Usakos with Friends

looking back to January 2017:

January was a bit rough, with a sad family situation and some very looong flights and layovers.  As glad as I was to get back to Arandis, I was very willing to leave town for a weekend to help M. celebrate his birthday with a whole bunch of other volunteers in the next town east, Usakos.

The view, from M's porch, of the outskirts of town.

Usakos is a bit bigger than my town, and a bit wetter, with the Khan River supplying enough water underground to allow for a few trees to survive.  A bit wetter also means more possibility of mosquitos.

And it's hot, even at night -- but night two they couldn't sleep outside,
due to rain!  That's right, rain!

It's also a main stopping point for traffic between Windhoek, the capital city, and Swakopmund and Walvis Bay on the west coast.  Swakop is a big tourist center; Walvis is the only deep-water port on this stretch of Africa's coastline, so it's a major transport and business center.  That means that the east-west corridor stays busy with trucks and combis full of people traveling for work or to visit family and friends, and almost all of them stop for toilets and the mini-mart (biltong, kooldrink, chips).

The mini-mart also supplements the local mini-grocer.

Strangely, Usakos doesn't have a great grocer, unlike my town, which has three.  But it does have a lovely cafe where we ate breakfast both mornings.

And a little park.  The town also serves regional, far-flung farmers.

We braii'd for M's birthday dinner, enjoying the lovely view from his porch.

Pretty sweet set-up for a PCV, but of course no grocer is a challenge.

But a lovely neighbor like this sweetie is a bonus.

I don't know why there's a little engine on display in Usakos.

Low-key Christmas

looking back to December 2016:

Plans for my second Christmas in Namibia went all kinds of skew-whiff, zigging and zagging about through various possibilities, places and people.  Different illnesses and difficulties were, sadly, responsible for the arrangements and re-arrangements, but eventually a happy outcome arrived, with PCV A. coming to visit for three days and a rent-a-car so we could putter about with a good bit more freedom (and a great deal more expense) than we would usually have.

The white one is ours, trying to catch some shade.

We were both mostly in the mood for movies, music and conversation, and got plenty of each.  Our major planned activity was a visit to Dune 7 and the moon landscape, both close by my home and each other.

Dune 7 is not especially special, but we didn't know that until we got there.  It's advertised as a tourist draw:  a high dune close enough to the bigger towns of Swakopmund and Walvis Bay to make a visit easy and quick.  On clear days you can see the Atlantic from the top of the dune, which is probably at least ten kilometers away and maybe more.  I don't really care.  The other mildly entertaining features are that walking a steep uphill of fine sand is hard, and coming steeply downhill in fine sand can be fun.  We did not have a clear day, so missed the ocean, but A. took the downhill route in great leaps, sinking far into the sand with each landing.  I was considerably more sedate, given my camera, knees and fear of falling.  With one or both feet sunk deep in the sand, if you fall forward I don't see why you couldn't just snap a fibula.  Jeez.

Heading up

and down.

However, I did have the fun of literally burning my toes.  Like most people, I did the climb barefoot because boots full of sand are no fun at all.  Since A. and I had had a holiday-like dilatory morning, we didn't reach the dune until about ten or eleven, by which time the strong December sun had heated those silicates to egg-frying temperatures.  We both kept digging our feet in deeper with each step, trying to find the cooler parts, but there weren't any.  I wound up with several blisters on and around my left toes, and considerable tender pinkness on the right.

When A. fell, he fell backwards.  Also he did not burn his toes, but he's a barefoot-runner kind of guy, so...

The moon landscape is gorgeous, and A. hadn't seen it before, so that was worth a drive.  We did set off to find some welwitschias, but we've both seen those and didn't enjoy the bumpy gravel road in a VW compact, and so turned back.

Does it look lunar in this photo?  Because it does in real life.

Christmas Eve's big fun was introducing A. to The Fate of Miss H.  Actually introduce, it turns out:  Lisa the nice waitress invited us to sit at a big table marked 'Reserved' and I checked with the lone man there, who welcomed us kindly.  Lisa then explained it was the band's table, and the man explained that he's the drummer and sound tech.  So we chatted with various band members and got some music recommendations that I've forgotten, and A. was as enthusiastic about their set as I'd hoped he'd be.  Lucky him; he saw them again in Windhoek this May, the night before he closed his PC service.

Festive!

On Christmas Day we cooked lentil loaf and Yorkshire pud with mushroom gravy and A's fabled mashed spuds, and it was all delish with a bottle of South African red.  And some superb Scotch whisky.  We picked 'Frozen' as our Christmas flick, and all together were very mellow, in a happy, merry way.

In the Christmas spirit, I ate too much mashed potato
to choke down a Cape Town chocolate for dessert.

Merry, merry!

And Now for Something Completely Different

looking back to December 2016:

Cape Town!  Oh, my dears.

Not the whole city, but a decent portion of it, from Lion's Head mountain.

I'd never really given it much thought, and it certainly wasn't someplace I planned to visit.  However, a group of PCV friends were going, which meant none of them would be available to go anywhere I did yearn to visit, and with the office closed for the festive season, I'd either languish sweating through another December alone, or spend too much money looking at things with no one to share the expenses or my sense of wonder, or to help me up when I fell off a mountain.  So when one of my friends had to drop out of the Cape Town trip, I asked if I could take his place and was glad to be accepted.

Part of the fynbos microecoregion or whatever.

The others did the bulk of the planning, which was fine with me.  I'm big on serendipity and somewhat lighter on internet access, and as a late addition to the group, I didn't wish to push.  And it worked out beautifully, though I wish I'd figured out a way to get to Robben Island, and maybe a township tour.

Sunset over table mountain from the Air B&B

I do question, too, whether I'd be quite as enraptured with Cape Town if I hadn't spent 18 months in a small town in a sparsely-populated, often poor desert country where I wasn't allowed to drive.  However, given those conditions I was seriously enraptured.

Fynbos on a mountain over an ocean.  Love this a lot.

Here are a few of the reasons:

1)  Uber.  You could just push a few buttons on your phone, and a car would arrive in a minute or two and take you where you wanted to go moderately safely without driving around in circles for 45 minutes first, gathering six or seven other people to pile on top of you.

Any of these cars might be Uber cars.

2)  Mountains.  Gorgeous mountains covered with greenery ring the city.  You can reach one in a few minutes with Uber and climb a well-marked trail to the top.

Half a moon over Table Mountain

3)  Ocean.  The part of the city that isn't bounded by gloriously green mountains is bounded by beautiful blue ocean.

Near the Cape of Good Hope

from Chapman's Peak Drive

4)  Art galleries, nightlife, all kinds of cultural stuff.  Several art galleries, one so crammed with paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures in myriad media that I clasped my hands in front of myself for fear I might knock something over.  Some artwork by artists with African- instead of European-sounding names.  Local traditional dancers doing street performances.  DJ's of many styles; signs of bands, cinemas and theaters though we didn't make time for movies and the only band we saw was a pretty modest cover band in a mock-Irish pub.

We just missed open-mike performances at this bar,
which is in the neighborhood where I visited art galleries.

5)  Bo Kaap.  The gorgeous neighborhood where we stayed in an Air B&B is clean, cobbled, hilly and very brightly painted.  It's got a lot of Muslims, so we heard the call to prayer ring out periodically.

Bo Kaap!

6)  Restaurants.  We had a full kitchen and tight budgets, and nonetheless we ate out most meals.  One night at Fork, a tapas place, I had one of the best meals I've ever had anywhere.  There was also a chocolate shop, a couple markets with artisanal food stalls including mushroom amazingness and fine cheeses, Mexican, a steampunk place...  Good whole-wheat bread was still hard to find, oddly.

I wanted to move in to the Honest Chocolate shop,
which had a gin bar in the back at night.

The chocolate pecan brownies were a large part of why.  Also the staff.

Not hugely important, but it was fun to run into buckets of gin everywhere.

7)  Company.  We spoke the same language in many more ways than the obvious one.  And we spent boatloads of time together, for over a week, sharing two bedrooms and a single bathroom, with no apparent tension.

Omajete, Khorixas, Mpungu, Swakopmund, Arandis.  On a mountain.

8)  Architecture.  The parts of the city we explored were great mixes of ornate and stately 18th through 20th century edifices, gleaming high rises, brightly-painted, modest single-family homes, New Orleans-like beer palaces and a bunch of other stuff I can't identify.  It was all gorgeous, and it all blended quite successfully.

This might be the Cape Dutch style.

This one, too, I think.

And here they are mixed up together.

9)  The amazing view from our front deck; cf: mountains, ocean, architecture and Bo Kaap.

Table Mountain, from the front door.

10)  Ecological uniqueness!  One of our guides claimed Cape Town's fynbos ecology is a globally unique biome, which gets a scholarly argument from Wikipedia.  However, it does seem to have an enormously high number of endemic species -- 6,000 types of vegetation you can't find growing naturally anywhere else.  So that was pretty amazing, and interesting, and very new information.

The botanical garden celebrates vegetative diversity, plus mountains.

They are really big on protea, which come in many sizes and colours
plus the national cricket team.