Tag Archives: National Park Another year draws to a close… I find that the period of “limbo” between Christmas and New Year is a good time to reflect on the past: on the trials and accomplishments of the year that is finishing. This time in 2014, I wrote: “This last year has been a turbulent one: wars, acts of terror and insanity, […]  The Spitzkoppe, meaning “pointed dome” in German, is a granite massif rising out of the flat Namib Desert – a plain of gravel and sand that extends to the Atlantic Ocean a hundred miles away on Namibia’s west coast. Part of the Erongo Mountains, Spitzkoppe is the remains of a gigantic volcano which collapsed more than a 100 million years ago when the ancient continent […]  Namibia is big. And dry. Namibia is the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, which makes for clear skies, cold nights, and – even in winter – searing-hot days. Deadvlei (“Dead Marsh”), in Namibia’s Namib-Naukluft Park, almost 400 hot, bumpy kilometres from the capitol, Windhoek, must be one of the driest places in this big country. During a period of drought, some 700+ years […]  After being tipped onto the tarmac at Hosea Kutako International Airport in Windhoek, Namibia, one night last month, the first thing I noticed – after the cold, mind you; it was still mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere – was the sky. The sky was black, with very little ambient light. And it was full of stars: stars so close […] In Deadvlei, deep inside Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia, the dead trees have a character all their own. They stand like sentinels in a surreal landscape of red sand and parched white clay that could have been imagined by Salvador Dalí. I’m in Namibia, in Southern Africa at the moment. The stars are low and bright, the air is cold […] |
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