Wild at Heart

All I really, really wanted to do in Namibia was ride an ATV in the desert. I did that – wearing my Gretchen Wilson t-shirt, no less – rendering the trip wholly successful.

Namibia has been on my to-see list for the past year. It has a really interesting history, alive today in the architecture and pastries from its time as a German colony, and in the townships and radical inequalities from its time as a possession of apartheid South Africa. German and Afrikaans are still widely spoken, along with indigenous languages and English. Namibia won its independence recently, in 1990, and has been doing fairly well on its own.

Colonialism makes for a bit of an identity crisis and as this church in Windhoek shows, Namibia is not entirely sure whether it is German or African.

My proudly Namibian sandboarding instructor boasted to me that middle-class South Africans have been buying homes in Namibia because should the political situation get worse, Namibia offers a brighter future. As a patriotic temporary resident of South Africa, I pointed out that Namibia’s democracy is really more like a one-party state itself and that SWAPO, the ruling party, has just built an unnecessarily extravagant State House with taxpayers’ money. But then I had to get back to sandboarding.

Courtney and I opted for the "unskilled" sandboarding, which was more like tobogganing than snowboarding. Nevertheless, I managed to wipe out. Courtney wiped out on the ATVs though, so that made us even.

My patriotism further prevents me from calling Namibia more beautiful than South Africa, but it is indeed a very pretty country, where the sun nearly always shines. The 400 km drive from Windhoek to the coast took Courtney and me past the long grass and wildflowers of the Kalahari and into the vast Namib Desert without hardly a town or traffic along the way.

I was surprised at how green the Kalahari Desert was!

This, to me, is a proper desert - the Namib.

Most recently, Namibia has become (in)famous as the country that Brad and Angelina escaped to for three months prior to the birth of their biological daughter, Shiloh. As a little bit of a pop culture addict, this may have played into my motivation to visit the country. But it was sheer luck that a co-worker of mine at the Treatment Action Campaign offered Courtney and me the use of her family’s holiday home in Long Beach, the same place the Jolie-Pitts had called home, for our stay on the coast. The best part was that with our own house, we were able to do a huge Easter egg hunt on Sunday.

Long Beach is small, and it didn't take us long to track down the resort where the Jolie-Pitts had stayed, order drinks, and proceed to grill the server for details.

I think it’s really cool that with just a car, a guidebook, and a friend, I saw another African country. A year ago, I’m sure I wouldn’t have felt confident doing that.

A year ago, I’m sure I wouldn’t have tasted the zebra.