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Mission Accomplished!
- October 27, 2009
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My Laundry has had a chance to be returned to me smelling of crisp sun, but the experience of walking though the Namibian desert for the past 20 days will take a lot longer to wash out of me!
Yesterday, at around 2pm, we arrived at our “boutique” hotel in Swkopmund. After walking an average of 2miles and hour, the bus ride at 100km/hr was welcome, if a bit surreal. For a moment we all wondered why we had walked at such physical expense when such wonders of engineering were available to us!!??
We all filled our first hours back doing the things we missed most. Some went straight to the bar or restaurant without changing or showering. I went straight to my room. Unpacked my bags, tried to shake a month’s worth of sand out of everything, sent the remaining pile to get washed and then spent an hour washing, polishing, clipping and primping until the girl in me emerged once again.
The first thing I ate was a slice of bread smothered with butter and sprinkled with salt. I was chatting and laughing away as we waited to have our dinner. The chilled butter met the warmth of my tongue and started to melt around it and the sensation was so overwhelming that in mid discussion my eyes welled up with tears and I cried like a father meeting his newborn son. I am sure there must be easier ways of being reminded of the wonder of the world we live in…. but I cannot say that I am sorry for this way.
On the Seventh of October we walked onto the restricted Diamond Area, eager for every step forward and secretly hopeful that we would find a diamond in the rough at our feet. Quickly the focus moved away from searching the ground at our feet for shiny stones to dodging the fierce waves that collided with the steep dunes or placing our foot on a flat of the knobbly and hard salt flats that pierced or quickly blistering feet.
The salt pan floods with sea water and then breaks, buckles and cracks under the fierce African sun to resemble the polar ocean in miniature and for hours I become the size of an ant as I imagine walking across it with my sled.
The first week saw us waking at 6am, trying desperately to battle the aches and exhaustion enough to dress, eat and load our still heavy packs up by 8. We navigated inland to cut off peninsulas but then found ourselves away from the water we needed to survive so would cut back inland and make camp by 7pm. Five more hours of pumping water in the dark awaited us before being able to sleep those precious few hours that were not enough to heal our blisters or our bruised bones.
An efficient router system soon emerged and we managed to ensure that everyone got a break from pumping water or collecting water from the sea to filter for long enough to eat their dinner. Our expedition food became our only pleasure of the day. We would savour
every spoonful and then scrape the sides of the empty packet repeatedly, as if to will it to produce more.
The two most painful moments of the day were putting my boots on in the morning, and then taking them off at night. In the morning they needed to be coaxed back into the confines of the tight boot that pressed in unison on all the raw blisters. In the evening the weight of the pack multiplied by the miles and hours meant that even after prying my boots off, the relief would not be felt for at least half an hour as my feet continued to throb and ache as if a lead pipe was being whacked against the soles of my feet.
Every hour we would rest. Removing our packs for those 15 minutes and eating a snack was our rhythm and the way a bite at a time the entire coast was conquered.
After every break we all looked like the walking dead as we eased our feet back into walking and gave our bodies time to release enough endorphins to numb the pain.
As our packs got lighter and the mileage we needed to cover diminished we were able to look around and love our environment instead of just gazing on it as the enemy and preparing our body for the pain it would inflict. Not needing to cut inland so much we started to spend more time on the coast, discover its wrecks and make friends with its animals.
Our team of 14 became a nomadic tribe. We moved forward with patience, care and compassion. The simplicity of our task was a joy… but possibly because we all knew it was only for a short while.
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