This second post about my trip to Namibia won’t be exactly about one thing or place in particular, rather about what I could see from the car window during those hours spent travelling from one place to another.
Namibia is a very big country and the distance we covered in only two weeks was nearly 3000km. This meant that a great deal of our time was spent entertaining ourselves in the car or sleeping. When I was not asleep I’d look out the window and see these endless mountain ranges and flat deserts.
It may not seem much but seeing such arid nature is bewildering. It left me awestruck. No matter how many times I’d see mountains or arid plains, each time it was like the first one. I was expecting the Africa I already knew: dry but full of greenery and water. Instead Namibia crushed my certainties.
As soon as we got off the airplane, we embarked on the first of many car trips. Just outside of the airport we were met by a dry and brown landscape, empty of any signs of civilisation other than the building we had left behind. In fact, we were welcomed by a small family of warthogs crossing the street, as a sign of good luck I suppose, and to state loud and clear that that was their territory: we were visitors. A gentle reminder to respect the place and to enjoy it, to take in all its beauty without spoiling it.
Every day we began our car journeys early in the morning, allowing us to see a cold light wake up (or tuck into bed) every Namibian creature. The roads, long and endless lines, were like front seats at the theatre. Aided by the lack of vegetation, or better, the small, sparse leaf-less trees, our eyes were able to spot animals roaming free in the distance, or mountains raising so far away that they were covered by a mist of light blue.
As the day passed, we saw the desert change in forms and colours: from rocky, dark grey and piled flat rocks to soft, terracotta mountains and crumbled boulders, and then again to sand dunes nearby the Skeleton Coast, where the wind blew strong enough to create sand storms, remodelling the dunes back to their untouched glory.
As we headed North, the deserts begun to change leaving space to the woodlands, savannas, and the Etosha pan. In these kind of habitats it wasn’t hard to spot tall giraffes slowly moving in search for leaves to eat or elephants walking around.
Seeing green trees and bushes after so many days of looking at dried up branches was quite a marvellous thing. Somehow I had forgotten about how green trees could be and how close to one another they lived. I remember thinking “Wow, trees do exists. How did I forget about them?”
Nonetheless, the greatest beauty of the Namibian scenery are the desert colours. The soil in Namibia is filled with minerals giving each rock and each grain of sand and salt a specific shade, creating infinite palettes of colours. Then, thanks to the sun rays, the shade of the minerals changes as the day advances. This makes each mountain and each desert different from one another.
Always leaving the spectator with an open mouth and eyes filled with wonder.
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