing something
productive when I have such a small window.
On our way each, Jo suggested to stop at Gross Spitzkoppe, a mountain
of granite in the desert. Maggi Barnard and I had roamed the
Spitzkoppe together but Jo had only seen it from the distance.
This mass of rock is visible from perhaps 80 kilometers away. It rises
in the haze and beckons. It’s easy to understand why the Damara people
see it as a spiritual place. The caves there have Bushman paintings
from hundreds of years back. We looked at rhino, giraffe, even lion.
And the stick figures, some crawling through the bush to kill the
rhino are wonderful.
We climbed the rock and I captured two fabulous pictures: one showed
the Spitzkoppe through a granite arch, with Jo to the side and giving
it perspective. The other was a gift. We stopped in the shade of the
rocks to photograph a cleft in the mountain and Jo noticed a
klipspringer just below the cleft. I climbed slowly to position this
antelope in the space of the cleft and he waited for me. As a result I
have a once-in-a-lifetime picture of this little animal in perfect
position. The pictures are all added to the 2005 Namibia folder.
We stopped at the café at the entrance to the Spitzkoppe and were
welcomed by a click-speaking woman. Well, she spoke English to us,
telling us not to sit at the table with the placemats, napkins and
wine glasses. Because we wanted just a cool drink, she put us at the
plain table. Her two sons and a daughter scampered around us, waving
and smiling. The oldest boy, Boto, told me his sister’s name was
Lucinda. Mom corralled them when they got noisy and chattered away,
clicking and scolding them outside.
We stopped at a line of rock sellers and bargained for amethyst,
tourmaline, garnet, pyrite, sodalite and rose quartz. A woman
convinced me that the bargain of my life was a crystal inside of which
was trapped a blob of water. Now this is special in this eternally-dry
desert. I bought it! I should mentioned, when I stopped at the
roadside to photograph the Spitzkoppe from afar, I was able to pick up
random rocks that glittered in the sun.
When we were waved down by the many children offering primitive
necklaces that we didn’t want, we gave them bananas and pears and
apples to help their hunger.
New Namibian pictures are at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/robertsmellis
Sailing story at:
http://www.sailnet.com/collections/articles/index.cfm?articleid=ouread0018
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