In early September I returned to Hanoi from almost a month in Namibia. For most of the trip, I traveled with a couple of naturalist friends, Rupert and Eddie, from Kenya and Namibia, respectively. While there I traveled over 4,000 miles, bookending the country from the Angolan border in the north on the Kunene River and the ancient tribal grounds of the Himba people to the sweeping beauty of the Fish River Canyon in the south.  We visited the charming Bavarian community of Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast and the cape seal colony near Huentes Bay, and to the east in the Kalahari Desert spent a couple of nights near Tsumkwe, the ancient bushman country, and home to a few fading relics of the original inhabitants of the south of Africa.

The three of us camped our way around the country, staying in lodges occasionally to scour the body of the gritty sand and road dust.  We spent three days camped on the Angola border. One afternoon, with the use of a staff, Rupert and I crossed the river in the waist deep rapids just to say we had been to Angola. We encountered several groups of Himba girls along the road and near the river. I took pictures of several of them on rock perches above the dendritic and panoramic Epupa Falls. They were bare chested, wearing goatskin skirts and heavily ornamented in jewelry.  Their glistening bodies were washed in a pungent mix of goat butter and ochre.

We hired the Daniel Boone of Namibia, Bruno Nebe, to track the desert elephants and rhino in the Brandberg area of the Namib Desert.  We saw almost 30 of the 57 remaining desert elephants from a granitic outcropping overlooking a dry streambed. It took us the best part of a day to track the rhino, one of only 11 found outside of game parks in the world. We were within 30 or 40 yards of him and downwind.  The rhino's sense of smell is acute, but their vision and hearing are poor.  Once we retreated, from a couple of hundred yards away, he picked up our scent from where we had been observing him behind a poisonous euphorbia bush. In a mingled state of agitation and confusion, he then showered the bush and surrounding area in urine to mark his territory.

Not only did we see bushman cave art, we discovered two shelters never looked upon with European eyes-ochre paintings of animals and Stone Age tools spread everywhere, possibly up to 10,000 years old.  There were big chunks of ivory laying around to be crafted into tools, shards of pottery, and scads of pre-contact ostrich shell beads.  It was if they had gone out for a hunt and would be returning soon.  We left it all as was and agreed not to reveal the location (as if I could ever find my way back there anyway).

Other stories in the pipeline include a trip to Alaska after winning a lottery slot to see the McNeil River Bears; two weeks traveling around Castro's Cuba; camping with the nomadic descendents of Genghis Khan in Mongolia. I hope to be serving up some more "Yak Pizza"by this time next year. Happy trails.

Phil Karber
Hanoi, Vietnam
September 11, 2001