by Jishi Santos

Created on: October 15, 2008   Last Updated: November 24, 2008

Travel diaries; Namibia.

I would stand in the messy desert landscape of Gaberone, Botswana, in 1995/6, watching the jets heading west towards Windhoek, Namibia and wish I was on one. I had heard so much about this desert country and it's Skeleton Coast that I could only dream......well that dream came true and it all started in Melbourne, Australia, on June 26th 1997, when upon entering an Opportunity shop here, I heard the words 'Ya' and some other Afrikaans language I recognised. The female voice uttering these is now my wife and I discovered she had a son in Namibia. Jump forward ten years and we are on a world trip to see him, plus two daughters, one in New York and the other in Capetown South Africa. I had also dreamed of visiting Capetown in 1995/6 and we had just done that and seen the magnificent mountain and coastline scenery around the Cape. Now almost unbelievably my love and I were flying over the Kalahari Desert where I had worked on our way to Windhoek the capital of Namibia. Windhoek means(and I've just asked my wife this as she had been here before and speaks Afrikaans very fluently) Windy Corner. Wind is wind and Hoek is corner.

Windhoek is a pleasant little town and the government has been stable for quite a few years so services are good as well as roads. There are a few hills which make it attractive but our destination was Swakopmund, some 370 kilometres away to the west on the Atlantic coast, where our son Adam lives and is a senior reporter with the Namibian Times. The trip out of Windhoek arrives at Brakvater, some 10 or so kilometres away and this was of special significance to us as this is where my wife had been on her last trip here and it was the mountain range which stood out and was a forerunner of things to come. Quite spectacular in it's own right, my wife had written a story about this place and her journey into these mountains. I did not have any film left but made a quick sketch of their shape and later turned it into a painting. Travelling further on you leave the greenery and the landscape is of a unique desert with all sorts of colours emanating from its dunes as the sun moved across the sky. We had shied away from any innoculations, due to cost, before we left but unbelievably we ran into an outbreak of polio which the government had taken seriously. At the halfway stop we were greeted by a group of ladies who dispensed the oral vaccine. From here to the coast is a piece of scenery that is unique and I say this because

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