Holiday in Namibia (3): the Quiver Tree Forest & the Fish River Canyon
April 17th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Sunday was definitely a travelling day. We left the Bagatelle Kalahari Game Ranch just after 8 am and eventually rolled up to the Gondwana Canyon Village a little after 4 pm, after a journey of 8 hours. We were always travelling directly south, for about two-thirds of the journey on a normal road and for around a third on gravel roads, both straight as an arrow, as far as the eye can see with virtually no traffic.
Of course, we had regular stops: at a little town called Mariental for coffee and to buy some lunch for later, at the wonderfully-named tiny town of Keetmanshoot to buy petrol, and at the Canon Roadhouse in Ai-Ais National Park to use the splendidly-decorated toilets.
Our major stop though – just over an hour – was at the Quiver Tree Forest, otherwise known as the “Giant’s Playground”. This was like being on another planet: a ubiquitous scattering of huge dolomite boulders with plentiful appearances of the distinctive aloe trees known as quiver trees (because Bushmen used them to fashion quivers for their arrows). In fact, these are not trees at all, but plants with deep roots. They are found all over southern Namibia and the northern Cape, but in few places are so many seen together. They look so distinctive with their spiky leaves.
Once we had finally reached the Gondwana Canyon Village, we were allocated our chalets and given a chance to unpack. Then, at 6 pm, a member of staff led us a short walk but a steep climb to a set of giant rocks where we could observe the sunset while having a drink of our choice, preordered and brought up by another member of staff. The sunset was not as red as those we had observed on the previous two evenings, but the location and the light were magical.
Back at the village, dinner was again a three-course affair and this time I ate springbok.
Monday was devoted to the Fish River Canyon. Everyone has heard of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but a lot fewer know of the Fish River Canyon in Namibia. Indeed many tours of Namibia miss out Fish River Canyon because it is so far south, but we are on the GRAND tour of the country.
Since we are staying so close to the canyon, we were able to have a late start to the day and left at 9 am. It was just half an hour to the canyon’s northern crest.
The Fish River Canyon is the second largest in the world, only exceeded by the Grand Canyon (which I visited in 1970). Formed about 500 million years ago, it is 100 miles (160 kms) long, up to 17 miles (27 kms) wide, and at points almost 1,800 feet (550 metres) deep. The rocks here are among the oldest on earth.
Our driver/guide Carlos dropped us at the Hikers’ Viewpoint and then waited for us at the Main Viewpoint. You need special permission to go down into the canyon and apparently only last year a hiker died within half a day as a result of dehydration.
We contented ourselves with a stroll from one point to the other, a gentle uphill walk of two miles (three kms). The views were breathtaking and it was difficult to stop taking photographs. As a total contrast to the Grand Canyon, the site is totally non-commercial and, when we visited, we were almost alone.
Without prior notice, Carlos had set up provision of cold drinks and nibbles, so I relaxed with a cold beer. We were there for just two hours but we will never forget it.
The rest of the day was at leisure. The temperature was 38C so I stayed indoors and read. At dinner, I tried something new: a South Africa dessert called malva pudding which was tasty. Following my earlier enthusiasm for star-gazing, I downloaded an app to my iPhone which identified all the constellations for me – I just had to point my mobile at the sky.
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Holiday in Namibia (2): Windhoek & Kalahari
April 16th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Our journey from Britain to Namibia consisted of two flights: one of just over seven hours overnight from London to Addis Ababa and another of five hours in the morning from Addis Ababa to Windhoek.
At Windhoek, we met our guide for the whole holiday, Carlos Mauers. His father was of Portuguese heritage and his mother of South African Cape Dutch ethnicity. When his parents met and married, Namibia was under South African control and a system of apartheid was in place so that their inter-racial union was illegal. Everyone has a story. The local company that he presented for out trip was GoVacaction Africa.
Our group is nine-strong: two married couples, four golden girls (two married, two widowed) who have done many trips together, and me as the only single traveller. We are all of similar age and very well-travelled with a keen interest in discovering Namibia.
I had my first adventure even before leaving the airport when my luggage was put on a coach, I followed my luggage, and then discovered that everyone else in the group was on a different coach. Once I was on the correct vehicle and we moved off, I found that, in Namibia, they drive on the left as in Britain (a heritage of the administration by South Africa). Also all the advertisements are in English. But the weather was very different: blue skies and warm sunshine.
Our accommodation in Windhoek – for one night only – was in the five star Hilton Hotel, an experience that will not be repeated as, for most of the trip, we will not be staying in hotels but lodges. After we had time to unpack, Carlos gave us all a 45-minute briefing on the next two weeks. There was a lot of information, but I noticed frequent references to “an early start” and “a long journey” and warnings of “60% of the journey on gravel roads” and of “mosquitoes”, “scorpions” and “cobras”.
Our first meal was a splendid affair: a three-course dinner with three different wines in the characterful Hotel Heinitzburg built by a German in 1914.
Our first full day in the country (Saturday) was one of those early starts. My alarm was set for 6 am, bags had to be outside our rooms by 7 am, and the coach left the hotel at 8.15 am for a one-hour tour of the city.
Windhoek (pronounced ‘Vin-huk’) is the capital of the country and situated more or less in the middle. The name is probably a corruption of the German for ‘windy corner’. The modern city was founded in 1890 when the Germans started to build their Alte Feste (Old Fortress) to accommodate the occupying troops.
Today the population is still only about 400,000 which is just a little larger than a typical London borough. It is known as ‘ the cleanest city in Africa’ – that German influence again. The city is surrounded by three ochre-coloured mountain ranges and, since it is located at an altitude of 5,400 feet (1,650 metres), it has a cool and pleasant climate.
Our short city tour involved seeing from the outside: the National Museum fronted by a statue of the father of the nation and first president Sam Nujoma and close by a memorial to the victims of the genocide of 1904-1908; the Christukirke built between 1907-1910 and dubbed “the gingerbread church” because of its appearance; the National Parliament dubbed “the Tintenpalaz” because it used to be offices using lots of ink; and the railway station opened in 1897 and looking like something in a period movie.
It was time to leave Windhoek and to head south for our next destination. At first the road was fine and then about half way we turned onto a gravel road which was decidedly bumpy. It was a journey of around five hours, but there were plenty of stops: at the town of Rehoboth for coffee and to buy some lunch to eat on the coach, at the Tropic of Capricorn to take photographs, at a tree to see the nests made by social bell weaver birds, and to relive ourselves by the empty road (girls to the left and boys to the right).
It was 2.15 pm when we arrived at the Bagatelle Kalahari Game Ranch for another one-night stay. We were allocated lodges scattered around the grounds and then provided with coffee and cake before we boarded a special vehicle driven by a field guide who took us on a tour of the huge ranch to look for game. We saw lots of animals of different species:, springbok, kudo, oryx, wildebeest, meerkat, ostrich, rhino, zebra, giraffe and several kinds of birds.
After a couple of hours touring the rolling terrain, we drove to the top of a large red sand dune to observe a bright scarlet sunset and have a welcome sundowner. There were some other tourists there and I made friends with a Dutch couple in their 50s, Marco and Roelie. Back at the ranch, there was a tasty three-course dinner with choices for each course and I had kudo for my main course.
I had learned from my Dutch friends that they had arranged for some stargazing at the main lodge so, after dinner, I joined Marco and Roelie on a special observation platform where there was a powerful telescope. We were guided around the stars by a young local guy with a laser torch and an impressive knowledge of the heavens plus some weird views on extraterrestrials ands worlds outside our universe. We saw tons of stars and a swath of ‘cloud’ that was the Milky War. The experience was awe-inspiring.
By the time we had finished our star gazing and Marco and Roelie had treated me to a drink at the bar, the facility was almost deserted. On my way to my chalet, I realised that my key was at reception and now the whole place was now closed up. I imagined having to spend a night alone in the desert, but fortunately I managed to find someone who alerted a member of staff who opened up reception and found my key.
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Holiday in Namibia (1): introduction
April 13th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
I am about to go on a holiday to Namibia with the company Voyages Jules Verne. This will be the ninth country in Africa that I have visited and the 86th nation worldwide. It will be a challenging trip, especially for someone who is almost 75.
I will be away for just over two weeks. There will be four long haul flights: two there and two back. The country is huge and all the internal travel will be by road, so there will be a total of seven vehicle journeys, each between five-eight hours. We will stay in nine locations: hotels, lodges and camps.
Let me provide a short introduction to the country.
It is located in south-west Africa with the Atlantic Ocean to its west, South Africa to its south and south-east, Botswana to its north-east and Angola to its north. It is bisected through the middle by the Tropic of Capricorn.
In 1884, the German Empire established rule over most of the territory of Namibia, forming a colony known as German South West Africa. Between 1904 and 1908, it perpetrated a genocide against the Herero and Nama people. The Germans systematically killed 10,000 Nama (about 50% of the population) and approximately 65,000 Herero (about 80% of the population).
This atrocity has been called the “first genocide of the 20th century” by British-Nigerian historian David Olusoga. This year, a film about this genocide has been released in Germany. Called in English “Measures Of Men”, this two-hour work has been written and directed by Lars Kraume.
German rule ended in 1915 with a defeat by South African forces. In 1920, after the end of World War I, the League of Nations mandated administration of the colony to South Africa.
Following a war of independence from 1966 to 1990 fought between the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), an armed wing of the South West Africa People’s Organisation(SWAPO), today’s Republic of Namibia gained its independence from South Africa on 21 March 1990.
Namibia is the world’s 34th largest country. It is almost three and a half times the size of the UK. But it has a population of a mere 2.5 million. This means that, after Greenland and Mongolia respectively, Namibia is the third least densely populated country on the planet. The main ethnic group is the Ovambo who comprise just over half the total population. The official language is English which, of course, is a great advantage for our group. But German and Africaans are widely spoken and the country’s 15 ethnic groups speak some 27 languages and dialects.
Politically Namibia has a democratic system. The president – elected for a term of five years – is both the head of state and the head of government. Since 2015, the position has been held by Hage Geingob of SWAPO.
In spite of being such a small country in terms of population, the legislature is bicameral with a National Assembly of 104 as the lower house and a National Council of 42 members as the upper house. Although the constitution envisaged a multi-party system, the SWAPO party has been dominant ever since independence in 1990.
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A review of the 1946 classic movie “Gilda”
April 13th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This classic film noir is largely set in an illegal casino in Buenos Aires just after the Second World War and its point of view is that of the American narrator and gambler Johnny played with style by Glenn Ford. However, all the best films in this genre have a femme fatale and the eponymous fellow American comes in the delicious form of Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) who was then just 28. The love-hate relationship between Johnny and Gilda is at the heart of a story revolving around the owner of the casino and criminal mastermind Ballin Mundson (George Macready).The conclusion is a little too neat and contented for this to be a totally hard-boiled film noir but, along the way, there is crackling dialogue and plot twists that will delight the viewer. There is more than a hint of the earlier “Casablanca” (1942) with its static scenes, evocative music, and sharp, heavily ironic, exchanges. The two most memorable scenes both belong to Haywood: the hair-tossing introduction to Gilda and her performance of “Put The Blame On Mame” (actually sung by Anita Ellis).
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A review of the book “Black And British” by David Olusoga
April 12th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
There are many way of presenting the history of a nation. One is through a series of great characters and, in the case of British history, this is typically kings and queens. Another is through a series of great events and, in the instance of British history, this could be characterised as ‘1066 and all that’.British-Nigerian Professor Olusoga takes an utterly different approach: he gives a narrative account of Black people in British history. His original work on this theme was titled “Back And British: A Forgotten History” (2017) and it is quite a tome of over 600 closely-typed pages. Conveniently he has created “Black And British: A Short, Essential History” (2020) which is only 200 widely-typed pages with lots of illustrations. This shorter work is aimed at children but is equally attractive to busy adults.
Olusoga explains that Africans first came to Britain with the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. He then jumps around 1,500 years and tells us about Black characters such as John Blanke, a trumpeter at the court of Henry VIII, and the five men of Shama, visitors from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). But the Black story becomes huge with the advent of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1640-1807). England was the world’s biggest slave-trading country, shipping some 3.5 million Africans to America and the West Indies.
Olusoga explains how long and hard was the struggle to make slave-trading illegal by the British. Then it took another 30 years after the abolition of the slave trade before there was the abolition of slavery itself. Eventually 46,000 slave owners were well-rewarded by the state but former slaves received nothing.
The world’s first Industrial Revolution (around 1760-1840) took place in Britain and it was powered by the cotton industry located around Manchester (my home town), but this industry was so profitable for the factory owners in large part because the cotton came from the plantations of the southern United States where slavery persisted until the American Civil War (1861-1865). Olusoga tells us about the ‘Scramble for Africa’ following the Berlin Conference of 1884 and then explains the contribution of Black soldiers to the British military effort in the two World Wars.
In 1945, there were probably fewer than 20,000 Black people in Britain. Today’s British Black population stands at around 2 million, a little more than 3% of the national population, with London (my home for over 50 years) being “the most diverse city on earth”. Olusoga explains how and why this happened and brings this history up-to-date with references to the Black Lives Matter movement and the removal of the Edward Colston statue.
Of course, the story is far from over as, only now, are institutions from the British monarchy to “The Guardian” newspaper (on whose board Olusoga sits) beginning to research and acknowledge the role that they played in the exploitation of Black people and the need to make some kind of restitution for this. History shapes who we are, but it is not fixed and needs to be constantly studied and reassessed.
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A review of the 2016 film “The Whole Truth”
April 11th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is a courtroom drama that follows the standard tropes of the genre. It is Louisiana and a man has been murdered; his son confesses to the crime and it seems like an open and shut case. But this is a movie so we know that it is not going to be as simple as that and, sure enough, a series of flashbacks gradually reveal more and more about the death and, in the end, we have the inevitable reveal in the form of an unexpected twist.There are a couple of features which make this rather traditional work quite watchable. First, the actors, especially Keanu Reeves – looking much more presentable that in his John Wick persona – as the defending attorney and Renée Zellweger – looking utterly different from her Bridget Jones character – as the victim’s wife. Second, it only runs for an hour and a half which is a refreshing change from the glut of movies that last too long.
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A review of the 1963 epic “Cleopatra”
April 8th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Was “Cleopatra” a classic? Well, it was far from being a brilliant movie, but it deserves to be appreciated for its infamously troubled production and its gloriously grand staging. As the film critic David Thomson wrote in his book “Have You Seen …?”: “You have to see ‘Cleopatra’ if you have any remote interest in film history”.The eventual director (and co-writer) was Joseph L Mankiewicz who created a film that became the most expensive ever made up to that point and almost bankrupted the studio. The story is familiar and three major stars fill the three key roles: Elizabeth Taylor as the Egyptian Queen, Rex Harrison as Caesar and Richard Burton as Mark Antony. Taylor and Burton had an affair during shooting and went on to have two marriages.
It is absurdly long at four hours and there is only one real action scene (the sea battle of Actium), but the costumes are wonderful, the stages are magnificent, and the scene of Cleopatra entering Rome visually spectacular.
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The three great crises of Christianity: what is God? what is the Church? what is man?
April 7th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“The situation was summed up by the Cambridge historian Richard Rex, who suggests that there have been three great crises in the history of the Church. The first, in its early centuries, revolved around the question ‘What is God?’. That is to say: how many natures were in Jesus Christ, how many persons in the Trinity, and so on. Then, during the Reformation, ‘What is the Church?’. The third crisis, he argues, is happening now, over the question of ‘What is man?’. This relates – as he memorably puts it – to ‘an entire alphabet of beliefs and practices: abortion, bisexuality, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, family, gender, homosexuality, infertility treatment…’This is a quote from an interesting article in the “Spectator” magazine.
I feel for my Christian relatives and friends because I see another great schism on the horizon. For me as an atheist, the answer to the first question is: there is no God. Therefore the second question does not matter to me. The third question needs to be answered with tolerance and acceptance and respect as people decide who they are and what they want to do with their body.
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A review of the Chinese film “So Long, My Son”
April 5th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This 2019 Chinese film is a revelation. It tells the story of two couples, friends and fellow workers at the same factory who have boys on the same day who also become friends. The two couples prove to have very different lives and the actions of the two sons have powerful and long-lasting implications for both families.This is a large film in several respects. The filming ranges from Inner Mongolia in China’s far north to Fujian province in the country’s deep south. The time period covers some three decades from the 1980s to modern times. And the work itself runs for just over three hours.
Wang Xiaoshuai created the story, co-wrote the script and directed the film. The structure of the narrative is a series of non-chronological flashbacks which is somewhat confusing (especially for a non-Chinese viewer), but it is all told in a captivating manner with moving insights into both political and personal experiences.
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A review of the classic novel “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf
April 3rd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Having seen the 1992 film version with Tilda Swinton in the titular role and the 2022 theatre adaptation starring Emma Corrin, I thought that I would tackle the original 1928 novel. The eponymous hero is a male noble man and poet in the early 17th century who lives until the time of Woolf, about half way through this period of more than three centuries changing gender from a man to a woman, along the way meeting a succession of poets, writers and critics.I confess that I did not find it an easy read. There is minimal plot, only six (untitled) chapters, and lots of long sentences and really long paragraphs (the lengthiest paragraph is almost three pages). The writing is impressive but the language is flowery, even flamboyant. The novel is inspired by, and dedicated to, Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West and there are multitudinous references to literary characters and works plus Sackville-West’s life and family. The Penguin Classics version of the book that I read had over 30 pages of notes.
The work is presented as a biography, complete with eight photographs, but the elongation of a lifetime and the gender transformation of this life make it a most unusual and unreliable biography. The whole work is a satire and there are some humorous characterisations. Woolf wrote of her book that “it is all a joke” and called it “a writer’s holiday”.
However, Orlando has two periods when he falls asleep for a week and has “his moods of melancholy”, while Woolf herself was subject to breakdowns throughout her life and eventually drowned herself in the River Ouse. I know that the novel is a classic, but there were times when I almost fell asleep or contemplated throwing myself in the River Thames.
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