Namibia | It's a wrap!

Let’s review our Namibian adventure. First in numbers, of which I have made up the vast majority. 4600km of mostly dusty roads. 62 beers drunk. No kilograms gained - yes, I hold a deep belief in the powers of positive thinking. 2 litres of lotion Marta would apply daily to fight off the zero humidity and ever-present dust - the fight was lost. 13 times we would discuss whether guinea fowls really are the stupidest species of birds - they are.

Now the learnings of our peripatetic wanderings. We predictably took too many clothes and sent a bulging box full of t-shirts (fine, mostly mine) home. The times of roughing it out are gone - while we loved the camping, we have equally enjoyed three-course champagne dinners in artisan ceramic dinnerware. We are also still adjusting to the life of travel. I think too much of work (and find myself even missing it at times) and we both wonder what it would feel like in another month or two.

Highlights, thankfully, are too many to list here. Craning our necks and marvelling at the starscape on a dark night in remote Damaraland. Sipping shiraz and quietly watching the theatrical spectacle of the Okakuejo waterhole with nine white rhinos entering from behind the curtain soon after a herd of elephants left the stage. Clambering up the dunes of Sossusvlei with a giddiness of a seven-year-old boy, only to see nothing but iron-red sand all around us.

Given we are getting melancholic here, it might be apt to quote from a book I am reading, accounts of the exploration of the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter by Wilfred Thesiger in the mid-twentieth century. “No man can emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand of which marks the nomad. And he will have within him the yearning to return, for this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate climate can match.”

And with this, onwards to Iran!