Kalahari Dreaming
20 July 2011
I spent the past 10 days in the Kalahari with my parents – on what was for me one of the best holidays of my life. I feel so privileged, at this age, to be able to spend quality time with my parents who I respect, love and can call friends. The slideshow and text below are fragments of those few days. I edited quickly without too much consideration, just initial emotion and feeling and jotted down these words on the last night of the trip in front of the campfire at Verneukpan. The music – a track called Paper Airplanes - is care of Alison Krauss and Union Station – which was on repeat in the car stereo…
Light – grey like discarded fire coals in the morning, luminous in the evening. Hair falling in front of my face, highlighted, landscape moving past the Landrover window as I lie, watching. It passes. Reminiscing, memories, reflections. In windows. And along with the whistling. Age and time past. Loved ones with us, and without. Wheelchair spore in the gravel. And those of a dung beetle, a scorpion and a lynx. Skinned and for the dogs. Life in the Kalahari. Survival of the fittest. Bibles and bullets. The campfire splutters. Coffee and rusks in bed. Hot water bottles and hearing campfire talk as I fall asleep. Misted morning windows and vistas out of the back window. Caked with mud. Sand between toes, wind in my hair, roof racking. Sunshine. Sunshine. Happiness without a shower. Is it possible? Yes. 10-day-old jeans. Smile. Bent over searching the sand for evidence of people who came before us. Clouds that appear from nowhere. Rising without yeast from nowhere. The silence is deafening. The blackened kettle whistles. And spits water into the unsuspecting fire. It’s angry. Tinfoil, bellows, puffs of a pipe. The moon is as orange as the sand. Perfection. Almost too much.