Namibia—Becoming "One with the Spice!"

Go ahead. Really. Dump some gutteral Dutch, with the sound of Tulipomania in its Afrikaner, in with some organic German lager, brewed without chemicals, into a land being mined for its low-grade uranium by Uncle Sammy, Mother Russia, Frogs and even the Canutes. Will this beautiful country—with its wooden guano-collector platforms for birds, surfing beaches like The Guns or Pelican Point, and in-land rocky outcroppings and ginormous canyons (second only to The Grand Canyon) full of cobras, black mambas (you heard me right, bro, the very ones that bite yo neck) and adders, wild dogs making a teeny come-back, its cranky hunt-by-day spotted hyenas (who, with the brown, nocturnal ones, take seals off the beach)—ever become one with the spice? Go put Dune into your DVD player, as Dino De Laurentis' over-produced sci-fi cult-classic is your only lodestone for this place...

Maybe Steven Segal, in his box-kite tux or mumus, to hide his cape buffalo carcass, could also stand in, to stop the uranium mines from stealing all the wa-wa (there's talk of a giant de-salizination plant planned for the water for the mines). His ponytail might work okey-dokey with some tribal scarification, and he could offer a dowry of Kobe cows from his aikido master to the Herrero, begging forgiveness for Hitler using them on his V2's (read your Tommy Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow). [oopsie boggles, I'm starting to sound like moi; there's even a chance this blog will end up needing parental guidance for the wee ones looking in: that what happen, mon, when life become overplanned improvisation, ja!].

Seriously, though, today our inter-port lecturer is talking about the devastation of Namibia's present future with the uranium and diamond mines, when it is ripe for windpower (sometimes blowing forty-eight knots in the sandstorms: here's a conversion chart that has mildly amusing descriptions of escalating wind speeds: http://www.disastercenter.com/convert.htm). Solar power's expense keeps it from being brought in (the biggest installations have had parts stolen, perhaps like our meth-heads in the good ol' U.S. of A. tearing metal off the bridges to buy their next fix, like Bubs in The Wire).

But because only 40% of the 2 milllion people use electricity, putting in solar and wind for electricity on a small scale could stop the harvest of the last succulents and trees in the desert for fuel used in tribal villages for cooking, and for tourist campfires.

Here's what it looks like above ground, with the uranium ore underneath:



Nelson Mandela got them their harbor back from South Africa in Walvis (Val = whale; pronunciation is "wall-fish") Bay, but it's chock full of planet Harkonen (yes, another Dune reference) , like this here wooly mamoth oil platform (there's that brand name that I saw in Gloucester, Mass, harbor, "Hercules"), that has South African crews working round the clock, adding to its size, before they drag it up the coast to suck black crude for, apparently, what was once Angola? Right now the round-the-clock crews are welding and pounding like orcs, the sparks from their torches dropping off the rig like the crew's gondola, into the brown water of the harbor, full of dead birds and the flotsam/jetsam of this and that:







We went on a camping trip for star-gazing, but, because it's the rainy season here, where the ten thousand clouds tease the desert, growing by many kilometers a year, with its few storms and flash floods, we didn't see the wide swath of the Milky Way, or the four stars of the Southern Cross (which I call Crosby, Still, Nash and Young). Didn't hear the jackals howling like coyotes. Didn't see a hyena, or chameleon or anything but the dry river bed, with its trickle of water. There were the acacias, some succulents and dollar bushes, and some songbirds at twilight.





Yo, Yo: watch them there camelthorns, y'all:



But the drum group arrived, with "gem-be's" and fine voices, the spin-off of the choir in Swakomund (the odd German town up the coast, which is still about 350 kilometers from Windhoeck, the capital, with 328,000 people, which includes twelve tribes).



More importantly, we were met at the dock by a girls' choir from Windhoeck. It wasn't clear if they were orphans, but the HIV epidemic has slugged this nation that appeared in 1990—at least a 25% infection rate. Because of it women live to 41, men to 45. I still can't really get it into my head that HIV moves into every new generation through breast milk, which seems a kind of cosmic crime that should cause earthquakes.

These young girls sang into my Belkin Ipod recorder like their lives depended upon it.





They had lunch on the ship with us:



Then they did a mini-concert just for my radio show:



I met a woman volunteering to help them who had been out of America for fourteen self-less years—an elementary teacher and sports medicine expert starting up children's programs in El Salvador, Bangladesh and now Namibia. She said there's no continuity for the children because their parents' generation is dead before they're grown. These girls from age five through sixteen sang with so much passion, expertise, creativity and beauty that it was all I could do to hold my recorder without breaking down. I went back to my cabin and wept openly, wondering if I should come back here and volunteer as a teacher. The townships here, as in South Africa, are a model of how the gap widens between the HAVES and the (have nothings)...

I'm going to record children singing (just as I'm having them color in, and add to, my high fallutin' coloring books made of my doodle-mandalas) in each country, sharing the singing of children in previous countries. So children in India will hear children in Namibia singing, and those in Thailand will hear others in Viet Nam, and so on...

On the way to my camping trip to the Namib Desert, we passed the highly wonky city of Swakomund, built by Germans. It looks a bit like some lost part of South Central L.A. This city is maybe 20,000 people, while the capital, Windhoeck, is in the mountainous desert 350 km away. There's just something peculiar about this collision of German, Afrikaner and tribal cultures; it's kind of like forgetting to get your belt through one of the loops in your pants, so they sag in some odd, eventually annoying way, causing you to walk and think sideways...[don't y'all be saying this is "random").

Between Walvis Bay and Swakomund, there are new condo-like vacation homes that I can hardly bring my self to show:



And along the coastal side of the dunes, very near the beaches, there are folks kiting around on the dunes:



On the last day I got up far too early for a jazz vampire to go sea-kayaking in the Bay, literally paddling through massive groups of seals, with many smaller dolphins and a couple behemoths—bottle-nosed porpoises, who would come over when I tapped the boat, moving alongside the shaky racing kayak like torpedos. The Cape Seal colonies on the beach were screaming and groaning, yet somehow each mother know's her calf's call. Alas, I have no pictures, as I didn't want to risk my remaining camera, already having broken my back-up. Still haven't taken any video with my new camera, as it's risky filming in the blowing sand that can ruin the lens, or with groups who don't want to star in my tourist movies.

On the last day I got far too many Namibian dollars, and had to find a post office to buy stamps for a bunch-0-postcards that should arrive in some of your mailboxes in a few years. Why do post offices around the world move in super-slo-mo? I always remember the postal employees working the long, angry lines in Rome: they would pull the windows back behind the bars at each clerk's post and the let the anxious crowd waiting to mail parcels see them drinking coffee and smoking, chatting without each other, then they'd shut the windows, encouraging the obscenities among those stuck in the long lines, who knew that half their parcels would be stolen, lost or mis-delivered anyhow.

I had the award-winning but milktoast German Tafel beer in bottles, but finally snuck a pint of the draft Bansa (oh baby) in the blistering heat of the day.

Then I saw her at the back of the Seaman's Center. She was dressed in green felt, and it made me weak just looking at her, teasing me. I could hear her sultry voice calling me..."Mark, come closer, baby. Stroke my cues, break my balls, fill me with money!":



So I was able to play pool (as there were no crew in attendance—there are strict rules about fraternization between crew and passengers) on an eensey-teensey table with yellow and red balls. There was no chalk, the cue looked like Evil Ka-knee-ville's twisted spine and the pockets were unrelenting, but I had way more fun beating myself than anyone ought to (just putting this in so no one cry's Big Fish exaggeration):



There, isn't that better?

I ended by returning to my first encounter with Hercules, the Oil Rig:



It was a refined sunset, with no green (dollar-bill) flash...