Graptolite - Safari Day 24 a Heikiblog

Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Sat 24 Apr 2010 21:10
Graptolite is at 36:49.20N 028:18.56E in Turkey. This is a Heikiblog from
Namibia

24th April

This is not a blog about going to places or seeing sights. This is not a
blog about the little delights or disasters on the way. This is not a
blog about what we have done. This is a blog about Africa, it`s about what
you feel and experience when you come to Africa, it´s about all your
dreams about freedom and infinity.

We are back in Namibia. We are back in the open.

As soon as you arrive in Windhoek airport you are out in the open. The
airport is approximately 45 km east of Windhoek and your soul is already
adapted to this amazing land by flying for quite some time over absolutely
open land – wide, open, empty, as wide as the sky, as wide as the desert,
as wide as the universe.

Driving through that wonderful, wide landscape frees your mind, frees your
imagination and empties your mind from everything that is associated with
“civilization”. It brings you in touch with all the colours you could ever
imagine, with the purity of nature and with the rhythm of the land.
The colours here in Africa are absolutely breathtaking: You find the
emerald green sea floating into clear blue skies, lined with heavy dark
green lined bushes and highlighted with lovely shaped clouds and the shiny
yellow of the grass and the warm red of the earth. You find grassland so
wide and beige that you think you could drown in there, dotted with
singular dark green bushes and trees and limited by unlimited blue skies.
You find chocolate brown mountains with shimmering grey bits reflecting
the never-ending sunshine, embedded in yellow grasslands and decorated
with ostriches, impalas and springboks. And you finally find bright red
dunes that look like even mountains, reflecting the warm red colour in the
clouds above them in a sea-like blue sky that seems to never end. And on
these huge red dunes which have edges that seem to be cut into the sky you
see little dots of yellow, grey or green that are painted by god’s own
hand.

These colours are so bright, so intense and the forms of the mountains are
so bright, so clear and so wonderful combined, that they almost seem to be
surreal.

The colours at night seem to be even more surreal: All the stars of the
south, the Southern Cross and the best view of the Milky Way! And at the
moment when the moon sets in warm red colours into the dark sky you
couldn’t wish for more beauty on earth or in heaven.

And when you walk through that landscape you smell the wonderful smell of
wild sage, either because the elephants you were following just stepped
over it and exposed that wonderful smell or because they just swing in the
wind and release their earthly odour. And after sunset or before sunrise
you smell the wet earth that nurtures the land.

Associated with all these impressions is the rhythm of Africa: Dark, very
rhythmic, warm and sometimes very slow, touching your soul. You just have
to sway and swing to the wonderful tunes that embed your soul into these
wonderful colours, into this wonderful landscape, into all the smells and
into Africa. Or upbringing and cheerful so that you just have to move your
body to the rhythm of the tune.

All of this is Africa, all of this is what you experience when you come to
Africa, when you come out into the open, when you allow your body and soul
to dive into Africa and drown in colours, in smells, in rhythms and in
infinity and eternity. Come to Africa and experience it for yourself,
there is no way I can describe it in words! You just have to feel it,
have to experience it and your soul will never forget Africa! Nkosi
Sikelel’iAfrica (God bless South Africa)!

Heiki