A change in the weather (and some more food comments)

Latitudinally, much of Namibia is tropical – we’ve passed the Tropic of Capricorn on a few trips to the south. Still, we’ve definitely experienced seasonal changes. In 2008, the summer rainy season was shifted later than normal, beginning in late-January and lasting until May. We personally experienced these late rains around 7 May at Swakopmund and 26 May at Etosha. Flamingos breed in the Etosha “pan”, a large saline body of water whose level fluctuates dramatically with precipitation and evaporation. The literature indicates that flamingos leave the coast in December to breed and return in April. This year, we watched flocks of honking pink birds fly north from Walvis Bay and the Saltworks in March, tracking the late start of the rains. They were inland until at least September, but probably didn’t breed successfully, as the pan had too much water: flamingos need a stable level so they can build mud nests rising out of the water, providing some protection from water-wary predators. The late rains were nonetheless torrential, and the northern part of the country flooded, resulting in poor crop production and emergency food deliveries.

By mid-April in Namibia, a sense of sadness is pervasive as the landscape changes from vibrant lush green to its drier hues. Stipagrostis bushmens grass has long nodding seed heads with feathery plumes, so abundant that the landscape turns silver, and the plumes accumulate before the wind in piles like small snowdrifts. Many of the desert plants seem not to be tied to the duration of the rainy season. They germinate with rain; they complete their life cycle with fog; and they fruit and dry up. So the landscape changed color even before the rainy season ended this year. Still, there were enough plants still flowering in May to keep JR’s parents busy with species identification while they visited!

Some of the plants that grow during the rainy season were worth sampling – given the history of hunter-gatherer societies in this region, we know there must be things to eat (in addition to the spiny, toxic ones that have evolved means of protecting their hard-won growth against herbivory). We saw fields of wild watermelons throughout the country, from the highlands around Windhoek to the wild lands of Etosha to the border of the Namib Desert. These melons grow slightly larger than softball-sized, and they look simply luscious as the landscape dries up, like green and gold packages of life-saving moisture. They lasted much longer than we would have expected, and in our travels we asked about their natural history: We heard that the melons can be very bitter, but that kudu and gemsbok will bite into them as other resources become scarce. At Namib-Rand, Mr. Klein collected several on our tour of the reserve and said that some plants produce bitter fruit, but others taste quite nice. The ones he selected were on the “nice-tasting” end of the spectrum, a cucumber taste crossed with watermelon consistency, harboring enormous seeds that are probably also edible if prepared correctly. At Treesleeper, with the Bushmen, we ate sweet berries, which tasted like tamarind but were mostly husk, seed, and a little fruity essence.

We missed one natural Namibian delicacy – not a plant, but a fungus. In February and March, as we drove the B-roads between Windhoek and the coast, we regularly saw people standing by the side of the road with white mushrooms as big as their heads. We were still a little dubious about food safety at this point, so never stopped, but in late April we learned from several Namibian friends that the mushrooms taste amazing as steaks sauted in butter. We should have stopped and paid no more than N$30 for one, as long as it was treated properly and not held upside down, which causes dirt to fall into the gills. In such a dry country, mushrooms are pretty rare, but these grow on termite mounds because these mound-building termites farm fungus. The mycelia send up fruiting bodies when there’s rain.

This year’s winter was not as cold as we’d been warned to expect, even at elevation in Windhoek. We never used our heaters in the apartment and never awoke to frost, although we did pass many people bundled in puffy jackets, or selling gloves on the street. Winter usually brings east winds on the coast. These hot winds are caused by freezing temperatures in the mountains, which set up a pressure differential with the coast. As the air moves from high (cold) to low (warm) pressure, it also drops in elevation, and the air heats up from this adiabatic change. When the air reaches the coast, it can be 40C, driving desert sand before it at such velocity that it sand-blasts paint off cars and knocks small children off cliffs (this latter in theory – we never tested it). The hot air is also essential for drying out the guano on the big platform constructed above one of the salt pans. Usually, the guano is “harvested” in June, but this year the process didn’t start until September. Once again, it’s proving to be a weird year - the east winds were late and infrequent.

In Namibia, the country burns in August. In general, we’ve tried to avoid driving at night in a country where the wildlife is larger than our Kombi, and the wildlife habitat comes up to the edge of the (dark, narrow, 2-lane) road. But on a couple of August nights, we were traveling after sunset through scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Pitch black. Red flames licking through low bush. Lines of fire stretching into the air as they moved up hillsides. Thick smoke. We have heard that some of these fires are set on purpose, because they flush game, eliminate accumulated grass litter, and open up space for new vegetation growth. Indeed, we have seen green blades appear in burned-over areas. Some of the fires are probably natural or unintentional: the landscape is so dry by late winter that it seems poised to combust.
In Namibia, spring arrives in September. Despite the ongoing dry weather, some of the Acacia trees flower, and there’s a heady sweetness in the air. From our 7th floor apartment, Windhoek looks like a patchwork of purple, because all the introduced (from Australia/NZ?) Jacaranda trees are covered in purple blossoms. Historically, spring was the “little rainy season,” but the recent trend has been that Namibia receives less and less of its annual rainfall during this season. We have heard October called “suicide month”, the hottest month of the year, when clouds start gathering after months of blue-sky, dry weather. The farmers think that these clouds might drop some rain and end the seasonal drought, filling their catchments and growing a bit of new vegetation for their stock. But usually all they get is clouds, not rain. This year, however, we’ve witnessed a little rain as October ends, including unprecedented sprinkles at Swakopmund and 40 mm in a night in Windhoek. We wonder what this signals for the ocean, which is roiling around with odd winds and high production, and there may be another sulfide eruption in store…. This time, if the toxic ocean materializes, we hope to be out on the water of Walvis Bay to study it intensively first hand.