The Namib

Please note: this is a long post cos I’m in a ranting & lots of photo mood, and if you’re a Luddite (like me) still on dial-up give it some time to load.

The other night I went out for dinner with JRK and a couple of friends after JRK’s opening at Photospace. Amongst our group – okay there were only four of us so we barely reached group status – was a woman who grew up in Namibia. Now that’s a country you don’t here much about, but one that conjures up pleasant memories for me. Seeing as I didn’t want to be seen as a sycophant, and the fact that I’m a cynical smart-arse, I didn’t say “Oh Namibia, that’s my second favourite country on this wee planet of ours” (after NZ, naturally).

I could have said that, but I didn’t. Instead, through my somewhat alcohol-affected mind, I tried casting my mind back to early 1998 and the few weeks I spent travelling through Namibia. It was hard; hell, I have enough trouble remembering last week let alone last century. However I have photos, so for your benefit and entertainment, and my nostalgia, here are some of them.

Oh Namibia, land of contrast. It has coastline and sand dunes, hills and desert, animals and people (seven of them at last count), towns and cities (well one city, but we bypassed it). There were two main things that I really loved about Namibia, 1) the space, and 2) the heat.

The whole country is like the Aussie outback where you drive for a day and never see any other human, or even evidence of them (except for the road you’re driving down of course).
Yeah, the space. Big sky country and other such cliches. Oh and the heat!! It was the first (and admittedly only time) I’ve been in 50°C and it was truly lovely. Being desert it was a dry heat, none of this horrible tropical clothes-stuck-to-you-all-day-I’d-rather-be-in-a-sauna-cos-at-least-then-I-could-jump-into-an-ice-bath humidity. (I even went for a stupidly long walk in it (all in the name of photography though of course - the one below to be precise), without adequate water or sun protection, but didn’t actually need it - at least I didn’t feel like I needed it and I came back alive and well so arguably I didn’t need it.)

(Naturally I’m completely ignoring those couple of days where it was so foggy we didn’t actually know what we were driving through or that we’d made it to the coast until we were almost in the surf.)

Okay so what did we see?

Sand dunes. Desert. Deserted towns. Game. Sand dunes. Desert. Game. Um sand dunes. And um desert. Um more sand dunes. And um more desert. Sunsets. Some sunrises even (yeah, I know, who'd thought it!!) Oh yeah and deserted towns. And game. Oh and a bicycle. And a lizard. Three hundred and twenty one photos in twenty four days. Not a high daily average, but as I'd been shooting little more than one roll a week up to that point, I went crazy wild (comparatively speaking).

Eighteen months, and a few more countries later, I arrived back in NZ and applied to study photography. Of the six images in my portfolio, three or four of them were shot in Namibia. If only I’d known how to take photos back in 1998, I could have got me some cracking shots, real beauties.

Completely forgotten by me, and presumably everyone else, I did appear to have a brief flirtation with night photography. The results are as bad as you'd expect for handheld shots, but it was interesting to rediscover these - well interesting for me anyway.

I did see more stuff and do more things, but you don't really want to know about it. I can tell that you're incredibly bored now. If not let me know and I'll try harder next time.

Just as an aside, previously in the evening I met a woman from Yugoslavia but seeing as that is the least favourite of the country’s I’ve visited I decided against getting into a long conversation about what an ugly country it is and how all of it’s inhabitants are intolerant racists (not the I’m one to generalise mind you), and what a service to the world Clinton did when he bombed Belgrade. Hey, but that’s another story, for another time.