On the coast of Washington, a popular topic of conversation is the weather – when will the rain stop? Here in Namibia, the question is when will they start? The common weather pattern is for intermittent rain showers to begin in November, with fairly steady rains between January and March. In 2006, the summer rains were apparently quite heavy: There is an amazing set of pictures displayed in the Post Office, showing flooded roads, parks, houses, vehicles. “Rivers” that most years are literally streams of sand were cascading water. And of course lovely shots of clouds and rainbows. In contrast, 2007 was a drought year (the first drought of the millennium), and 2008 is also unfolding rather drily. We experienced our first rainstorm Jan. 5 – an easily-visible discrete patch of torrential downpour, straight grey lines between clouds and brown hills. We watched it come miles away, as we splashed in the Olympia swimming pool. First, the clouds gather together. Then, the wind picks up to a howl, as the air is forced away from distant rain. Then, large drops begin to fall, and finally the curtain arrives. Or not. The rain is remarkably patchy, pouring in one neighborhood while leaving another dry. The rains tend to fall in the evening, and the lightning after dark can be spectacular from our high perch, for instance crackling down in a jagged bolt or illuminating the grey rain against the black sky. Katie has declared that she doesn’t like lightning, But she knows that her parents find it fascinating!
In this dry country, the rains serve as the limiting resource for production, so their arrival is very important. In the past several weeks, we have witnessed the power of moisture. Recall, in week 2, that our drive to the coast was gauntleted by warthogs and baboons. Less than half of the trees had any leaves on them. Last week, on the same drive at the same time of day, we observed zero warthogs and baboons (no statistics needed). On our return trip (1/27), almost all trees had leaves, and the highway was gauntleted by flowers – yellow ones like buttercups, purple ones like lupine, and white ones like lilies. Pools of standing water have accumulated. Presumably, the animals have plenty of food and forage deep into the bush and no longer need to take advantage of roadside vegetation. Even the rocky, sandy piles around our apartment building have sprouted small acacias, blooming and fruiting so fast that we already know this particular species produces very prickly fruits!
The country looks green. Okay, you say, you’ve been away from rainy western Washington so long that your “green meter” has re-set. Anything that’s not simply red sand looks positively verdant. This is probably somewhat true, but we also have enough semi-quantitative evidence to know that we’re witnessing a change in season. The dripping 34C heat of our arrival has moderated to the mid-20s (but wet clothes still dry on the line in a matter of hours!). Similarly, our first days here were entirely cloud-free, just a brilliant blue day-sky and incredible stars at night. We’ve hardly seen any stars recently. Bare trees are leafing out and flowering; seeds are germinating in previously bare patches of ground. Where we were accustomed to patches of tall brown clumps of grass, we now see green new growth (and so do the cows, who will undoubtedly fill out a bit). To top it all off, we awoke Friday morning on the coast to the sound of water dripping through the roof! The coast typically gets 2 mm of rain annually, and this one rain shower must have exceeded the average – not to mention the capacity of the roof. (We were at a B&B, just waking up to go explore some rocky intertidal sites.)
Monday, January 28, 2008
Daan Viljoen nature reserve
1/19/08: The area around Windhoek is dotted with game reserves demarcated by fences – double-high if there is actually interest in keeping many of the antelope inside (or predators such as leopards and cheetahs outside). Most of the game reserves are private, although perfectly happy to have tourists visit, but our first excursion was to a reserve run by NWR (Namibian Wildlife Refuges?). On a bumpy, rocky, steep road precariously navigated by Corolla, we saw zebra ( a whole herd, plus one grazing right by the road), kudu (twisted horns), oryx (straight horns), hartebeest (ringed horns), wildebeest (and calves), warthog (and piglets), 7 giraffes so close that each one exceeded the field of view of our binoculars, banded mongooses (mongeese?), and several birds. Alan said: “Pinch me. I guess I’m in Africa.” But the reserve is proof that even native animals can overgraze an area (despite its size): the fence-line was clear because of the hazy green ground cover of new grass outside.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Week 2 trip to the coast
Jan 8-13 2008 (Tuesday-Sunday):
We traveled by car from Windhoek to Henties Bay on the west coast, which took about 5 hours with just two brief stops (for gas and for Katie to pee in the desert) along the way. Alan drove slower than all but two large trucks (one carrying cows), but was still averaging over 100 kph on “tar roads” (paved) and slightly slower on the “salt road” along the coast.
The drive shows a gradient from semi-arid savannah to almost pure sand. We began in a now-familiar landscape dominated by acacia trees. The grasses in the ground cover seem entirely dry, but nevertheless were being collected in huge bags by groups of people along the road. We suspected they were using the grass as animal forage. We saw some goats, and a tannery/stock pens. Farther from Windhoek, we began to see “wild” animals as well, a few springbok, several troops of baboons, termite mounds, and warthogs. The distribution of termite mounds and warthogs seemed almost perfectly correlated, with a center around the “garden city” of Okahandjo, which must have a reliable water source to be able to grow olives and tomatoes. As we drove farther west, the grass in the understory turned to short brown tufts, and the acacia trees became smaller and sparser. Along the whole drive, we saw distant mountains, each set seemingly different in geology, based on color (from grey to red) and shape (from mounded to spikey). There were only two more sizable settlements along the way to the coast, at Karibib and Usakos, nestled in a large depression that must bring some water. After Usakos, the fences that had lined the highway throughout the rest of the trip dropped out, and we saw no more animals. Although the “rest” signs still showed a picnic table under a tree, instead these rest areas had a permanent awning – no trees available anywhere. As we approached Swakopmund, I finally understood how huge the landscape of Namibia appears, with an arcing blue sky and vast panorama of arid ground to the distant mountains: the ocean looked small in comparison! Probably the close curtain of fog over the ocean contributes. We turned north from Swakopmund, leaving behind us the enormous red dunes just to the south. On the beach side, we saw many restrooms, but the coast was quite deserted except for a few fishers with poles so long that they attach them for transport to the front bumper, sticking up in the air. On the far side of the road, which was still hard and flat despite no asphalt, we saw only one type of low-lying bush that accumulates sand into mounds. When we saw them up close later in the evening, the accumulated sand is riddled with animal burrows. The plants could be huge Salicornia, by the round succulent shape of stems and leaves. We also passed an area of salt-lichen, closed to off-road traffic. It appeared red-brown and quite large, maybe 10-20 cm aggregations, at least as we passed at speed and distance in the car.
When we arrived at the Sam Nujoma Marine Resources Research Center, we were welcomed into the Director’s suite, as the director had quit and left the day before. The center is 4 years old, and directors apparently have a difficult time dealing with its infrastructure challenges, low usage, and remote location. It’s actually quite a remarkable place: the architect designed the buildings at odd angles so they appear already to be crumbling off the sand cliff into the sea (perhaps that was not his intention), and an underground river has its mouth here, so freshwater is easily accessible from wells (there are small green lawns and numerous horticultural projects). In fact, the freshwater flow is so large that it leaves a small 2-m lens of saltwater on the surface, where all the marine organisms live. And the remainder of the water column along this stretch of coast is fresh and often anoxic. SaNuMaRC has delighted, surprised, and puzzled us. It was established with an elaborate plan of “closing the loop” to achieve sustainability, but the solar hot water heater is broken and water runs continuously, the biogas digester apparently doesn’t work because the septic truck came twice for pump-out, the horticultural plants include two notorious invaders of arid land (Opuntia and tamarisk), and the chicken, geese and ducks brought in for pest control have been caged (against hyenas and because they ate plants instead). We were also puzzled by the placement of the center: no thoughtful ecologist would have selected the place because of the low diversity on the exposed beach. No thoughtful lab scientist would have selected the place because there is no running seawater – despite 4 years of trying, it has been a recent breakthrough to establish a permanent pipe to fill carbuoys with “good” seawater at the bottom of the dune, then truck it to the top. Communication with the outside world is through UNAM’s network, which makes email decidedly slow (many minutes simply to load a web page) especially during weekdays when others are also on the network. Alan removed a bulb from a dissecting ‘scope with no plug to replace the burned-out bulb in the second ‘scope, allowing us to examine algae. The library mostly contains material about UNAM, with just a handful of reference books – although, given how little we know about natural history, the perfect number to get us started. We wondered what political decision was made to place the center in this remote location and invest so much in buildings rather than equipment to expedite science: then we found out that Sam Nujoma has a house just down the street in Henties Bay! Scientists and staff at the center bought fish for Nujoma and entourage; and Saturday near sundown the same vehicle returned with two loads of boxes that were put into the common room – possibly the empty, unplugged walk-in freezer (Alan had checked it out from curiosity earlier in the day). Mystery!
We have been impressed by many of the horticultural projects, especially growing different varieties of squashes and melons to look for resistance to salt spray (imagine! Watermelons growing out of sand!), and successful production of oyster mushrooms (these grow out of the end of plastic bags in a special room). Even with limited seawater, there are also projects to raise marine fish in tanks.
SaNuMaRC, like much of Henties Bay, perches above a restless ocean on a red-sand dune: the beach sand is gray, and the old river sand purple in places. This beach has some similarities to the one we left on the outer coast of Washington: extensive sand (for hundreds of miles, rather than tens) that people drive on (with Land Rovers and quad bikes rather than pick-ups). Signs all indicate that it is illegal to drive on beaches, but the enforcement is apparently lax. People drive 4x4 vehicles to set up elaborate day-camps for fishing and kite-flying; and they drive quad bikes up and down the steep sand cliffs that plunge 20-30 m to the beach. We observed that almost everyone driving on the beach was white, and we’ve heard people come from all over Africa because these beaches are some of the last remaining where it is possible to drive. Some of the roadside trash suggests that fireworks were set off over New Years as well.
We’re beginning to learn about the Namibian coast by walking the beaches at low tide. The beaches themselves are quite barren, reflecting the dynamic movement of sand – 1 m per week northward movement, and perpetual rearrangement of berms and slopes. One day, water was trapped in a high intertidal pool and Katie went swimming in comfortably warm water up to her thighs. The next day the pool simply drained away. We found just two species in the sand: sand-colored isopods up to nearly 1 cm in length, which nibbled on toes but burrowed rapidly in the sand, presumably food for the few shorebirds we’ve seen. And Donax surf clams – Pismo clams in California – that work their way up and down the beach in the swash. Alan traded a local fisherman some beach-cast tackle for information that the clams are quite rare near the marine station, but become more abundant a few km N and S where the sand quality changes. We found a few shells, some recently opened for bait, and two moribund individuals that allowed us to see internal anatomy: a large digger foot and two siphons, too small to make anything but bait or chowder.
The wrack on the beach is slightly richer, dominated by Laminaria kelp and a small 1-2 cm native mussel. Elsewhere, this Laminaria is collected for cultured abalone food, but it is probably too rare to grow much of a business: there’s just not sufficient hard substrate along the coast to support vast kelp forests. We also heard that the small native mussel is such an effective fouling organism that is preventing the expansion of Mytilus galloprovincialis from S. Africa north along this stretch of coastline. In the wrack we found two morphological types of larger mussels: one is quite elongate and brown, with an outer edge that is almost square in shape; the other is jet-black with a white-to-blue abraded umbo and sharp angle on the shell edge near the hinge – perhaps gallo. At the low, large patches of mussel shell rolled around in the surf, almost flowing like water up and down the beach. The wrack also included smaller numbers of: limpets, a translucent brown circular shell, snails, Venerupis clam shells, sea cucumbers, bryozoans – primarily one that forms long, narrow, flat colonial blades, crab carapaces, and parts of spiny lobsters. We have begun to look at some of the algae and have found, in addition to Laminaria pallida, ulvoids and Cladophora for greens, and numerous reds. Some look familiar, such as Plocamium and Ceramium, but some were really impossible to tell. We had two books at our disposal: some color plates and descriptions in the Seaweeds of southwest Africa, and line drawings in Branch and Branch’s guide to seashores. But the reds included some fascinating types, for instance one that appeared to have no holdfast but instead twined around Cladophora filaments, and another with dramatic flower-like reproductive structures emerging in patches from a flat blade. We did find one deadly species - Physalia (Portugese man-o-war), which blew in droves onto the beach as the wind shifted from NW to SW one afternoon. Alan collected a whole bucketful, along with the similarly-blue Velella velella (By-the-wind sailor), which is common on the beaches of Washington.
We’re also learning about the Namibian coast by talking with scientists: Larry Oellermann, who is on a multi-year contract at SaNuMaRC to improve mariculture, and several people at NatMIRC (National Marine something research center) in Swakopmund, the major research site for the Ministry of fisheries and marine resources. The Benguela system is one of permanent upwelling, not intermittent. Generally there are strong winds from the southwest (although mostly northwest during this stay), with occasional shifts to the east that bring terrible (to people) but dune-nourishing sand. Plus flies. The water was soupy green, even in the tidepool caught by sand, and the high-tide waves were frothy with diatoms. This sounds tremendous for marine production: Even here, however, wild finfisheries are collapsing (we heard that sardines are essentially gone, although the fish identification book in the library indicates they are now carefully managed and sustainably harvested! Offshore, orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish, both long-lived, slow-to-mature deepwater species, began to be exploited around 1995, and in just a few years catch per unit effort plummeted.) And last year 60% of the oyster crop was lost to sulfur “blooms”. The fishery and mariculture troubles probably have different causes, and interestingly sulfur appears entirely natural. High production in the coastal ocean contributes to a rain of organic material reaching the bottom, where it accumulates and is decomposed by such things as the largest bacterium ever discovered (1 mm cells!). Decomposition creates pockets of hydrogen sulfide that, for reasons yet unknown (at least 15 hypotheses have been suggested), occasionally bubble out over the course of a week or so: the hydrogen sulfide reacts with oxygen in the water column to create water and elemental sulfur. This elemental sulfur is visible in satellite imagery as an enormous patch of light-blue off of the coast. And locally it appears as anoxic water all the way to the surface: immediately bad for many fish and crabs, and intolerable by Pacific and European oysters after about a week (whether from the sulfide or anoxia is not clear). Some of the native species (a goby, mussels, clams) apparently last longer.
We traveled by car from Windhoek to Henties Bay on the west coast, which took about 5 hours with just two brief stops (for gas and for Katie to pee in the desert) along the way. Alan drove slower than all but two large trucks (one carrying cows), but was still averaging over 100 kph on “tar roads” (paved) and slightly slower on the “salt road” along the coast.
The drive shows a gradient from semi-arid savannah to almost pure sand. We began in a now-familiar landscape dominated by acacia trees. The grasses in the ground cover seem entirely dry, but nevertheless were being collected in huge bags by groups of people along the road. We suspected they were using the grass as animal forage. We saw some goats, and a tannery/stock pens. Farther from Windhoek, we began to see “wild” animals as well, a few springbok, several troops of baboons, termite mounds, and warthogs. The distribution of termite mounds and warthogs seemed almost perfectly correlated, with a center around the “garden city” of Okahandjo, which must have a reliable water source to be able to grow olives and tomatoes. As we drove farther west, the grass in the understory turned to short brown tufts, and the acacia trees became smaller and sparser. Along the whole drive, we saw distant mountains, each set seemingly different in geology, based on color (from grey to red) and shape (from mounded to spikey). There were only two more sizable settlements along the way to the coast, at Karibib and Usakos, nestled in a large depression that must bring some water. After Usakos, the fences that had lined the highway throughout the rest of the trip dropped out, and we saw no more animals. Although the “rest” signs still showed a picnic table under a tree, instead these rest areas had a permanent awning – no trees available anywhere. As we approached Swakopmund, I finally understood how huge the landscape of Namibia appears, with an arcing blue sky and vast panorama of arid ground to the distant mountains: the ocean looked small in comparison! Probably the close curtain of fog over the ocean contributes. We turned north from Swakopmund, leaving behind us the enormous red dunes just to the south. On the beach side, we saw many restrooms, but the coast was quite deserted except for a few fishers with poles so long that they attach them for transport to the front bumper, sticking up in the air. On the far side of the road, which was still hard and flat despite no asphalt, we saw only one type of low-lying bush that accumulates sand into mounds. When we saw them up close later in the evening, the accumulated sand is riddled with animal burrows. The plants could be huge Salicornia, by the round succulent shape of stems and leaves. We also passed an area of salt-lichen, closed to off-road traffic. It appeared red-brown and quite large, maybe 10-20 cm aggregations, at least as we passed at speed and distance in the car.
When we arrived at the Sam Nujoma Marine Resources Research Center, we were welcomed into the Director’s suite, as the director had quit and left the day before. The center is 4 years old, and directors apparently have a difficult time dealing with its infrastructure challenges, low usage, and remote location. It’s actually quite a remarkable place: the architect designed the buildings at odd angles so they appear already to be crumbling off the sand cliff into the sea (perhaps that was not his intention), and an underground river has its mouth here, so freshwater is easily accessible from wells (there are small green lawns and numerous horticultural projects). In fact, the freshwater flow is so large that it leaves a small 2-m lens of saltwater on the surface, where all the marine organisms live. And the remainder of the water column along this stretch of coast is fresh and often anoxic. SaNuMaRC has delighted, surprised, and puzzled us. It was established with an elaborate plan of “closing the loop” to achieve sustainability, but the solar hot water heater is broken and water runs continuously, the biogas digester apparently doesn’t work because the septic truck came twice for pump-out, the horticultural plants include two notorious invaders of arid land (Opuntia and tamarisk), and the chicken, geese and ducks brought in for pest control have been caged (against hyenas and because they ate plants instead). We were also puzzled by the placement of the center: no thoughtful ecologist would have selected the place because of the low diversity on the exposed beach. No thoughtful lab scientist would have selected the place because there is no running seawater – despite 4 years of trying, it has been a recent breakthrough to establish a permanent pipe to fill carbuoys with “good” seawater at the bottom of the dune, then truck it to the top. Communication with the outside world is through UNAM’s network, which makes email decidedly slow (many minutes simply to load a web page) especially during weekdays when others are also on the network. Alan removed a bulb from a dissecting ‘scope with no plug to replace the burned-out bulb in the second ‘scope, allowing us to examine algae. The library mostly contains material about UNAM, with just a handful of reference books – although, given how little we know about natural history, the perfect number to get us started. We wondered what political decision was made to place the center in this remote location and invest so much in buildings rather than equipment to expedite science: then we found out that Sam Nujoma has a house just down the street in Henties Bay! Scientists and staff at the center bought fish for Nujoma and entourage; and Saturday near sundown the same vehicle returned with two loads of boxes that were put into the common room – possibly the empty, unplugged walk-in freezer (Alan had checked it out from curiosity earlier in the day). Mystery!
We have been impressed by many of the horticultural projects, especially growing different varieties of squashes and melons to look for resistance to salt spray (imagine! Watermelons growing out of sand!), and successful production of oyster mushrooms (these grow out of the end of plastic bags in a special room). Even with limited seawater, there are also projects to raise marine fish in tanks.
SaNuMaRC, like much of Henties Bay, perches above a restless ocean on a red-sand dune: the beach sand is gray, and the old river sand purple in places. This beach has some similarities to the one we left on the outer coast of Washington: extensive sand (for hundreds of miles, rather than tens) that people drive on (with Land Rovers and quad bikes rather than pick-ups). Signs all indicate that it is illegal to drive on beaches, but the enforcement is apparently lax. People drive 4x4 vehicles to set up elaborate day-camps for fishing and kite-flying; and they drive quad bikes up and down the steep sand cliffs that plunge 20-30 m to the beach. We observed that almost everyone driving on the beach was white, and we’ve heard people come from all over Africa because these beaches are some of the last remaining where it is possible to drive. Some of the roadside trash suggests that fireworks were set off over New Years as well.
We’re beginning to learn about the Namibian coast by walking the beaches at low tide. The beaches themselves are quite barren, reflecting the dynamic movement of sand – 1 m per week northward movement, and perpetual rearrangement of berms and slopes. One day, water was trapped in a high intertidal pool and Katie went swimming in comfortably warm water up to her thighs. The next day the pool simply drained away. We found just two species in the sand: sand-colored isopods up to nearly 1 cm in length, which nibbled on toes but burrowed rapidly in the sand, presumably food for the few shorebirds we’ve seen. And Donax surf clams – Pismo clams in California – that work their way up and down the beach in the swash. Alan traded a local fisherman some beach-cast tackle for information that the clams are quite rare near the marine station, but become more abundant a few km N and S where the sand quality changes. We found a few shells, some recently opened for bait, and two moribund individuals that allowed us to see internal anatomy: a large digger foot and two siphons, too small to make anything but bait or chowder.
The wrack on the beach is slightly richer, dominated by Laminaria kelp and a small 1-2 cm native mussel. Elsewhere, this Laminaria is collected for cultured abalone food, but it is probably too rare to grow much of a business: there’s just not sufficient hard substrate along the coast to support vast kelp forests. We also heard that the small native mussel is such an effective fouling organism that is preventing the expansion of Mytilus galloprovincialis from S. Africa north along this stretch of coastline. In the wrack we found two morphological types of larger mussels: one is quite elongate and brown, with an outer edge that is almost square in shape; the other is jet-black with a white-to-blue abraded umbo and sharp angle on the shell edge near the hinge – perhaps gallo. At the low, large patches of mussel shell rolled around in the surf, almost flowing like water up and down the beach. The wrack also included smaller numbers of: limpets, a translucent brown circular shell, snails, Venerupis clam shells, sea cucumbers, bryozoans – primarily one that forms long, narrow, flat colonial blades, crab carapaces, and parts of spiny lobsters. We have begun to look at some of the algae and have found, in addition to Laminaria pallida, ulvoids and Cladophora for greens, and numerous reds. Some look familiar, such as Plocamium and Ceramium, but some were really impossible to tell. We had two books at our disposal: some color plates and descriptions in the Seaweeds of southwest Africa, and line drawings in Branch and Branch’s guide to seashores. But the reds included some fascinating types, for instance one that appeared to have no holdfast but instead twined around Cladophora filaments, and another with dramatic flower-like reproductive structures emerging in patches from a flat blade. We did find one deadly species - Physalia (Portugese man-o-war), which blew in droves onto the beach as the wind shifted from NW to SW one afternoon. Alan collected a whole bucketful, along with the similarly-blue Velella velella (By-the-wind sailor), which is common on the beaches of Washington.
We’re also learning about the Namibian coast by talking with scientists: Larry Oellermann, who is on a multi-year contract at SaNuMaRC to improve mariculture, and several people at NatMIRC (National Marine something research center) in Swakopmund, the major research site for the Ministry of fisheries and marine resources. The Benguela system is one of permanent upwelling, not intermittent. Generally there are strong winds from the southwest (although mostly northwest during this stay), with occasional shifts to the east that bring terrible (to people) but dune-nourishing sand. Plus flies. The water was soupy green, even in the tidepool caught by sand, and the high-tide waves were frothy with diatoms. This sounds tremendous for marine production: Even here, however, wild finfisheries are collapsing (we heard that sardines are essentially gone, although the fish identification book in the library indicates they are now carefully managed and sustainably harvested! Offshore, orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish, both long-lived, slow-to-mature deepwater species, began to be exploited around 1995, and in just a few years catch per unit effort plummeted.) And last year 60% of the oyster crop was lost to sulfur “blooms”. The fishery and mariculture troubles probably have different causes, and interestingly sulfur appears entirely natural. High production in the coastal ocean contributes to a rain of organic material reaching the bottom, where it accumulates and is decomposed by such things as the largest bacterium ever discovered (1 mm cells!). Decomposition creates pockets of hydrogen sulfide that, for reasons yet unknown (at least 15 hypotheses have been suggested), occasionally bubble out over the course of a week or so: the hydrogen sulfide reacts with oxygen in the water column to create water and elemental sulfur. This elemental sulfur is visible in satellite imagery as an enormous patch of light-blue off of the coast. And locally it appears as anoxic water all the way to the surface: immediately bad for many fish and crabs, and intolerable by Pacific and European oysters after about a week (whether from the sulfide or anoxia is not clear). Some of the native species (a goby, mussels, clams) apparently last longer.
Minor emergency
Monday evening Jan 7: Katie suffered a radial dislocation as Alan picked her up by her arms onto his lap. My worst nightmare: a medical emergency before we’ve made any medical connections. While I tried to calm Katie down by nursing and reading, Alan consulted the internet to look for cures to “nursemaid’s elbow”. I would have been terribly panicked except that I knew it should be possible to pop it back in, but how? Cousin Emma had suffered a similar injury at the same age, and her doctor had fixed it while out on a jog. What a terrible time for the whole Polytechnic internet to be down! Alan finally had to go all the way across campus to the Conroys to use their internet connection. When he returned (seemed like forever), he rotated her hand out and then bent her elbow up – Voila! instantly no more pain, and Katie could use her arm. Score one more for the internet. (And for listening to one's sister...)
Namibian locavores?
In keeping with the Ruesink family tradition, no log-book would be complete without some details about FOOD!
Food that fits the climate:
1. Stale tortilla chips that we brought from Seattle are now crispy.
2. Katie has discovered ice cream cones, best consumed in the heat of the day with big licks, a face covered in stickiness, and always just barely ahead of the drips.
3. Water: we are drinking perpetually (except for Katie, who has her own opinion about these things). Water throughout the country is potable if it comes from a tap (so we’ve heard, and it certainly seems true in Windhoek – no GI distress at all to report). Still, we appreciate the filter that we brought from the US, as it improves the taste of municipal water: we’re just not the sort to spring for bottled water.
4. Tea (and coffee): Namibians do not drink iced tea or coffee. It’s hot hot hot, even though the air is as well. In fact, if we ask for “hot tea,” we get strange looks – is that something special? different? The standard tea is 5 Roses brand, very well steeped. Rooibos, native to south Africa, is also common. As Katie has attended meetings and briefings with us, she has had many opportunities to try her practiced skills at “tea parties” with real china (under close supervision). She particularly enjoys putting in A LOT of sugar, stirring, and snitching any sugar that misses the cup and falls on the saucer.
Local food:
The bare fact of the matter is that this country is dry. All the introductory ecology textbooks are borne out here: low evapotranspiration leads to low productivity. Low productivity means it’s challenging to grow local food. You need 15 hectares of land to support a single beef cow; goats and sheep can be stocked at six times the density, but (we calculated) the space of the Rutabaga Ranch near Willapa Bay would only allow us to keep a half a goat. More intensive animal production, such as broilers, eggs, pigs, dairy cows, all require feeds, and these require more soil and irrigation than is possible in much of Namibia. Eating local, therefore, takes on a somewhat different challenge here. From ecology and history and (we’ve heard) some perverse subsidies, much of the food in Namibia is imported from South Africa. Ecology: there’s more productive land there. History: Namibia was a protectorate of South Africa, and it’s still considered a sign of status to purchase South African products. On our first evening here, Alan went to a South African chain general store, described as “a bit like Walmart”. All the items he brought home had been imported. Since then, we have looked carefully for Namibian products: we can buy Nammilk milk (only whole; South African milk comes in different fat contents and is usually irradiated so needs no refrigeration) and yogurt (Katie particularly enjoys the sweetened fruit versions). We can buy Waldschmidt eggs from near Windhoek, and, as we’ll be teaching about chickens in a few months, we hope to visit their farm. We can buy Namibian fish, but this is apparently an unusual product for consumption in the country: only 2% of the extensive fisheries of the Benguela current are consumed within Namibia, and most of that by tourists. So, we’ve begun to try the local beef (ground, it matched the low fat content of Bud Goulter’s grass-fed beef near Willapa Bay – and all the cattle we’ve seen have been very rangy), sausage, kudu, and oryx (stuffed inside a pepper for JR’s tasty lunch today). We’ve become fans of “Fruit and Veg City” just down the street, where we buy apples, oranges, nectarines (all smaller and tangy-er than in the US), papayas (called paw-paws?), grapes, plums. F&V City prides itself on fresh local produce but includes all of southern Africa as “local”.
On Saturday 1/19 we attended our first Green Market, or Bio-Market, a sort of farmers’ market equivalent. The good part: fresh, organic, and mostly local food (exception: dried nuts and fruits, purchased from S Africa and beyond [probably, given the dried cranberries!] and packaged for sale here). The ambivalent part: 99% white for both sellers and buyers, our first time to experience this slice of Windhoek life. Booths included: homebaked bread, rusks, and crunchies (granola bars); eggs and home-slaughtered chickens and geese; vegetables such as lettuce, spinach (Namibian type), aubergine (eggplant), zucchini, patty-pan squash, maize (corn), parsley; sausage and cheeses; dried herbs; ground beef and ground game. One booth had vegetables purchased from a variety of nearby locations, including Khomasdal, which we understand is a suburb where some non-whites were resettled in the 1950s. We bought honey with comb from the only bee-keeper in Windhoek, who had suffered quite a few stings even though he reported that African honeybees are not particularly aggressive in summer when lots of flowers, especially acacia, are available. The honey is dark and pungent. We also bought prickly pear fruits, because we heard that, like Washington cherries, they are only available for a short time each year. Peel the fruits and slice the sweet, seedy inside to eat raw.
Oysters: In a way, we’re in Nambia due to oysters. There’s not much to report so far, except we first encountered them raw on the half shell at the Kalahari Sands Hotel (and casino) for Sunday brunch. They tended towards the “east coast” style (“watery”, we say on the West coast), with nothing in their guts. Alan refused to try them: I found them to be quite pleasant, slightly briny and sweet, even with a little lime squeezed over them. The brunch also included green-lipped mussels (Apparently from NZ, as their introduction has not been allowed in S. Africa or Namibia), available on the “salad bar” cooked in a sort of vinaigrette, and as an addition to a “choose your own” stirfry. The oysters must have been popular, because by the time I got to the iced section, there were only a few left.
Namibia does have an excellent combination of characteristics to produce salt: a marine coastline with tremendous evaporative solar power. The Salt Company (I kid you not) can be seen from the Salt Road between Swakopmund and Henties Bay: a conveyor belt drops salt in an outdoor pile that is several stories tall – this must be the first separation of salt from the other materials picked up from salt ponds.
It’s different!
1. Namibian pizza: soft crust with tomato sauce, mushroom and baloney pieces, cheese on top. It’s good! 2 out of 4 of our first lunches.
2. “Natural” products are difficult to find: Peanut butter and many juices contain added sugar. Soaps are full of chemical scents, and (we gasped) laundry detergent still has phosphate. The lowest amount we found at Pick and Pay was 3%, and the highest 30-40%!
3. Spinach: in southern Africa, refers to something that is much more like our chard, eaten raw in salads or cooked. Cheap and delicious! JR’s idea of heaven. For AT and little KCR, potatoes are also easily available. And a potato is still a potato.
4. Bread: There are essentially no name brands (not even Wonder bread!) Instead, each grocery/bakery has generally 3 types of sliced bread, all in very square loaves: white, brown, and wheat. Personally, I was hoping for a little more German influence – crisp crust, chewy inside. Even though the crusts are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the loaf, Katie still wants them cut off!
5. Another type of bread that’s characteristic of Namibia is brotchen (with a double dot over the “o”). These are 4-5” white rolls, sliced in half and topped with a variety of savory options open-faced. So far we’ve tasted: egg salad, cheese and tomato, and thinly-sliced smoked game with tomato and pepper. We’re pretty sure brotchen are indicative of german influence!
Food that fits the climate:
1. Stale tortilla chips that we brought from Seattle are now crispy.
2. Katie has discovered ice cream cones, best consumed in the heat of the day with big licks, a face covered in stickiness, and always just barely ahead of the drips.
3. Water: we are drinking perpetually (except for Katie, who has her own opinion about these things). Water throughout the country is potable if it comes from a tap (so we’ve heard, and it certainly seems true in Windhoek – no GI distress at all to report). Still, we appreciate the filter that we brought from the US, as it improves the taste of municipal water: we’re just not the sort to spring for bottled water.
4. Tea (and coffee): Namibians do not drink iced tea or coffee. It’s hot hot hot, even though the air is as well. In fact, if we ask for “hot tea,” we get strange looks – is that something special? different? The standard tea is 5 Roses brand, very well steeped. Rooibos, native to south Africa, is also common. As Katie has attended meetings and briefings with us, she has had many opportunities to try her practiced skills at “tea parties” with real china (under close supervision). She particularly enjoys putting in A LOT of sugar, stirring, and snitching any sugar that misses the cup and falls on the saucer.
Local food:
The bare fact of the matter is that this country is dry. All the introductory ecology textbooks are borne out here: low evapotranspiration leads to low productivity. Low productivity means it’s challenging to grow local food. You need 15 hectares of land to support a single beef cow; goats and sheep can be stocked at six times the density, but (we calculated) the space of the Rutabaga Ranch near Willapa Bay would only allow us to keep a half a goat. More intensive animal production, such as broilers, eggs, pigs, dairy cows, all require feeds, and these require more soil and irrigation than is possible in much of Namibia. Eating local, therefore, takes on a somewhat different challenge here. From ecology and history and (we’ve heard) some perverse subsidies, much of the food in Namibia is imported from South Africa. Ecology: there’s more productive land there. History: Namibia was a protectorate of South Africa, and it’s still considered a sign of status to purchase South African products. On our first evening here, Alan went to a South African chain general store, described as “a bit like Walmart”. All the items he brought home had been imported. Since then, we have looked carefully for Namibian products: we can buy Nammilk milk (only whole; South African milk comes in different fat contents and is usually irradiated so needs no refrigeration) and yogurt (Katie particularly enjoys the sweetened fruit versions). We can buy Waldschmidt eggs from near Windhoek, and, as we’ll be teaching about chickens in a few months, we hope to visit their farm. We can buy Namibian fish, but this is apparently an unusual product for consumption in the country: only 2% of the extensive fisheries of the Benguela current are consumed within Namibia, and most of that by tourists. So, we’ve begun to try the local beef (ground, it matched the low fat content of Bud Goulter’s grass-fed beef near Willapa Bay – and all the cattle we’ve seen have been very rangy), sausage, kudu, and oryx (stuffed inside a pepper for JR’s tasty lunch today). We’ve become fans of “Fruit and Veg City” just down the street, where we buy apples, oranges, nectarines (all smaller and tangy-er than in the US), papayas (called paw-paws?), grapes, plums. F&V City prides itself on fresh local produce but includes all of southern Africa as “local”.
On Saturday 1/19 we attended our first Green Market, or Bio-Market, a sort of farmers’ market equivalent. The good part: fresh, organic, and mostly local food (exception: dried nuts and fruits, purchased from S Africa and beyond [probably, given the dried cranberries!] and packaged for sale here). The ambivalent part: 99% white for both sellers and buyers, our first time to experience this slice of Windhoek life. Booths included: homebaked bread, rusks, and crunchies (granola bars); eggs and home-slaughtered chickens and geese; vegetables such as lettuce, spinach (Namibian type), aubergine (eggplant), zucchini, patty-pan squash, maize (corn), parsley; sausage and cheeses; dried herbs; ground beef and ground game. One booth had vegetables purchased from a variety of nearby locations, including Khomasdal, which we understand is a suburb where some non-whites were resettled in the 1950s. We bought honey with comb from the only bee-keeper in Windhoek, who had suffered quite a few stings even though he reported that African honeybees are not particularly aggressive in summer when lots of flowers, especially acacia, are available. The honey is dark and pungent. We also bought prickly pear fruits, because we heard that, like Washington cherries, they are only available for a short time each year. Peel the fruits and slice the sweet, seedy inside to eat raw.
Oysters: In a way, we’re in Nambia due to oysters. There’s not much to report so far, except we first encountered them raw on the half shell at the Kalahari Sands Hotel (and casino) for Sunday brunch. They tended towards the “east coast” style (“watery”, we say on the West coast), with nothing in their guts. Alan refused to try them: I found them to be quite pleasant, slightly briny and sweet, even with a little lime squeezed over them. The brunch also included green-lipped mussels (Apparently from NZ, as their introduction has not been allowed in S. Africa or Namibia), available on the “salad bar” cooked in a sort of vinaigrette, and as an addition to a “choose your own” stirfry. The oysters must have been popular, because by the time I got to the iced section, there were only a few left.
Namibia does have an excellent combination of characteristics to produce salt: a marine coastline with tremendous evaporative solar power. The Salt Company (I kid you not) can be seen from the Salt Road between Swakopmund and Henties Bay: a conveyor belt drops salt in an outdoor pile that is several stories tall – this must be the first separation of salt from the other materials picked up from salt ponds.
It’s different!
1. Namibian pizza: soft crust with tomato sauce, mushroom and baloney pieces, cheese on top. It’s good! 2 out of 4 of our first lunches.
2. “Natural” products are difficult to find: Peanut butter and many juices contain added sugar. Soaps are full of chemical scents, and (we gasped) laundry detergent still has phosphate. The lowest amount we found at Pick and Pay was 3%, and the highest 30-40%!
3. Spinach: in southern Africa, refers to something that is much more like our chard, eaten raw in salads or cooked. Cheap and delicious! JR’s idea of heaven. For AT and little KCR, potatoes are also easily available. And a potato is still a potato.
4. Bread: There are essentially no name brands (not even Wonder bread!) Instead, each grocery/bakery has generally 3 types of sliced bread, all in very square loaves: white, brown, and wheat. Personally, I was hoping for a little more German influence – crisp crust, chewy inside. Even though the crusts are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the loaf, Katie still wants them cut off!
5. Another type of bread that’s characteristic of Namibia is brotchen (with a double dot over the “o”). These are 4-5” white rolls, sliced in half and topped with a variety of savory options open-faced. So far we’ve tasted: egg salad, cheese and tomato, and thinly-sliced smoked game with tomato and pepper. We’re pretty sure brotchen are indicative of german influence!
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Exploring Windhoek
I find it amusing that we so recently moved out of our apartment in
The apartment has an amazing number of appliances: toaster, coffee maker, tea kettle, beaters, television, even a clothes washer, but no clock. I’m not actually sure if the time is 3 in the afternoon or 2, as I write this. I wonder if this is a subtle hint to be aware of African time. Regardless, the days are long – in hours and because we’re still exhausted from travel and from unfamiliar heat.
This morning we spent about 4 hours walking north into a busy urban shopping area, where we began to pick up the few essential items that were too heavy to pack: sunscreen, antibiotic cream, dish soap, hand soap. Katie played for a while in the Zoo-park, which hasn’t had a zoo for decades, but has a fine playground. We had been warned that they’re a bit dangerous: all we discovered is that the metal parts are very hot in the sun (especially as Katie had bare legs), and some of the wooden boards are missing. It was more than made up for by the children there, who asked Katie to “come and play,” then picked her up and had her join in their adventures with a galloping 5-seated horse. Yesterday, we spent some time with 12-year-old Lisa, who is visiting next door. She was totally excited about a gift of stickers, fascinated by the animal flashcards, and amazed at how many toys Katie has (in fact, we only brought out a fraction of Katie’s full complement, which is dwarfed by the toys we left in
Arrival
It is a long way from Seattle to Namibia... and yet short. On the last day of 2007, we left the damp chill rain that never seems to dry, and we arrived a year later, having weathered 3 plane flights by dint of Katie playing with other kids on the first leg, sleeping on the second and third.
On the last leg from
On the drive from the airport into
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