Vicente Wolf

My friend Iva Spitzer and I planned our trip carefully, despite the high cost of travel there and I made a point of planning to see every aspect that the country has to offer. One of the biggest surprises was the sparseness of its population – the country is the size of Texas and France combined and only has a total population of 4 million people. The streets in Windhoek are cleaner than anything you’ll see anywhere else, every house is painted nicely and the word ‘traffic jam’ has not yet entered the Namibian vocabulary. Part of the reason I went is because Susan, my Director of Public Relations (and the person typing this blog as I don’t touch computers), comes from there and has sung its praises to no end. I had to go see it for myself.

Most of the traveling in the country is done by small four- to six-seater planes that fly from Windhoek to all the various camps that exist throughout. My first stop was up north near the Angolan border and the airstrip was a road of rocks delineating the strip in the middle of nowhere, a small building with a unisex toilet and probably some desert lizard that runs around the desert, for this was all there was. For a minimalist, this is a haven.
On my first day we went out to see the Himba tribes, hiking on sand dunes that are beyond ones sense of the scale of what a sand dune should be. (They’re actually mountains made out of sand.) Everyone at the camp was very accommodating and I got to interact with people from all over – Australia, Canada, France, Italy…a group of maybe nine or ten people. Iva and I had our own Land Rover and guide, which made it a much more serene way of traveling. At the Himba tribe the ladies are quite spectacular – all covered in mud. They rub their bodies and hair with a mud mixture every day – part to offer protection from the poisonous Namibian sun and as a beauty detail. From what I was told they never wash their hair – it’s all mud and animal fat.
Life here is very simple. You milk the goat, you walk the trail, you try to catch a tourist once in a while and you mud yourself. These people very rarely travel outside their realm of nomad grazing areas and once in a while see the tourists that stay at the camp. 

I saw Wildebeest, Giraffes, Springbok, Wild Ostrich, Elephants and even a poisonous Puffadder on our hike. Oh, and did I mention the sand? Everywhere. Just relentless sand. It’s truly a surreal environment, where, if lost, you will never find your way.
An excursion on a quad bike ended for me with a fractured arm, black and blue face (no make-up either!) and two days in hospital. But don’t think that this colored my opinion about Namibia. I found it to be an experience never to be forgotten. Areas like the Skeleton Coast where you see whale bones and seal sculls and a humungous dead tortoise, shipwrecks from the early ‘20’s, turned out to be a wonderful day at the beach – photographing and walking miles without seeing anything man-made. 

I got a couple of great seal sculls for my scull collection and, in addition to my quad bike accident, I got an extraordinary sunburn. But again, don’t feel that this in any way discolored more than my skin!

In Damaraland we tracked huge desert elephants and we drove through the dunes while sitting on the roof of our Land Rover. We saw Hereros (who wear fantastic dresses and headpieces), more dunes, the best of which was in Sossusvlei. The petrified trees took my breath away and I spent a whole day there photographing – truly a memorable experience. There were no clouds while I was there and the sunsets were non-existent until the last day when some cloud cover offered the most exquisite sunset. Pinks, mauves, reds and oranges blended with the color of the sanddunes and constantly changed until it was dark and eerily quiet. What an exquisite display of color!

I think a highlight in Namibia was Sossusvlei with the highest dunes in the world. The petrified trees are a photographer’s delight and the progress of vistas offered by the ever-changing landscape play with your sense of scale and depth of fi

eld due to the color of the sand. Another highlight was The Skeleton Coast – to spend a whole day and never see anybody else, walk through these fields of whale skeletons that have been there for over 100 years…the desolation you experience in this country is one that makes you become very introspective and makes you wonder about the lives that we live here in New York with so much stimulus…it took me two days to sort of chill in this vastness of emptiness.

Is it one of my favorite places I’ve been to? No. One of the most colorful? Definitely.