Into the Northwest

It’s been an especially weird few weeks.

Good weird, bad weird, I’m-at-a-complete-loss-for-words weird.

Honestly, I’m a little bit stumped about what to write. So, I will just gloss over the bad weird and say school has been rather tough, as of late.

So, let’s move on to the freakishly surreal and crazed. This past weekend Ashley, who is another volunteer, and I went on an impromptu journey to The Middle of Nowhere with a friend from Opuwo, his father, and their cohorts. Like I previously suggested, it was a bizarre weekend. We were driving for pretty much three days straight. We drove out of town, then way out of town, then we entered Tatoine to visit the sand people (where are my Star Wars fans), and finally we fell off the face of the Earth.

Actually, we drove to the far Northwest corner of Namibia, to the Kunene River. You could practically ride a crocodile into Angola. Because that happens.

If you were to ask me where exactly we were or what we were doing there, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Mostly because I did ask and was consistently given a vague and generally unhelpful answer. Luckily, it honestly didn’t matter to me where I was. Generally speaking, I never know completely what’s going on around me at any point in my life. So, nothing new.

Allow me to describe the experience in short, incoherent, and badly formed sentences (because that is all I can manage right now). 

It was ungodly hot. We drove in one humongous truck and one less humongous truck. I fell in a hole. We belted out American Top 40, and I bobbled around to trance music in a way that resembled a drunk panda. I dropped a tire on my toe. At one point, I lost a shoe. Ashley also lost a shoe. We drank lots of fluids. We occasionally ate. We mined for rocks. I slept in a blanket on the sand (the Blanket Burrito is my preferred method of sleeping outside. It wards off scorpions). I danced on rocks. I showered in the river. We drank river water. I probably have worms. We got stopped by the police. We did not get arrested. We did not get eaten by the crocodillas, which is what my learners call crocodiles and which was also apparently an actual concern. But we did see giraffes. I was carried across the desert by Ashley because I did not have shoes (thanks, Ash.). The car broke down, and we got stuck several times.

We got back to Opuwo completely haggard, bumped, bruised, and dehydrated. But I will probably do it again.

All of you, my beautiful people

Put down the National Geographic magazine, and be ashamed. Because you should be on a plane to Namibia right now. I swear it’s possible to do it in more luxury, if you so choose. Just go.

(And if you do come, bring me Mexican food, please.)