Greetings from Sun Country

Deutsche Seiten
Sitemap
About
Enlarge picture

The Sossusvlei, a lake in the middle of the Namib desert

My place

In the southern hemisphere

Have you ever seen water going clockwise down the sink? Here it's usual (earth rotation), and there are some more things different:

It's mid-summer in February and winter in August. So forget white Christmas till the next ice age.
There's no North Star in the sky, rather you will see the Southern Cross. Above all, there are many more stars visible with bare eyes than I ever thought are there - the view is so clear that even the Milky Way looks like being painted on the night sky.
You go northwards if you follow the sun in the noon.

Funny enough, the May bug is called May bug here, where it actually is a November bug.

With an 100-miles-wide beach

Well, "beach" is not quite correct. The thing is a desert called Namib, and it covers the western part of the former Southwest Africa. Responsible for climate, living conditions and many important aspects of its inhabitants everyday life, it has been chosen to also provide for the name of the country. So since independence in 1990 the new state is called Namibia.

There are not many people in this vast country but there are other extraordinary things:

the least rainfall in sub-saharan Africa,
the second largest canyon in the world,
one place with zero inhabitants, and one place with one,
some of the world's last bushmen,
the widest variety of poisonous snakes,
the highest sand dunes, and
a mine in which more than fourty minerals on earth were found first.

In the middle of nowhere

Windhoek is not yet the end of the world. But if you step on your toes, then you'll maybe spot it.

Windhoek is Namibia's capital. It is, moreover, its only town, and to travel to the next town nearby can take quite some time:

12 hours to the South by car to Cape Town / Republic of South Africa,
12 hours to the West by aeroplane to Rio de Janeiro / Brazil,
one or two days to the North-East by car (the plane won't be much faster as there is no direct flight) to Harare / Zimbabwe, or
a lifetime to the North by whatever transport you like to Luanda / Angola. A lifetime? Yes, because most likely you would meet someone underway to take your life.