Three weeks in Namibia

Namibia is the quiet country.

Other countries in Africa, such as Mali and Kenya, have been called loud because of their people, their, music, their cultures. But not Namibia. The thing that gets you is the stunning silence. Make your way just a few metres from crowds and you’ll hear nothing. No music, no talking, no singing, no sound at all.

And it’s jarring.

Being in the open for the first time and hearing absolute silence is almost scary. I felt it while standing on top of a dune in Sossusvlei, the large area of sand dunes in the Namib Desert along the Atlantic coast. I had been walking, huffing and puffing, struggling against the sand, when I stopped. My breathing quieted, I stopped humming a song and the orange sand stopped its shifting.

I was a bit away from our camp and my dad was 100 metres away. I heard nothing. Not talking, not an overhead airplane, not even a bird chirping. Of course, I had heard near-absolute silence before, but I had never heard an absolute vacuum of noise outside of my bedroom.

The only thing that brought me out of the trance-like state of hearing nothingness was a bird chirping. I heard an oryx rustling around in some bushes. A mouse ran through the sand in front of me.

I realized the desert was alive around me. I didn’t know how, since the riverbed was dry, it hadn’t rained significantly since 2011, and I was standing in the middle of a sandy desert with no fresh water for kilometres, but it was alive.

This feeling doesn’t just come in the desert — in most parts of Namibia you can find a crushing quietness broken only by the crunching of grass, the chirps of birds, or the huff of elephants.

In the north, the roaring Okavango seems to quiet down to just a trickle and on the coast, the fog cloaks you and pushes the crashing waves into the background with the soft patter of feet on sand being the solitary soundtrack.

Even in busy national parks, when the clatter of diesel pickups dies down, an unbroken silence reigns supreme. In my three weeks in Namibia, I felt the alienation and loneliness that silence brings almost every day, and was swept away in wonderment every time — nowhere else in the wilds of the world do I think such a feeling can be found.

Namibia has the unique quality of plunging you into the depths of feeling alone and the epitome of solitude and then yanking you back out into a state of consciousness where you realize just exactly where you are and what’s around you.

But it’s different from other empty places I’ve been to because, unlike the empty and wild expanses of my native California, you aren’t pulled back into a reality filled with humans, but one filled with animals and nature. In California, you can feel alone but not as completely engulfed by the isolation that is felt in Namibia as you know that there is a busy freeway close by, or there is a plane flying overhead or you hear some people coming towards you on the trail.

In Namibia, it’s nothing like that. Silence becomes absolute and magical.

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First online Sept. 2, 2016, 3:28 a.m.

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