Common Sense and Whiskey

Textures: A Simple Example

In yesterday's Wednesday HDR post of Mt. Cotopaxi, Ecuador with an added texture, I suggested you go out and shoot your own textures and experiment with them in Photoshop. Thought I'd show you an example. This is a photo of the docks at Windhoek, Namibia:

This is just some random, ordinary wall I shot in Riga, Latvia:

Here they are, combined in Photoshop:

This was one of my early efforts with textures and it surely will never win any awards, but it also didn't cost $100 - $400, and I learned a whole lot in the process. Just get out there and try it for yourself.

Three Africa Links, Fine for Weekend Perusing

• A 3,000 Mile Adventure Across Namibia

• A nicely done photojournalism site: Africa Knows

• An engaging five part series on travel across Africa from World Hum: The Roads Between Us

(Photo from Dead Vlei, Namibia. Click it to make it much bigger. More in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

 

Nambia, Namibia ... Whatever

Former Finnish President, international fixer and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him to the distinguished crowd at Atlanta's distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among his achievements "helping to achieve independence for Nambia."

We visited Nambia a few years back, and found that the locals actually call it "Namibia."

•••••

Late in the afternoon our pilot, a very young girl with blond hair and blazing blue eyes, took three of us up in a Cessna for a trip out over the dunes. She explained that at the coast (55 kilometers away), sometimes they run safaris on the beach, so if we saw any cars we had to let her know immediately!

That was curious. Why?

They could spoil our fun, she grinned. We were required to fly at 3000 feet, but out there she said she would drop us illegally to 500.

Where in the world can you flaunt rules like this if not on the desolate coast of bloody Namibia!? And so we did.

We retraced the morning’s route from the airstrip across the road from our lodge, into the park and down along the tar road.

They’ve numbered the dunes, 1 to 70 or 80, and we did a pinwheel around Dune 45, somehow an icon. Bernard had stopped for us to see it, too, driving us in the morning, and indeed, folks had been already there and climbing it.

Before sundown, though, dune 45, and all of the dunes, stood deserted. Everyone had to be out of the park at night.

We did a long turn around “Big Daddy,” which they repute to be the world’s tallest sand dune, and in the same sweep took in the dead vlei and Sossusvlei, and the dune we’d climbed in the morning. They call that one “Big Mama.”

The road ends here and beyond, nothing but dunes, horizon to horizon, and no place for engine trouble.

The coast gained focus, and in time we cruised over a fallen-in diamond mining settlement. The sight of it was jarring, its man-made perpendiculars entirely out of sorts with the natural swirls of the desert, which often resembled nothing more than crumpled bed sheets.

The shipwreck on the Namibian beach.

We came down low along the water’s edge to see seal colonies, dozens, that stretched for miles, up to a shipwreck and then back over the dunes to a curious landscape, low green vegetation spotted with circles they called fairy circles. They reckon trees died and somehow poisoned the soil, and nothing grows in the circles.

•••••

For complicated reasons we had one way tickets to Namibia. Those thin, slick, mimeographed handwritten ones.

Terror, Terror Everywhere

 
Oddest story of the day:

"A suspect package containing a detonator, batteries and a ticking clock was found on a suitcase checked onto a Munich-bound plane, German police have said.

The bag was detected before it could be loaded on the flight from Namibia."

It's always something, ain't it? It's just that this time, it comes from about as far away as it gets. Of course, Namibia was a German colony (hence the flight - Air Berlin AB7377 from Windhoek to Munich) and just now Germany is taut with terror tension.

But note the low-key way the Namibian authorities handled things:

"It was detected at the luggage screening point prior to loading, said the Namibia Airports Company (NAC).

"We are still investigating the suspicious object," a Namibian police spokesman told the BBC. "It's too early to say if it's terrorist-related. We will only pronounce when the investigation is completed."

Further security checks were carried out on passengers, luggage and the plane itself before the LTU/Air Berlin flight was allowed to depart.

No explosives were found in the bag, Air Berlin said.

All passengers had to identify their own bags before they were reloaded.

However, cargo due to be loaded on the flight was kept back for further investigation, said a statement from NAC."

They held the cargo back, put everybody's bags out, had the passengers point to their own, loaded everybody and their bags up and sent them home.

It's fortunate for the Namibian Airports Company that Namibia has no non-stop flights to the USA. The TSA would transform Windhoek airport, a casual, relaxed, shoulders-down kind of place, into a grim, locked-down, angst-laden perpetrator-processing boiler room filled with bins of empty water bottles and toothpaste tubes, brooking no dissent as passengers are manhandled one by one for their own good.

Hang in there, Namibia.

It's much better the way it is.

(Photo from the tarmac at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport from the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

A Namibian Tale

Paths cross, and random people spend a day together in places like this. In the pre-dawn, everybody mustered by the coffee pot, and on the way to the safari truck I shook hands with the man next to me.

"I’m Bill, hi."

"Hello, I’m Reto."

"Sorry?"

“Reto. R – e – t – o,” he said, grimly enough to back me off.

Just freezing at first, until the sky pinked up and gave form to the landscape, and we all leaned in toward the center of the open truck and out of the wind. Reto sat with the driver, a Damara with the English name of Bernard. A mom and her two kids huddled in the seat behind them, Mirja and me next, and dad, a bluff and hale South African, claimed not to be freezing in the back, in his shorts, by himself.

We stopped at a lookout before the sun presented itself and he dismissed the cold, “Aw, in ten minutes time it will be hot.”

There was a stop at a particularly daunting sand dune, and Bernard put out a light breakfast. I slipped away to take pictures and so I was last to the picnic table, a seat made white with bird droppings. Didn’t much want the cold cuts and yogurt but I took more than my share of coffee and I perched, next to Mirja, sort of half on and half off the bench, which put my back mostly to Reto, who hadn’t said a word all day.

We prattled about the South Africans’ home city of Durban.

“Oh, you’re going there? I was actually hijacked in the center.”

“You must go shopping at Gateway, biggest mall in the southern hemisphere….”

“The Queen stayed at the Royal Hotel – it was five star then, hardly four now, I’m afraid.”

And so on.

After enough of the happy talk I felt my back to Reto, down at the end, and I turned to ask him where he was from.

Zurich, living in Geneva. International trade lawyer.

Naturally thin, prematurely graying but a youthful looking kid in his 30’s. He’d lectured on international trade law in Windhoek and arranged a four day extension to here and then, later in that day, to Swakopmund, and he called it once in a lifetime.

Back in the dark over, hovering over the coffee pot, when he sort of grimaced as he spelled his name, R – E – T – O, then fell silent, we couldn’t make anything of him, but as we drew him out we saw he was quite shy and alone, but with a razor-sharp wit.

In the late morning, as we walked across a dune just barely not lethally hot, Mirja asked one of her perennials, “Do you have snakes?” Before Bernard could reply the South African kids lovingly described the sidewinder and Bernard helpfully mentioned the spitting cobra.

Not something you run into in Geneva, I ventured to Reto.

Quick as a sidewinder he replied, “No, only the two-legged version.”

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See 100 more photos from Namibia are in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And read more stories From the Eventual Book.)

Wednesday HDR: Namibia

Today's HDR comes from a really singular place, the Dead Vlei in the Namibian desert. Best I understand, once the River Tsauchab flooded into this pan between sand dunes, allowing enough water for trees to grow. But as the dunes shifted, access to water was cut off, killing the trees.

The Namib desert climate is so dry, though, that the trees just about don't decompose. The dunes are thought to have cut off the water supply some 900 years ago, and still these trees stand.

100 more non-HDR photos from Dead Vlei and elsewhere in Namibia are in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See a couple hundred more HDRs from all over the world in the HDR Gallery. A much larger, higher-res version of this week's HDR photo is there, too. Just click on the photo.

No One Said It Would Be Easy....

There's a story to tell, including hurtling across the Namibian desert in a mighty Corolla (or other Type B rental car) but there's no time just now. We're off on the RMS St. Helena. Next port of call is Jamestown, St. Helena Island, South Atlantic Ocean, middle of the week.

We'll be in touch. Cheers for now.

The Journey Ahead

We're battening down the farm now to head toward Walvis Bay, Namibia, which is the point of African land on the map.

En route we'll stop in Switzerland and Italy, then on 1 January, 2010 we'll fly JNB - Walvis Bay to board the RMS St. Helena and sail to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension.

We'll be posting our thoughts here on CS&W and our photos here on EarthPhotos.com. Please come along with us.

In the meantime, you can read up on the local news in:

- Coastal Namibia: The Namib Times

- St. Helena: The Independent

- Ascension Island: The Islander

And here's "The Pierhead Webcam" live from Ascension, updating every five minutes. Looks tropical.

Road Trip Starts Next Week. First Stop: Switzerland

It's almost time to leave the farm and head back out on the road. We'll be underway at the end of next week. First stop, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where we'll arrive on Boxing Day. During the weeks that follow we'll cover some 13,000 miles, from the Alps to southern Africa, back up the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean via Royal Mail Ship, and on to the U.K. aboard an RAF jet.

Come with us as we write about it here on Common Sense and Whiskey, and see photos as we go, as we visit Switzerland, Italy, Namibia, and St. Helena and Ascension islands. We'll post them (bookmark here) on our photo site, EarthPhotos.com, starting around the end of next week.

(photo from the Switzerland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

And... They're Off. Eventually.

We're heading to Namibia in a month. Let's hope we get off to a smoother start than last time. Here's what happened then:

If you fly from Johannesburg to Windhoek, you mostly fly over Botswana. After an hour the clouds stop in a line and below it’s scrub and salt pans, no roads. Before noon you find yourself under a blazing sun, 45 kilometers east of town at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport.

No difference between this patch of scrub and any other between here and Windhoek. Except maybe this particular bit of land used to belong to somebody important’s brother-in-law.

We had a voucher for our rental car that read, “Thrifty Car Rental, Windhoek airport” across the top, but walk past the Avis and Hertz and Imperial counters in the arrivals lobby and hmmm, no Thrifty.

Once we worked out that in fact Thrifty only had a city office and we found the man they’d sent to haul us in, and once we waited just that one quick additional hour for another flight carrying another client – once we made it to the Thrifty Car Rental office in Klein Windhoek, they were happy to ask for another hundred NAD (Namibian dollars) for the transfer back to the airport when we dropped the car off, it being so far and all.

We declined to pay extra for that.

When we finally left Windhoek, at the first police checkpoint on the Rehoboth road  south of town, we had the chance to perspire for the better part of an hour with a stout, entirely agreeable police woman at a shed by the road. There was no registration on our windscreen, you see, a fact noted by the astute policeman at the roadblock (but news to us) and so we’d have to go back to the car rental office.

Nambia

Once we stood in a receiving line to shake hands with Marti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and Nobel laureate, who was in town to speak at Atlanta’s Piedmont Driving Club. In his introduction, a forgotten member of Atlanta’s high society cited, among Ahtisaari’s achievements, brokering a deal which led to the independence of “Nambia.”

We smiled, winced and understood a couple of things: That the presenter’s lack of knowledge reflected the provincialism of our town, and that Namibia isn’t very well-known, either.

We’ve since visited Namibia, which is beautiful, and are scheduled to return in just six weeks time. As we’re booked into a couple of days stay at Walvis Bay to start the New Year, Namibia is on our radar, and this story in the New York Times caught my eye. It’s no surprise, more sad than scandalous, and just a reflection of the world as it is today.

The article details  allegations of preferential treatment for the children of politicians, and other misdeeds, including that “a state-controlled Chinese contractor … facilitated a $55.3 million deal to sell the Namibian government security scanners with millions of dollars in kickbacks.” Until last year, Hu Haifeng, the son of President Hu Jintao, ran the company.

The article quotes Xia Lili, First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with that characteristic light Chinese touch, as contending he had no obligation to respond to queries. “This is over,” he said.

There will ever be scandals, of course, and we'll just be travelers passing through town. So never mind all that. For enjoying the southern hemisphere summer, and a couple of days at the beach, we're looking forward to the first CS&W posts of 2010 coming from Walvis Bay, Namibia. Over the next few weeks as we get closer to travel, we’ll have a story or two from our last trip to Namibia.

Photo of Namibian sand dunes from EarthPhotos.com. See about a hundred more in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Fine Fowl Photography

Two really great sites to recommend for avian photography:

Scream Savers has a just unbelievable shot of a short eared owl heard the photographer's shutter going off and took a look, and Jean-Luc Vaillant's Avian Photography site is tremendous.

Our much more modest offering here. The ostrich pictured here lives in Namibia.

Fabulous Destinations When Money Doesn't Matter #2

Put this one on your list:  Namibia may be better known as a desert destination than for game viewing. But up in the north the Etosha Pan and the Etosha National Park rival, and compete with, Botswana's Okavango Delta.


Top of the line up there, far as we can see, is the Ongava Lodge's Little Ongava, with a rack rate of N$8990/US$1116.96 (today's rate) "Per person per day fully inclusive of all accommodation, meals, activities, guided tours to Etosha and on Ongava" based on a double room.

Sure looks nice, though.

See the Namibian desert in the Namibia Gallery, and the Okavango delta in the Botswana Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also Namibia's Top Safari Lodges.

(Ongava banner from the Ongava website.)

Maximizing Your International Travel Dollar

Our mailbox is laden with expensive glossy catalogs from high end travel providers. Mountain Travel Sobek, “Celebrating 40 Years of Adventure Travel,” sends a very nicely done 204 page 2009 catalog offering, for a couple of examples:

12 days in Namibia for $7795 per person, starting and ending in Windhoek, including internal airfare and the company of others (price offered is for four or five people). Including Clara and Herb from Cleveland, your close proximity partners for nearly two weeks of Land Rover trips and box lunches, whom you’ll meet on arrival, this epic journey departs from Windhoek twice each year, on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Or how about 13 nights in the Republic of Georgia from $3695 (again, not just you, but from 4 – 12 people)? This one starts in Tibilisi, twice a year, again on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Not to fault Mountain Travel Sobek. This is what they do. You’ve seen the Perillo Tours ads for travel to Italy? Same thing. You’re buying it? They’re selling it.

So don’t buy it. Do your research and hire local people. They not only have local knowledge, but they’re also often quoting in local money, and the money you spend with them stays local.

My wife Mirja and I flew into Windhoek, for example, by ourselves, and spent a bare fraction of that group price. And it was simple: