Namibia: better late than never

The sudden emergency of a detached retina put paid to the idea that we would be able to join our friends on the first leg of the planned trip to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia.  What remained was a followup appointment with the ophthalmic surgeon about 6 days after the surgery.  In the meantime I had strict instructions to not drive in a car (even as a passenger), not lift anything heavier than 4kg, not exercise - including even walking, and not move my head about too much.

Luckily the world cup soccer and Wimbledon were on TV so I spent the six days with our hosts' two dogs in front of the TV, with the gas heater going to keep me warm, and a brilliant excuse not to do any cooking or washing up.

I spent quite a few hours preparing for the followup, looking at the elevation gain between Cape Town (18m/59feet) and Windhoek (1700m/5577feet) and how to plan a trip that split the elevation gain into stages with overnight rests in between to allow my eye to adjust to the pressure.   Apparently the gas pressure in the eye can increase very quickly as elevation increases and this could lead to pain in the eye and all sorts of complications that are not worth chancing.

West Coast near Cape Town

The doctor was a little disappointed that the gas bubble was not smaller when he examined me.  The meniscus was at around 80% of the circle of vision and reported that the bubble was 50% of the volume after surgery.  Looking through the gas was like looking through a bottle of water at a distant object.  Everything is magnified but out of focus - excepting things a few inches from that eye.

He had a plan, though.  He was going to prescribe medicine that inhibited the body's production of fluid to be taken on days that I was experiencing great elevation gain.  He had some colleagues in Namibia with whom he had studied and sent a text message to a couple which secured an appointment for me, on day 13 after the surgery, in Windhoek.  I needed a "cleared to fly" letter from an ophthalmologist and another examination once the bubble was below 30% of the volume of the eye.

The "no heavy weights and no driving while my right eye vision was distracted by the bubble" restrictions were still in place but he was happy for us to drive up to Windhoek in stages.

We left on the Saturday for the first of 4 legs that were each going to be 4-5 hours with stops and one or two side trips to see scenic attractions that had been identified in advance.

I was able to take a last walk with the dogs who had kept me company on our final evening there.

Day 6 after eye op, first outing with the dogs (photo by Anne)

The first stop was the West Coast National Park Marine Protected Area in Langebaan.  This is a wonderful natural park with long roads that people regularly use for biking.  There are long beaches which I believe are open to the public during the summer.  An extensive lagoon supports many bird species and  some wild buck.  At this time of year we didn't encounter multitudes of birds but we did see a few shrikes, swifts, bright yellow weaver birds and sacred ibises.  We saw a beautiful kestrel on our short walk (at this point a little walking was also allowed) to see two of the bird hides that are right out near the lagoon.

From there, after a brunch at the top end of Langebaan, we had a short walk on a beach and encountered horse riders.  One of them stopped to ask if we wanted a ride - she had seen the graphic of a silhouetted zebra on the side of our rental car and thought we were part of a horse related outfit.

Horse riding on the beach in Paternoster

Anne was driving for the entire first day which ended at an overnight stop in a small town about 3 hours south of the border crossing into Namibia.

I had pills and eye-drops intended to lower the pressure in my eye (by reducing the overall production of water in my system).  The pill's side effects are alterations in taste (in particular carbonated drinks which taste like bicarb) and a tingling of the extremities.  They felt close to pins and needles but more like the buzz you feel if you run your fingers across the metal of a poorly earthed electrical appliance.  The elevation gain was 900m (3000ft) and aside from a feeling of pressure in my eye the expansion of gas in my eye did not become painful which would have been a signal to turn around and seek lower ground.

The main road leading into our first stop after Langebaan was dirt for a section and it slowed us down a bit giving us taste of what was to come.

The border into Namibia was an interesting experience.  We were shuffled from one obscure office to the next - all accessible from the outside on a porch on the ground floor.  I suspect the officials are used to people who know their way around the border post and they were a little impatient with us novices.  But, when we hesitated they pointed us in the right direction.  You need paperwork for your car.  I was surprised to find out that UK citizens need to pay for a visa (obtainable at the airport and probably at the border post as well).  We were traveling on our South African passports so all was good.

The Namibian side of the border included hosing down our tires with disinfectant and waiting for us to put the soles of all our shoes (worn or packed) unto a basin with a cloth soaked in disinfectant.  Foot and mouth disease is endemic to South Africa and because Namibia exports a lot of meat to Europe, they are very strict about keeping the source of the disease out of the country.

We stopped at a small town called Grunau overnight at an AirBnb which included what seems like a fairly common scene in that area - a rusted old American car with a tree growing out of it.  

Namgate AirBnb evening view

We were out reasonably early to take a side trip to see the Fish River Canyon.  This is the second largest canyon in the world (based on its length).  It is not as deep as the Grand Canyon but we had impressive views from the two lookouts on the way. 

at one of the Fish River Canyon overlooks

The road to the canyon lookout was dirt and I persuaded Anne that my vision was well enough for me to drive.  The gas bubble in my eye had shrunken quite a bit and was only visible in the lower quarter of my vision as a sphere.

Fish River Canyon

After visiting the canyon we stopped at the roadhouse near the canyon for fuel.  It has a lot of character, including the rusty cars

"The Roadhouse" near the Fish River Canyon

and a bar inside with a "filling station" banner over it.  

Gasoline for the body

The attendants at the Rodehouse gas station assured us the dirt road was good and so we decided to keep going on the dirt road to the next town (Keetmanshoop) rather than backtrack to the national highway.

This turned out to be a mistake.  The road deteriorated as we were going along and at one point I pulled to the side to put in eye-drops.  Pulling off again I discovered that the road clearance was not what I expected and we heard a scraping sound underneath.  Towards the end of the road we drove past the downstream side of the Naute dam and saw a 4x4 coming out of what looked like the river.  As we approached we saw that it was a flooded concrete spillway.  I asked Anne to keep an eye on the water level as we pulled on to the bridge because it seemed likely that the level would be constant all across.  It was probably 15cm (6in) deep.

Once we were on the highway again we were able to speed up to 120km/h (75m/h) but we ran into difficulty with a slow double length tanker with a following and leading car warning of an oversized vehicle.

I discovered to my horror that you can't trust the dashed lines on the road in Namibia.  After looking ahead a few times and hesitating we came to a stretch where I could see the electricity poles curving off to the right for the foreseeable distance and I assumed that the grass that was shielding my view of the road surface was low enough that I would be able to see any car coming towards me so I hit the accelerator.  Too late I realized that all my assumptions were wrong.  An SUV was bearing down on me in the single lane that I was passing on.  I braked and swerved and came to rest at the side of the road in a cacophony of hooting.  The driver of the SUV had reacted quickly and stopped a few feet away from where my car would have been had I not left the road.  I had managed to stop off the road on the verge which had luckily only small bushes and no rocks.

Padstal cafe, Mariental (by Anne)

We were both very shaken and we drove slowly to the next town where we stopped for petrol.  A station attendant was bending over as we pulled in and came over to tell me that something was loose under the car.  Within moments there were about 5 people under the car like in an F1 pit stop.  Two young boys and three adults found some string and a knife to secure the engine splash shield and then made appeals for cash donations to each of them for the work they had done.  The man who pumped our gas joined the chorus.  We drove off with considerably less cash than we had entered with.  

We stopped overnight at a small town called Mariental, about 3 hours from Windhoek.  The AirBnb guest rooms were in a gated area with a Padstal (roadhouse) general dealer, cafe and restaurant that we had dinner and early morning coffee at.

The next day would be another elevation gain day, going up from about 900m to 1700m.  Again, as before the effect on my eye was minimal, no discomfort this time at all.

As we pulled out (this time with Anne driving) we saw 2 of these oversized tankers, each with a car in front and one behind ahead of us!  Fortunately when we caught up with them a few minutes later they were both pulled over off the road with the drivers having a discussion and (perhaps) a coffee break.  We were both pretty relieved to leave them behind.

The next morning we were due to see the ophthalmologist we were referred to in Cape Town for a check-up but we discovered in the morning that she had been booked off work and that someone in their practice who also works at the state hospital would be coming over at 3pm and we could hopefully see him instead.  It gave us an opportunity to buy the rations we had planned to buy the following day.

The ophthalmologist confirmed that the bubble was at 25% which was the threshold that our doctor in Cape Town had said would be enough to clear us for the flight back to Portugal on the 31st. 

I had already reached out to some friends of our South African friends in the US who live in a town between Windhoek and the Etosha Pan because we knew that we would not be able to make the distance without stopping somewhere overnight.  They run a cattle farm but also are very involved in development work with a community living in their vicinity.  They have an AirBnb and are in the process of developing a lodge that will offer opportunities for tourists to stop on their way to Etosha to visit a traditional Himba village.  

In our case we were desperate for a place to stay because our plan to drive up had been scuttled by the late appointment.  

It was such an enjoyable experience!  Even though they didn't know us at all they treated us like family.

We arrived just after the sun set.  

Sunset on Otjiwarongo Farmstay

Another golden rule of the road in Namibia is to not drive after dark because of the risk or running into an antelope, the big ones sometimes try to jump over a car and they are bigger than a horse and therefore very dangerous on the road. The guest apartment we stayed in has a balcony outside and I was able to capture a night shot of the Milky Way from there.

Milky way from the back ports of our room

On the way up to Etosha we started to feel as though the Namibian vacation was finally starting.  So many obstacles, a close encounter with my eye (and on the road) were behind us. 

South Africa: Mokopane, Cape Town and a major wrinkle in the overland trip plan

While we were living in the USA it was difficult to visit South Africa.  The common vacation allotments are 15 working days of vacation but on the whole people take that time off in short stretches with the longest being 2 weeks.  Mostly I would take a week in Summer, a week over Christmas and then use the other 5 days to extend long weekends or tack them on to one or the other of the longer breaks.

No one explicitly prohibited taking three weeks consecutively but the work culture resists doing that.  

We ended up visiting South Africa only a few times at most once every 4 years and I did use my full three week vacation on those visits.

Now that we are retired we have a less restrictive schedule which allowed us to visit last year for a month and when an opportunity came up for an overland trip to Namibia this year we jumped at it.  We had already planned a trip to visit Matt in Albuquerque so this was going to be the longest travel experience outside the 18 months that we spent traveling in 2022 visiting potential places to retire.

So here we are back in South Africa preparing for the trip.

Our first stop was in the Limpopo region to visit my sister and brothers for a few days in the tiny towns of Mokopane and Modimolle.  

Mokopane has suffered significant deterioration in its infrastructure over the past few decades, in particular the roads which are mostly full of potholes.  A couple of the main roads have been tarred recently but all of the secondary streets are in poor shape.   The roads see heavy traffic from the nearby platinum mine and there are officials who are apparently siphoning off municipal money intended for the road upkeep because not much is spent on that in the town.  Someone pointed out the luxurious homes of city officials without comment as an example of corruption.

There is a neglected children's park at the end of the street where we stayed and it is a pretty good symbol of the state of things.  The swings are missing their seats and the rocking horse is rusted and unusable. 

Dilapidated mini park

There is not much to do in Mokopane but my sister's grandchildren are active riding bikes and playing sport.  We decided to try to find a place to hike in the hills on the outskirts of the town and my sister contacted someone living just below the foothills to ask if we could park our car at his house and walk from there.

The hike started along an established path but we quickly veered off to head towards the closest hill and ended up having to navigate through thorn trees and "wag 'n bietjie" (wait a bit) bushes that have thorns that hook into your clothing - hence their name.

On the way we stopped to examine an old homestead with rather strong walls that have withstood the disintegration of the roof, windows and doors.

Abandoned house decorated with my grand nephews

 Further up I persuaded my grand-nephews to strike the three "No evil" poses.

Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil

My nephew pointed out a thorn that Anne photographed.  It is called a devil's thorn in English but he called it a "skaapsteker" which translates to sheep stabber because it lies on the ground and penetrates the feet of sheep (or poorly shod humans) with a painful thorn.

devil's thorn

The day before we were due to fly out to Cape Town we visited our oldest brother who lives in Modimolle (about a 90min drive from Mokopane).  

The Bouwer siblings and Gary's wife, Krista

The town was named Nylstroom by the Dutch Voortrekkers who settled there after traveling North West to escape British rule.

The Voortrekkers mistook the prominent hill in the landscape for a pyramid and thought that the river nearby was the Nile river (hence Nylstroom - literally Nile stream).  The hill was a prominent feature for the indigenous Tswana and was named Modimolle which has become the town's name after universal franchise in South Africa (1992).

The Voortrekkers in this region suffered terribly during the 2nd Boer war.  The English commander in chief, Lord Kitchener, implemented a brutal scorched earth policy to crush the Boer guerrilla army by burning down farmland and creating the first British concentration camps.  A large number of civilians both white and black were interred in poor conditions.  It is little wonder that even today there is a strong anti-English sentiment in the Afrikaans population in that region of South Africa.

We visited a graveyard of people who had died in the concentration camp at Nylstrom between 1989 and 1901.  544 people died in the camp and there are 525 graves in the cemetery, all covered in loose black rock embedded into concrete.

Anne walking along the front row of the graves of the concentration camp victims

The victims were mostly women and children and the saddest are the graves of the tiny children who lived for only a few short months in the cruel conditions.

One of these, for a little boy who lived 10 months has a cracked and weathered tombstone recently decorated with flowers that show a strong desire to keep the memory of this tragedy alive in the community.

Grave of 10 month old Sarel van Emmenis

After this sombre visit Anne and I drove through to Johannesburg to see where my younger brother was moving into a new home in a retirement village.  We helped unload some of his things and sat in the cold winter evening air chatting with him over a picnic brought by friends who also came to see him settle in.  We've known them since we were very young in Kimberley.  

It does look like he has found a good place to settle.

Anne and I spent a night at the Johannesburg airport before taking the early flight to Cape Town where we were due to  stay with the couple who are going on our Namibia trip with us.  They are also long time friends.  I lived with them for 2 years in a house in Observatory in the early 1980's while I was studying at the University of Cape Town.

Cape Town is an amazing place.  We have reconnected with people and have visited Newlands forest for walks with the dogs.  It is winter now and Cape Town has a rainy winter.  Houses in South Africa are for the most part like houses in Portugal.  They were built for the hot weather and have very little to offer for the cold so on many winter days it is warmer outside than in.   With all the rain you are more or less obliged to air your house out regularly to avoid damp problems.  So sitting inside with doors or windows open takes some warm layers of clothing!

The winter temperatures are similar to those that we have in Portugal.  It rarely reaches freezing point at night and often during the day gets up to a fairly comfortable 20ºC (68ºF) or around 13ºC (55ºF) when it is raining.

We went to a Philharmonic concert in the Cape Town City Hall on our second night thanks to a spare ticket that someone offered our friends.  

A story I often tell about Anne is how I found out what a rebel she was in high school.  She went to a celebrated school in Cape Town called Rustenburg Girl's High and she really didn't enjoy being there.  Very often and for some reason with impunity, she would walk into the school grounds and straight through to the opposite end gate and over to the commuter rail station at the back of the school grounds.  From there she would catch a train into the city and go into the Philharmonic Theatre to watch them rehearsing.  What amazes me is that in South Africa school children wear uniforms so she was quite obviously unaccompanied in the city without being found out.

Our concerns about the safety of parking in the city were eased because of the car guards in the Parade parking lot at the City Hall.  These guards are all accompanied by large threatening looking dogs.  This car guard was willing to let me take a photo of him with the City Hall in the background.

Car guard in the parade parking lot outside City Hall

Crime is a feature of South African cities and this is a pretty good indicator of strategies that are being used to reduce it.  A few days later on a walk we came across a large stretch of discarded industrial electrical insulation and our friend pointed out this was left after someone had stripped the copper wire from it.  Copper is valuable and towns have begun to replace electrical installations with aluminum or copper clad steel wire.   These alternative metals conduct electricity less effectively than copper does but have proved to be a good alternative.  They have no resale value and therefore break the reward loop that leads to extensive copper wire theft.

Discarded insulation after copper wire theft

We visited Dalebrook, one of the quaint towns in False bay which is on the Indian Ocean side of the city.  It has a tidal pool where Anne learned to swim as a young tyke. The railway line in the foreground of the photograph below is the commuter rail to Cape Town from Simonstown and you can access the pool via a subway walkway from the main road.

Anne waving over the railway line from the sea side of Dalebrook pool

Next we visited Sea Point which is on the Atlantic Ocean side of the City.  The promenade along the coast line has an area with a lovely sculpture of Nelson Mandela with the ocean as a backdrop.

Sculpture of Nelson Mandela with a misty Sea Point beach in the background

They have an Olympic sized swimming public pool right next to the ocean there.

The Sea Point public pool

On Sunday evening, after lunching with another old friend of Anne's who now lives in Zimbabwe, we went to Noordhoek to see the Simon van Gend Band at a cafe in a quaint little farm village.  

On the way there we saw a sign warning about an endangered toad that crosses the road in the nature reserve (Silvermine). 

Caution Western Leopard Toads

The music was great and the presence of an accomplished trumpeter really added to the sound.  We went with the friends who were hosting us and again met Anne's friend from Zimbabwe and her partner.

The Simon van Gend band

Newlands forest stretches along the Eastern foothills of Table Mountain and Devils Peak and our host  gets to choose among a number of beautiful destinations where she will take her dogs each day.  The dogs of course love them all, but Newlands forest is the place where they get to chase squirrels.

We took a walk starting at the Rhodes monument on the foothill of Devil's Peak.  The view had lovely scenes over the Cape Flats towards the mountains to the East of Cape Town.  In the picture you can see the Rhodes Memorial in the foreground and to its right the University of Cape Town.  

The brownish smog is a feature of winter here where a temperature inversion traps the woodsmoke under warmer air.  A south-westerly wind called the Cape Doctor clears the air but it is more prominent in summer so winters can get smoggy.

View from above Rhodes Memorial

There are indigenous trees called Silver Trees that have leaves with fibers on them that reflect the sunlight.  They can grow in dense copses which look like they are snow-tipped.  We came across a couple of them on our walk.

Our host is very active in a team that come up to the mountain to cut down alien invaders and she has seen a resurgence of these and other indigenous plants over the years that they have been actively working to restrict the invaders.

Silver trees on the foothills of Devil's Peak

The Rhodes Memorial was built to honor Cecil Rhodes.  A visitor to the monument told us that it was modeled somewhat after a Greek temple and has 49 steps (one for each year that Rhodes was alive).  The monument has been subject to criticism in recent decades because of his role as an Imperialist.  Critics say that it glorifies white supremacy and imperialism and there have been calls to dismantle it.  Others argue that rather than erasing history, such monuments should be preserved as educational tools to highlight and confront the realities of colonialism.

View from Rhodes Memorial

In recent years there have been a number of protests that have resulted in damage and defacement of the monument, including beheading the statue of Rhodes (not in the photo above).  The head was restored to the bust.  The nose of the figure on the horse in the far end of the memorial was also removed at one point.

Kitted out for surgery

We were due to see off our friends on the Friday morning and I helped out with shuttling their pickup with the camping equipment to get a few things done.  I noticed on the Thursday afternoon that my vision had a bit of an impairment - like a shadow in the bottom right periphery while I was driving.  I thought it might be a big floater but later that night when I got into bed there were flashes of light along the edges of the area so in the morning I did some googling only to find that this was considered an emergency and should be seen to right away.

So we had the experience of the entire suite of emergency services and responses in Cape Town starting with a car trip to a hospital emergency room in the morning, followed by a consult with an opthalmologist later that morning and then on to a clinic in the northern suburbs for a surgical consult and finally surgery in the clinic that evening.

It was a whirlwind experience.  At first I was told that it may be a benign condition where fluid gets behind the retina but then rights itself but after a specialist consultation was told it was an actual tear in the retina.

The scans and reports were a little disconcerting because all of the indications were that it was a tear in the top right quadrant of my eye but the distortion to the vision was in the bottom right.  The surgeon was very helpful and showed me images of the eye and reminded me that the image is inverted by the lens on to the retina and then corrected by the brain.  

Image of the retinal detatchment

 

 He also told me that I couldn't travel for the next 5-14 days.  We were due to fly to Windhoek two days later so this was a major problem because it meant we would miss at least the first part of our trip there - a guided trip along the length of the Skeleton Coast that we have all been planning for 10 months. 

The reason for the no travel ban is that the surgeon puts a gas bubble into the eye after repairing the retina and this can expand catastrophically with elevation gain.  The option of driving up to Windhoek a few days later (from sea level to 1600m/5250ft) was raised but the surgeon was doubtful that the gas bubble would recede enough to even allow that.

While I was waiting for surgery another patient, a young farmer from the winelands nearby came in to say hello.  He was jokingly described by the nurse as a hospital resident because he had been at the hospital for seven weeks already with some uncertainty over when he would be released.

He had come into the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor which turned out to be benign.  The wound had become infected by a "superbug" which ended up causing swelling in his brain that resulted in near death and the loss of his ability to speak.

He is thankfully on the road to recovery now and spoke quite cheerfully about his prospects but I couldn't help wondering about my upcoming surgery and the presence of "superbugs" in the hospital. 

He is Afrikaans-speaking but had been fluent in English before this infection but he said that he was not going to try to speak English until his native language speech was restored.  He understands perfectly what is said to him and has all the words in his mind but the signals to his tongue and mouth are still not working properly so he has to speak carefully and slowly.

I, on the other hand, used to be functional in Afrikaans but since I have started learning Portuguese I keep on getting Portuguese words intruding which means my Afrikaans speech is careful and the wrong words sometimes come out - prompting him at one point to cheerfully tell me that he had just realized that his Afrikaans was as bad as mine was. 

We met his wife who is pregnant with a baby due in August.  She speaks Afrikaans with a lovely "brei" common in an area in the Eastern part of the Western Cape - the "brei" is a back of the throat rolling of the r's in words.  It sounds very much like the sound in words starting with an "r" in Portuguese.

I had to stay overnight because of a followup consult early the following morning to see how the surgery had gone.  When the surgeon  reported that it looked good we talked a little more about driving to Namibia.  It all came down to how much the gas bubble would dissipate by the follow-up consult - on the next Thursday - 6 days after the operation.

In the meantime I started doing research into a route that would give us the most gradual ascent over 4 days in the hope that it would be possible to make it to Namibia for the 2nd half of our planned trip.

A friend from Grahamstown who makes frequent trips to Namibia offered some suggestions for scenic stops on the route between Cape Town and Windhoek.  So assuming we are able to go, we have options to see some beautiful parts of Southern Namibia that we would otherwise have missed.

Green stars for first section, blue lines for second section

The map above has the original trip plan.  The guided portion is shown by all the stops marked with green stars - it is a 1000km stretch of desert coast ending more inland with a larger group of people.  The blue line is the extended trip that we planned to do with just our Cape Town friends.

We have what seems to be really good travel insurance from a company called Safesure who promise to pay 100% of emergency expenses and also downstream effects like flight cancellations etc.  We bought a product that covers a year of multiple trips for English speaking people living in Spain and Portugal.

I should also say that friends in America and Europe may be interested in what this medical adventure has cost.  We were seen as private patients without medical coverage and the ballpark for the consultations, surgery and hospital fees is hovering at around R120000 which is just under $8000 US.  We are going to try to get that reimbursed for the parts of the trip that we had to cancel as well.