Vacation!

looking back to September 2016:

My friends Kit and Karen both work in conservation in various ways, and love their work.  All the parts that have to do with the natural world, anyway; and they spend leisure time studying botany and zoology and geology (and maybe Spanish).  They also know a lot about figure skating.  Their vacations, at least two per year, usually revolve around wildlife in one way or another, and they've been to Brazil for the rainforests and Borneo for the elephants and the Outer Hebrides for the mosses or something, and Nepal and the Canadian Rockies and Botswana and and and.  But never Namibia, so they were delighted when I told them where Peace Corps was sending me:  "We'll come visit!" they promised, and made good in September 2016.

Kit and Karen.  She really feels the cold.  I was in shorts and a t-shirt.

They spent a couple weeks in the northwest, at Africat and with the Rhino Trust and a desert lion expert, in unusual cold and damp for this part of the world.  Then they came down to the Namib and picked me up at the office, and off we went to Swakopmund in their big 4WD rent-a-bakkie.  They told me about the cold and the fog they'd experienced in Kunene -- "Namibia is very cold," they planned to tell friends back in the US -- and admired the warm sunshine and clear blue sky of Swakop.  "Maybe it'll be back to normal in the morning," I said, bracing them for the coastal town's usual chilly mist.  We had dinner with S. at the Indian restaurant and got to bed early to be ready for our desert tour.

The desert, less than 2km from the ocean.

Chantelle, one of the Tommy's Living Desert Tours guides, picked us up at the B&B about 8:00 in a tough old Land Cruiser that held a middle-aged English couple.  The six of us spent the cold but gloriously sunshiny morning together, in convoy with Tommy and another guide.  Tommy's never takes more than three vehicles out on a tour, in a bid to balance environmental preservation with showing off this little-understood landscape in the hope that people who get to know it will choose to care more about preserving it.  All very delicate, these balancing acts.

Our first 'animal' sighting: maybe a desert fox track (on the right).

Tommy is an experienced desert guide, and knows this area intimately.  Chantelle has a lot fewer years in (although her skin is the same bone-deep desert tan), but is an obvious enthusiast and expert.  They drove us through the bare dunes just south of Swakopmund, officially a protected area where tourism businesses like Tommy's, as well as sandboarding, quadbiking and a few other 'adventure sports' are allowed to operate.  It's not well patrolled, so people who want to find it easy to break the rules against unauthorized motor vehicles, disturbing wildlife, driving off established tracks or camping or whatever.  But it's a start.

Second animal:  a beetle that drinks by sinking its head into the sand at
night and absorbing the mist through its nether-quarters.

The terrain is magnificent, and the guides' stories are edifying.  Chantelle told us they once routinely found chameleons in the area, but that as the desert touring and adventure sports proliferated, they had become more rare.  She didn't expect they'd locate one for us, and they did not.  But they did, and it seemed miraculous that anyone could, spot a couple of sidewinder snakes, a weird spider's home, and a multi-hued palmetto gecko.  We watched Tommy 'vacuum' the black magnetite out of the dune sand with a powerful magnet, and listened to a roaring dune. 

Spider's home of sand, reinforced with spider-juice.

Palmetto gekko

The birds are used to tourists in this one spot (where Tommy keeps Port-a-Potties!).

A sidewinder wriggling itself back into the sand.
Very soon, only its eyes (on top of its head) will show.

Another sidewinder, getting away from us uphill.

A blind legless lizard.  No idea what keeps it from being a worm.

About mid-day, we dropped the English couple at their hotel and the remaining four of us picked up lunch at the Shop-Rite, re-filled the tires at the Engen (deflated for sand driving), and headed to the lichen fields, moon landscape and welwitschia drive.

Farewell desert dunes.

Kit and Karen are fascinated by lichen.  Can you say that about any of your friends?  And Chantelle, I think, made it even more fascinating.  She had a spray bottle of distilled water with her, which she used to spritz a pebble or two so we could watch the lichen's immediate response: 'leaves' opening, color lightening, everything turning to face the source of wetness.  She had to use distilled water because the mist that usually feeds these things is very pure; the product of evaporation.  Our local tap and bottled water tends to be heavy on salts, chalk and other minerals, and can damage and even kill the desert plants that naturally get nothing but mist, and the very occasional rain sprinkle.

Fascinating, if you have the patience and eyesight for it.

It was black and crunchy a minute or two earlier.

Also out amongst the lichens, she showed us... a six-eyed sand spider!  You probably don't remember this from my post of about a year ago, but these suckers have a dread fascination for me.  They are small; generally less than 30mm/an inch across including legs, and potentially fatal.  If you get bitten, even if you don't die, you probably have messed-up everything for the rest of your life, as they are 'highly cytotoxic'; cytotoxic meaning their venom attacks all your cells.  Fun!  So Chantelle gazed around her, followed a few tracks and specific rocks, humming and reminiscing about having found it just a few days earlier, and pretty soon flipped up one big rock and pointed to a pregnant, deadly bug surrounded by eggs.  She used a stick for the pointing, but still.  Yikes!  (She had originally discovered this particular spider when she was demonstrating to a tour guest why he shouldn't just pick up rocks in this particular desert.  Karen laughed and said, "You do that all the time."  I don't anymore.)

Never want to see one of these things again -- though I suppose I'd rather
see it and run away than never know what bit me.

The next generation.  Sheesh.

We drove on again, rounded a couple of bends and gazed in wonder upon the moon landscape.  I've forgotten it's geology; I hope I never forget the magnificence of these striated, lumpy lifts and rifts at the edge of the Namib.  Then we dipped into the oasis and along the welwitschia drive, emerging frequently from our Land Cruiser to look at tracks - hyena and others - and dens - aardvark - and welwitschias - endemic to Namibia and the world's weirdest (maybe) and smallest (got to be; at least naturally-occurring) tree.  And some amazing sparkly plant that I thought was a vulgar plastic decoration Chantelle got cheap at Woolworth in the after-Christmas sales and stuck into the rocks to fool the tourists.  I'm still not 100% certain that's not the truth.

Moon landscape

Ditto

Hyena

Aardvark

It's a TREE!  With TWO LEAVES!  The leaves split; the trunk never gets
taller than a few centimeters; they live for centuries; they have males and females.

Yeah.  Like that occurs in nature?

So Tommy's Living Desert Tour and Chantelle get my highest recommendation.  Not all tour guides are sensitive to the environment to the degree most of us would hope, but this team seems very committed to preserving an ecological heritage they clearly love in the best way.