Namibia : Timeless sands

Standing on the edge of the dune sea of the Namib, in the last light of the day, my legs pelted by the grains of blowing sands, I am both present and timeless. 

There are no sands more ancient anywhere else on earth.  Water only comes here as early morning fog from the sea.  The dunes march away fifty  miles to the Atlantic.  Behind me a gravel plain stretches to the other horizon as desolate as the sands before me. 

Life is much simpler here.  I hope to keep a bit of that simplicity within me for a little while.

Namibia : The Stone Men of Kaokoland

The stone men of Kaokoland are at the same time both mythical and very, very real.  They only started appearing a few years ago scattered across the wild lands of north west Namibia.  Here are the ones we found.

Most of them have tags on them with a number and a snippet of prose.  No one is sure how many of them there are, but there are at least 40 gracing Kaokoland.  Only about a few thousand people inhabit the rocky mountainous desert that is almost twice the size of Greece. We spent a couple of days bouncing along dry riverbeds, along rocky jeep tracks, and plowing through deep sand with only a handful of sightings of stone men, and only a handful more real men.

Rumors say that a white man in his sixties, who goes by the pseudonym "RENN" made them.  He allegedly worked on constructing some luxury camps for tourists in Kaokoland.  If you find all of the men, and put all the prose together in order, you will have the full story. Then you will be able to solve the puzzle, win a prize, get the treasure, or something of the sort.  No one really knows.

I think the reward is in the finding and seeing.

Namibia : Etosha National Park

Etosha National Park is huge.  It takes days to cross by car, and you are only allowed out of your car at designated campsites.  Which is a good thing considering what is roaming the park.  We arrived at the tail end of the rainy season, so the wildlife is dispersed, and not congregated at watering holes for easy viewing.  As you can see by the pictures below, we did not have much trouble finding willing photographic subjects. I let the pictures speak for themselves.

International Limbo : All's well that ends well

The alarm was set for 3AM, so that we could check in at 4AM for our flight at 7 AM. At 3:01AM there was a heavy feeling in the pit of our stomachs. Sarah had read the alert on her phone that our flight from Christchurch to Sydney had been delayed in the middle of the night by six hours, and we would miss our connection in Sydney to Johannesburg South Africa.  Our Namibian adventure would be delayed by a full day. 

    Qantas had already rebooked us on a flight the next day and arranged a hotel in Sydney with meals included, but it was cold comfort when our imaginations were already running wild with zebras, giraffes, and elephants. It also meant another five hours in the Christchurch airport.  

    We whiled away the time with Sarah napping in my lap as I gave directions to international travelers who seemed to think I was the airport departure level concierge.  A divinely assigned profession, I have come to accept in my travels across the globe.  My father had the same fate.  It is something in our faces that seems to invite complete strangers to approach us anywhere on the globe to seek assistance in their journey.  The surprising thing is just how often we are able to help, even if we have only just arrived ourselves a few moments before them. 

I updated hotels reservations, connecting flights, and dates for park permits in between conversations with disoriented travelers seeking gate 12 or a restroom. Eventually our flight to Sydney boarded on time. Our unintended layover was uneventful, our flight to Johannesburg was smooth and on time.

The next morning our flight to Windhoek, ended up being delayed by fog, and our spirits took a dip.  Boarding began thirty minutes behind schedule.  As Sarah and I had our boarding passes scanned both lit up red instead of the green of every other passenger.  At this point we were resigned to disappointment, but instead were surprised to learn that somehow the universe had arranged for us to be upgraded to business class.  Biting my tongue, I took the boarding pass and dragged Sarah down the jetway, before someone came to their senses. Our pilot made good time and we landed on schedule.

    After our travails in New Zealand, it seemed our fortunes were changing!

New Zealand : It's a bit steep

There are no jetways in Queenstown New Zealand.  You exit the plane cabin onto a set of stairs and are confronted by a vertical wall of mountains seemingly sprouting from the tarmac at the far end of the runway.  We arrived at the tail end of a storm system, so the peaks were white with the first snows of autumn.  It was stunningly beautiful and none of the pictures or video I had seen could convey the impact of stepping down those stairs. You can read as much as you like, pore over maps, and study photos, but some things can only be conveyed by experiencing it.  

Our journey around the South Island was one jaw dropping vista after another. 

 

However our tramps on the trail were far more than we bargained for. While the Department of Conservation visitor center staff would caution that a trail was "a bit steep", we found ourselves in over our comfort zone with class 2/3 scrambles on exposed ridges or climbing upslope on the roots of thick beech forests.  

After three attempts of tramping on varied terrain, we retired our backpacks and adapted our stay to enjoy coastal pursuits instead.

The town of Hokitika is a blend of a Dairy/Arts/Beach retreat town. You  can walk the beach for miles looking for local greenstone hidden among the driftwood that litters the beach for miles.  Then you can bring it into town and have a Maori elder mentor you and carve it into one of their traditional designs or a unique one of your own at Bonz & Stonz. 

Wandering the sleepy streets barely requires a look over your shoulder for traffic, and the consignment galleries are mainly a social gathering of locals, with a sprinkling of tourists ogling the wares.  Every year there is a festival of local artists creating works on the beach from the driftwood, but the signature work where the main drag meets the beach is always lovingly maintained, and appears in photos in every establishment in town in a variety of shots covering every season and light of day. 

My shot does not hold a candle to the Real Masters

At the north end of the South Island we spent a couple of days at Totaranui beach on the Abel-Tasman coast track. We explored the walk to the east and west of the beach and relaxed in the tranquility of the gentle waves of it's sheltered waters.

We completed our South Island adventures with a drive down the East coast past stunning views from the town of Kaikoura.

We ended out circuit of the coast in a delightful tiny house in Christchurch on a dozen acres of greenspace with grazing llamas.

Our final day in New Zealand was spent in the International Antarctic Centre* learning about the history of Antarctic exploration and the species that live on that continent.  It is right across the street from the US National Science Foundation building that equips the staff before heading off for their deployments to the duty stations in Antarctica, which really brings home the lessons learned in the centre*.

Alas our last day in New Zealand would throw a bit of a monkey wrench in our RTW plans, but that is a tale for another blog post...

* I'll change the spelling, when I change hemispheres. 

Australia - Is everybody traveling alright?

The morning after we landed in Melbourne, we caught the first bus of the day out of Geelong, to take us to the start of the Great Ocean Walk in Apollo Bay. The bus travels through a few towns until it gets to the coast and becomes the Great Ocean Road. From Lorne to Apollo Bay it is a windy curvy road that follows the coast. It runs along the surf for a bit, before climbing up hundreds of feet with steep drops offs and then diving back down again. Our bus driver obviously knew the route very well, as he did not waste a single kilometer per hour of the speed limit entitled to him.

Every couple of miles the bus stopped to pickup or discharge passengers at a wide spot in the road with a couple of houses and a track climbing up into the hills. At one of these stops the driver came back to ask "Is everybody traveling alright?". After everyone, including us, answered in the affirmative, he resumed his duties of transporting us with efficiency to Apollo Bay. We had been chatting with a retired couple behind us, and I confessed that I was little confused by the use of that phrase. The wife replied "He was just asking if anyone was getting motion sickness."

Later that day I was hiking through a tall Eucalyptus forest, with my eyes pointed towards the canopy, with a quick glimpse at the ground every three or four steps. After a minute or two of this, Sarah asked "What are you doing?" to which I replied "This is where they live". After a half hour of this awkward parade through the forest with the occasional stumble and irritated mumble from Sarah, I froze. "Look!" I said as I pointed to a spot on a branch a hundred above us that contained a dark bulge against a cloudy sky. Sarah said "That's just a bunch of leaves". I took a zoomed in picture and as I showed it to her said, "Leaves don't have fur." Then a sleepy paw stretched out confirming our first koala sighting. A minute later we would find another koala fifty feet down the trail awake, and returning our stares.

The next couple of days we would continue along the coast, marveling at the dramatic coastline and all the wildlife that inhabited it.

We would round corners in the forest to surprise wallabies.

On the grassy farmland mobs of kangaroos would reluctantly hop off the trail a dozen meters or so to let us pass.

Brightly colored birds of all kinds would alert all their neighbors as we approached with songs, squawks and screams we had never heard before.

As we reached the campgrounds each night and chatted with the local Aussies about our wild encounters, they would smile kindly like hearing a child telling about a squirrel they had seen in the park for the first time. With one exception.

On our second day we were on twisty section of the walk where the trees were older and the forest darker. I was a dozen meters ahead of Sarah, when I came around a bend in the trail to find the path ahead blocked by a gleaming white buck quietly grazing. As it raised it's head, I saw it had a rack almost a meter wide. It was as surprised to see me, as I was to see him because I could see his eyes open wide, as I am sure mine were. For a second neither of us moved, until Sarah started to catch up with me, which broke the spell and he bounded off into the depths of the forest. A thought of a picture only then entered my head. At each camp I asked if anyone else had seen a white deer before, and no one had. I wonder if somewhere in that forest there is a lamp post in a stand of evergreen trees.

On our fourth day we stopped for lunch at Melanesia beach. One of the fellow hikers named Brett that we had met the prior night at camp, passed us by as were finishing up. About a kilometer up the beach he took the trail as it headed back up the bluff into the coastal forest. A few minutes later he reappeared, and milled around at the trailhead. We loaded up our packs and headed on down the beach to meet him. There we learned the trail was blocked by a tiger snake with a coiled up "None Shall Pass!" attitude. Sarah headed up the trail to see, with Brett and I following. Brett had to point the snake out to us from about ten meters away, as only his head rose above the grass. I took out my phone for a picture. As I took another step forward for a better shot Brett exclaimed "Mate, what are you doing?". After I took a couple more shots, I retreated back down the path to the beach to Brett's relief. The tiger snake bite will deliver between 30 to 60 mg of venom. 3mg can kill a human. I knew this before taking that extra step for a better shot, but I was in the moment.

On the beach we considered our options, and decided that discretion was the better part of hiking. We would instead race the tide and head down the beach to an alternate path, that was steep and overgrown, but snake free we hoped. We would end up hiking the next two days with Brett, stamping our feet through snake-y bits of trail with tall grass to warn off other snakes that we meant business, or at least pretended to.

There is an intimacy that you develop with a place and it's people when you walk it, that you can not easily replicate by any other means of travel. We would would walk in silence for half an hour, but the shared experience provides the substance for relating to each other when exiting a tunnel of green to a new vista of the coast. By the end of the two days we had shared stories of our families, travels and dreams.

We had traveled alright. 

Hawaii - Where the earth is new

On the morning of our second day in Volcanoes National Park we hiked down the Hilina Pali escarpment and across the lava fields of the Kau desert until we reached a black cliff  above the waves of the Pacific Ocean crashing below. We had not seen a soul since we left the trailhead the day before.  There was no sign of civilization as far as we could see in any direction.  It was hard to believe we were in Hawaii during spring break.

The Kau Desert is not barren. What it lacks is soil to hold the rain, mist and morning dew. Grass and trees are colonizing cracks in the lava fields as soon as the rock is broken into the first grains of black sand by wind, rain, and footfalls into the newest soil on Earth.  

Our camp for that night was Ka'aha where the surf had carved tidal pools out from the lava plains along the Kau Desert.  They were brimming with crabs, tropical fish, and lined with shrubs and trees.  One of which housed a barn owl. 

On dawn of our third day we  started our climb up the cliff above Ka'Aha.  

As we climbed the grass got denser and wildflower vines began to snake around the islands of lava that still poked up through the grasses. 

By the time we reached the crest of the ridge 1000 feet over the ocean the grass was above our hips.

We would spend another day exploring the coast of the park, and on our way our we traversed the 1969 Kilauea lava flow.  A fitting end to our backpacking trip to leave from one of the fresher flows open to hiking where the process is starting over again.