In search of wilderness

Are we always in search of something other than ourselves?

Why is it that society builds itself into a huge necessary machine of convenience and survival but then individuals go off in search of simplicity? The first time I found myself in the desert I felt something like deja vu, a feeling that I had been there before, a homecoming of sorts. I couldn't shake it. As I soaked up the heat, the golden dust and acacia trees, the kopje and the small lush green plants that sprung up in the driest of places, I felt a deep connection reignited, a familiarity. As though all I was seeing was a treasured memory from childhood or some distant life. It was recognition. The strangest moment of this recognition was during a track, in which we were looking for signs of elephant and rhino. I saw a pack of baboons, loping away from the loud motor of our car and the swirling dust it kicked up, and felt as though I had been in that moment before, I had seen the sight before, it was like a memory thrown up in sepia.

Seeing wild elephants was even more overwhelming. Watching the silent grey ghosts blend into their desert environment was more powerful than recognition. I was flooded with a feeling I couldn't explain or describe at first. Later when I thought about it, I realised it was a feeling I had once had in a very old church, which prior to being a church had been a pagan sight of worship. I felt something stir in the depths of my bones, something which made me feel tiny and insubstantial yet at the same time a solid part of history and place. A feeling of awe and interconnection. I have never been a religious person, I would rather believe in science and nature than a man-made god, yet the feeling I had in that church was best described by a religious word: reverence. For me, it had nothing to do with god, but everything to do with a realisation that something beautiful and inexplicable existed outside of my own small experience. In this case, the wonder of a herd of African desert-adapted elephants moving their way through a landscape they knew inside out, a place they could fight for survival in, by living completely within and of the land. It made me realise I live in a bubble, a small boxed world (a box house, a box vehicle, a box office ...). Everything I use is packaged and seemingly isolated - the connection from food to plate is lost. This is civilisation and a wonderful thing - I don't have to endure burning heat or freezing cold, find shelter, hunt food, make fire. This is a gift beyond belief. Yet did we lose something along the way? A connection with nature?

All this I wondered as I felt the calm of the herd silent as mountains, except for the crunching of leaves and the gentle rumbling as they communicated with one another. This world, so far from the one I was born into, this world seemed like home.

The first sight of the desert

Leaving the last of the so-called civilisation behind, we followed the road from Swakopmund to Damaraland. The landscape at first sight is alien, it looks utterly inhospitable, an endless loop of flat white scrubland with nothing to distract the eye from monotony. All I can think of are words such as 'barren', 'empty, 'bleak', 'hostile' and realised I was frightened of what I had got myself into. The desert. Magical words for me since I was a child, speaking of adventure and spectres in the sandstorms, beautiful palaces in the mirages. 'Desert' from the Latin desertum. English language being what it is, there are three meanings associated to the word - a barren, uninhabited place; to abandon, leave empty or alone; something that is deserved, in particular a punishment ("He got his just deserts."). I had always imagined the desert to be romantic, something about the space and solitude, the wild beauty. This was very different from what I had conjured up in my mind's eye. Nothing changed in the four hours we covered the straight, white, gravel road, until we finally reached Uis, a small, once prosperous mining town. Uis is the last stop before we really hit the desert and is home to the last vestiges of electricity, shops, houses built of brick. The camp will have none of this.

There is a mountain shading the town, with large white letters spelling out the name of the place, almost as a parody of the glittering and wealthy American district. This is distinctly not Hollywood. It has the feel of a ghost town with drifting groups of stullified people touting the semi-precious stones which made the name of this place worth displaying on a mountain. Signs are strung up everywhere encouraging tourists not to buy from these men. I was unsettled by this - someone explained to me that these men sold cheap bits of jewellery to tourists and then got drunk on the proceeds, and in order to encourage sustainable tourism one shouldn't buy their wares. Yet I couldn't help but wonder what these people who had been presumably put out of work by the closure of the mines were supposed to do. And I also couldn't help but notice how all of these 'drunk' touts were black, and all of the shop owners who strung up the signs were white.

Jo'berg to Windhoek

Johannesburg airport, awaiting a domestic flight to Windhoek. Sat in a basic, simple flight gate by an open door to the outside world, which is beautiful, glorious, and the vivid blue of not-England. The official on gate duty is singing in a beautiful, operatic voice. Strange thought that I am truly an alien here. Sat with two girls on the flight, one an excitable American going to Durban to volunteer for a Church group, the other a beautiful German medical student who was working her way around the world's hospitals (Sydney, Switzerland, Cape Town). The German asked me what D-Day is, referring to an in-flight programme. The American glowingly quoted passages from the bible. I am light-headed and wobbly-limbed. In a small amount of shock that here I am in South Africa, about to be transported to the Namibian desert.

Later. Namibia. In transition. A night in Windhoek and then a bus to Swakopmund to meet the volunteer leaders. Taxi ride into the city through starkly beautiful hill ranges, greens and browns and red. Brightly painted buildings. Mix of German, African and English in the landscape and architecture. Windhoek is very run-down and bleak. A hostel which horribly reminds me of school: groups of young beautiful people flirting and laughing in their cliques, whilst I hover between them, feeling excluded, too gauche. Feel strangely under- and overwhelmed by the alien nature of everything, the fact that I know no-one and nothing, the early dark (it is winter in Nambia). Homesick. Waiting for the desert.