The road trip my wife Jules and I undertook in the spring of 2004 wasn’t meant to end up as a travel book. It was planned – with the Namibian Tourism Board’s Johannesburg office – as a series of magazine articles covering the country from its southern tip to its eastern exit.
From Day One, however, as we approached the dusty Kalahari town of Hotazel, it started shaping up as something special. As we continued to Namaqualand, 30 years of memories returned: past exploits, a murder case of biblical proportions, an old man and his donkeys and a diamond town in the misty scrub desert on the shores of a rather wild Atlantic Ocean.
But the main course – this vast, dry cathedral called Namibia – invoked even more sensations of times gone by, of pure space and the joy of road travel in a simple farmer’s bakkie, not always staying “five-star” but relishing each new day in this gorgeous blonde land.
Yes, it’s true. You don’t need a 4x4 muscle machine to travel through the best bits of Namibia. And if you do come here in a four-wheel-drive, make sure you behave responsibly. It’s heartbreaking at times to see how many trashy tourists have left their skidmarks on this old country – and to know that most of them were left by our own compatriots. Some of those tracks in the lichen fields have been there for decades, and they’re nothing more than eyesores.
We also found that reading up on the various facets of Namibia helped us tremendously in getting a handle on the country, on peeping below the surface where its 1,8 million-odd people live and work for their existences each day. Our reading list follows at the end of the book – but there are scores of other relevant books we have yet to delve into. Namibia has always been a fertile ground for the writer and the photographer.
As such, A Drink of Dry Land is a simple account of a man and his wife driving to and through Namibia and having a couple of adventures along the way. Forgive an old national serviceman’s honest outrage near the end of the book – it just had to find some utterance and I thought it was appropriate here. You can’t be expected to relish the present-day miracle of most of southern Africa without occasionally recalling some of the bitter flavours of the past.
When we’re on the road, Jules is the mad genius fact-finder, researcher and keeper of the journal. She spends more than two hours a day fattening the “road book” with trusty information, interviews, background and impressions. Her journal has become this book.
Me, I’m the photographer, driver and drinker of single malt whisky on safari – at the safe end of the day, of course. The voice of A Drink of Dry Land is a blend of Jules and Chris. We invite you to take the third seat in the bakkie. Sit back and enjoy the ride …
October 2005
Johannesburg