And that’s when I fell in love with Namibia

October 8, 2012

By Molly Talbert (Middlebury College ’14)

Students take in the view near Wereldsend

Traveling in Namibia is like planet hopping, the landscape changes so quickly and so drastically.Every bend in the road isn’t the turn of a page – it is the opening of a whole new book in a whole different section of the bookstore.One moment we were in a canyon, the next moment we were in a sandy river bed, the next, in some other landscape that I had never known had existed before.

Last week, when we did our first bush camp, we travelled the whole day on the most rocky, knarly roads I’d ever seen.In my mind, without realizing what I was doing, I’d compare what we were seeing to the Southwestern, United States, where I’m from.We’d be surrounded by plateaus with dark, volcanic rock and they’d remind me of the mesas and plateaus of New Mexico.We’d drive through a flat, rocky arid savannah, and it sort of felt like being in the Mojave Desert, minus the Joshua trees.Then, a springbok would jump out from behind a Euphorbia damarana bush.Or a posse of ostriches would be spotted on the horizon, running and flapping their feathers like something out of a cartoon, and I was brought back to Africa, where every hint of movement in the bush is exciting.

Once we got to our camp site, an ephemeral river bed, the Aba Huab, and the wind was blowing sand into every crack in my tent, we asked how far we’d traveled that day, expecting an impressive number.

One hundred kilometers was the answer.

Compared to the distances in the U.S. – driving 75 miles per hour on the highway for the amount of time we’d driven that day – we’d barely travelled at all.But, it had been such an adventure!

We had hardly seen anyone else the whole day and we’d gone from plateaus to savannahs to sand mounds to a dry river bed.One of the trucks got stuck in the sand, and, as a group, we pushed it out.Although none of the students were driving, we’d felt so involved in getting us to our camping spot.To top off the whole day, we had seen countless animals and learned several new plant species, making this arid landscape suddenly seem to be filled with life.

After a day of adventures, one hundred kilometers away from camp and it felt like one of the most remote places on earth – only the middle of the Atlantic could feel more remote than where we were that night.

As the nearly full moon rose and flooded my tent with light as I was falling asleep – at the late hour of 9:15pm – and I thought back on the day, the only feelings I had were that of excitement and of wanting more.To keep driving and to keep seeing and learning about this strange, foreign, wonderful place.

And, that’s when I fell in love with Namibia.