I love travelling. When I lie on my deathbed, some of my happiest and most defining memories will be from holidays and adventures abroad in this extraordinary world, with the people I love.
However, it wasn’t until quite late in life that I really experienced and fell in love with Africa. Africa gets under your skin. It seeps into your every pore and sets fire to your brain. And one particular country has had more impact on me than any other. A country I barely knew about or could locate on the map even five years ago.
Namibia is one of least-known and most hauntingly beautiful countries not just in Africa, but in the entire world. It also one of the least-populated: only 2.5 million people live in a land three times the size of the United Kingdom. Yet it never feels empty because of the warmth of its people and the extraordinary impact of its landscapes on the human spirit.
Namibia is home to the highest sand dunes in the world. Fish River Canyon is the deepest canyon in Africa and the second largest in the world after the Grand Canyon. The foggy Skeleton Coast is one of the most feared coastlines in the world, home to hundreds of shipwrecks: Portuguese sailors used to call it “The Gates of Hell”.
Time takes on different spans and dimensions in Namibia. The mummified trees at Dead Vlei died in the eleventh century: just as William the Conqueror invaded an exhausted England in 1066. Indeed, its upside-down Baobab trees can live to be up to three thousand years old. The Namib and the blood-red Kalahari are the oldest deserts in the world.
Namibia’s settlements and towns are no less remarkable: Swakopmund is a German seaside-town in southern Africa, with all the bizarre contrasts you would expect from those origins. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the desert, created by a diamond rush, in which visitors can now walk through houses knee-deep in sand.
Namibia has even acted as a magnet for the extra-terrestrial with the largest recorded meteorite shower falling on its terrain. It is a country to inspire stories, as it has with my just-published novel: “Hallowed Ground: The Mystery of the African Fairy Circles”. Its soil is truly “Hallowed Ground” and I became obsessed with what lay beneath that soil as well as above it.
Spread across the face of Namibia’s deserts are hundreds of miles of ‘fairy circles’: vast enough to be seen from space. They grow and die with the same lifespan as humans, yet no-one has been able to explain why or how they appear.
Namibia is home to a proud, distinguished and ancient line of storytellers: tribes such as the Herero, Himba, San, Damara, Caprivian, Kavango, Nama and Ovambo. They are also extraordinary survivors. Between 1904 and 1907, the Germans wiped out most of the Herero tribe and half of the Nama in the first ever, planned genocide a kind of hideous dress rehearsal for the Nazi death camps - and yet they have survived.
Indeed, the whole country is an inspiration. It is a modern, parliamentary democracy about to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of its independence from South Africa. It has survived invasions and threats of all kinds.
Very sadly, the threats still continue. As one symptom of climate change, Namibia has this year been experiencing devastating droughts in which 60,000 cattle have died and crops have failed, leaving thousands of families with food shortages. Rains have started again recently and long may they continue.
A plea from my heart. Help Namibia survive and grow, by visiting it. In doing so, you will not only support a remarkable country, you will also experience some of the most inspiring landscapes and people on our precious planet. You will be richer as will they.
If you want to learn more about Namibia, take a look at http://www.namibiatourism.com.na/ and http://www.travelnamibia.co.uk/