Some years ago, after many years living on acreage, the child bride and I decided to move into more manageable accommodation. She wanted to move into an apartment but I, despite my love-hate relationship with grass after spending years sitting on a ride-on mower, wanted a townhouse. I wanted to come down slowly from my grass addiction. The irony is that I eventually killed all of our townhouse grass when trying to kill the nut-grass in it. So, one re-landscaped garden later, we don’t have any now. Notwithstanding, I could not live in Walvis Bay in Namibia unless I could build my house on the rugby field which appears to be the only greenery here. The rest of the place seems to have been built on the beach which is at least 50 miles wide.
It’s no wonder there is a paucity of grass in this place. Our tour guide advised us they get on average half an inch of rain a year and a little while ago they had a 13 year drought. Now, I don’t know about you but to me, those seem like one and the same. Where we lived in New Guinea, we would get about 10 feet of rain every year so what’s half an inch between friends. But if half an inch is all you get and getting it is the difference between pleasure and pain, how do you feel if it doesn’t come? We need to get this discussion back onto the straight and narrow again, I feel.
Pretty much everything in Liverpool has a Beatles connection. Similarly this place’s claim to fame is huge piles of sand so the word “dune” is ubiquitous when it comes to streets, shopping centres, hotels etc. But as you go east and further into the desert (or up the beach), sand gives way to rocks. And they are folded and faulted and twisted and thrust hither and yon; a structural geologist’s paradise. A spectacular and spectacularly ugly Mad Max landscape where incidentally, the last Mad Max movie was made. The geology is metamorphic. The topography is Mordormorphic.
I’m a very ex-geologist but this sort of topography still makes what hair is left on the back of my neck, stand up. I am reminded of the relative timelessness of the geological process – we’re talking potentially hundreds of millions of years to produce the petrological mayhem here which puts the climate catastrophists’ end-of-world timetable countdown into the blink category. Are we down to 7 years now? I’ll need to call Al or Greta or AOC (no, not the Australian Olympic Committee, although these days their answer would probably be the same) or some other world famous climatologist.
We’re talking different things here but catastrophic change doesn’t happen overnight in nature other than very locally. None of us will live to see significant permanent change in any shape or form and you can take that to the bank. Allowing grifters, carpetbaggers and ideologues to tell you they can change nature overnight (and believing them) will result in them taking you to the cleaners vis-à-vis your bank account. If you don’t realise this is happening now, you’re not paying enough attention.
That’s Walvis Bay and Namibia done and dusted. Various orifices have been unclogged of sand and we are heading north again. Despite the fact we are in the tropics it is still somewhat chilly. Our Namibian tour guide said there was no way he would swim or surf in the Atlantic Ocean as the water is freezing which I guess explains the less than tropical breeze. Angola beckons.