Two land days in a row. During the first one we emptied the old freezer in the garage. Too gross for photos, but try to imagine the smell of dead dolphin or sea bird carcass. Baby whale stomach contents. Or a dumpster used not for garbage but for natural rotting of dolphin skull flesh with the help of maggots loving horse dung, in order to bare the bones and create a beautiful skull for display.
The rotting flesh and horse manure were no contest for what we pulled out from the freezer. The worst were the intestines of a half-rotten dusky dolphin. We had to open its stomach and gut, and to look for eye lenses and earbones of fish. They were tiny, tiny things amidst much else rank stuff. I confess I had to stand upwind from the carcass. The smell was horrible, and unfortunately it only got worse as we pulled out the remains of the insides of a bottlenose dolphin baby. Or perhaps it was a pygmy right whale baby. Must have been as the organs were so large. The sight of a carcass does not bother me at all; it is simply the conditioning of my brain that says this is smelly and unhealthy for you, and you should vomit to be on the safe side.
But I soldiered on, like everybody else. Nobody displayed any visible signs of being physically grossed out, even those who had never done a necropsy before. But I refused to believe that I was the only one who suffered. It was not my first dissection day, but I know from experience that had we done this inside I would not have been able to contain my involuntary retchings.
I washed my jeans twice in the laundry machine but still could not get the smell out entirely.
Fortunately, the second land day was all about beaches and 4×4 driving and fresh air. Secretly I hoped we would not find a fresh stranding, alive or dead, because in the first case we’d be exhausted after a long, potentially dangerous rescue mission; and in the latter case we’d be exhausted from in situ necropsy, throwing all our clothes away by the end of the day.
Thank goodness that we just found old bones. No need for rescue or necropsy. One person was able to carry one spinal disc from the stranding site to the car. It took two people to move a sei whale’s lower jawbone about half a meter. The rubber wellies in the photo are a huge size 44 (US size 11), for comparison.
(Walvis Bay, Namibia; July 2017)
Little gems of wisdom in the public bathroom in Walvis Bay. The toilets are used by guests frequenting the bars on the boardwalk, mostly either during sunny hours of the day or quite late at night. Mostly the message is a plea for morality, leaning towards biblical sources of wisdom. But sometimes there is humor involved, too.
I can only imagine how frustrating it is to keep the one public bathroom of one’s little home town clean after a weekend night – every weekend.
(Walvis Bay, Namibia; July 2017)
Sesriem means “ses riemen” or “six belts” – the number of belts tied together required to reach the water on the bottom of the canyon with a bucket. Very practical. Very survivalist.
Once upon a time this was an oasis. There was a river flowing through, nourishing these 500-year-old acacia trees. But the river decided to go elsewhere, and the acacia trees could not follow. In the hot, arid desert climate they dried upright, like skeletons from better times.
The dark scraggly trees against a white lake of salt and the red dunes and blue sky is one of the most photographed landscapes in Namibia. And at 7.30 am it is all mine. I am the only person on the entire salt pan.
From time to time (not even once a year), the rains come and the dry white pan becomes a flooded lake. When an oryx walks across the mud, its footprints dry up like those of dinosaurs, waiting for the next rains to come.
(Deadvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)
7.30 am on the Deadvlei salt pan. It is as if I am the only person on a foreign planet. A Martian on a red planet of sand, where water once existed but is now long gone. This must be how the space-age people of the 60s imagined walking on Mars to be like. It is quiet. Still. The air is chilly but strangely easy to breathe, even with the dryness. There are no sounds anywhere, except for my team mates and two other crazies trying to ascend the Big Daddy dune, far above.
Standing in the still desert reminds me of the movie Truman Show, where Jim Carrey plays a man who has a lovely suburban middle class life – until he one day wakes up to realize his world is literally a stage and everything in it is scripted and televized. He begins to seek the boundaries of his physical world and comes to the end of it: at sea, outside of town, he touches the side of the dome which he always thought was the sky and the horizon. The water splashes towards it and all sounds are muffled, as if he were inside a room. Endlessness isn’t endlessness, but finite and staged.
(Deadvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)
We camped under a full moon at the overflow site, away from tourist buses and noisy families. We lit the braai fire under the tree, under a full moon, with lizards keeping us company. At night as I walked the 200 m stretch from the tent to the bathroom facility, I needed no flashlight because the moon lit up the sand. Somewhere, not far away, I heard the agitated grunt of a grazer, maybe a zebra or an oryx. Either it had a quick disagreement with a herdmate, or it was very quickly killed. Only the moon knew which one was the case. The jackals were howling in the distance. Thank goodness each campsite in Namibia has guards patrolling the area day and night.
The desert here is one of the oldest in the world. The red sand of Southern Namib comes from the Kalahari desert. When the Sossusvlei area was under the sea the Kalahari sand got washed in and stayed as the sea dried up to the desert it is now. The beaches became dunes. Some of the tallest dunes in the world are in Sossusvlei and the coast around Walvis Bay.
(Sossusvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)
The colors of Sossusvlei and the Sesriem area at dusk and dawn are the colors of every Namibian travel guide. No, the photos of those guide books are not photoshopped: the colors are truly magical. The red and pink hues come from iron content in the sand.
(Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)
On the way to Solitaire one must cross the Tropic of Capricorn. This is the southernmost location where, depending on the season, the sun shines down from directly overhead. it does not really feel tropical on the other side. Warm during the day perhaps, but freezing cold at night.
East winds are here again, blowing from the desert for a few days. In Walvis Bay we probably have 27 degrees Celsius on land, and we can feel the hot desert winds out at sea and witness the sand storm behind the dunes. The dunes have obtained a black rind that indicates a shadow: the wind has blown the edge of the dune over toward the sea.
(Namib desert, Namibia; July 2017)
So much of the lives of dolphins and whales remains as a mystery. We only see what happens on or near the surface. Most of our study data is biased to surface activities, and when we submerge hydrophones and other tools we are still mostly blindfolded: either we drop in something that only records behavior when animals are nearby, of we tag them but cannot really see what they are doing, and thus miss the big picture.
In Kenya we collected much information on fishing activities: locations of harpoonists, fishing dhows, and nets. Combined with dolphin sightings one could map out a picture of how fishing activities change the routes the dolphins prefer to take in the area.
(Walvis Bay, Namibia; July 2017)
This blue marble 