Let there be time…always // Namibe

The Namib Desert’s main characteristic is its inability to leave anyone indifferent.

I can’t say this any other way.

The fascination seems to start in the imagination of those who wish to know it.

At least, that is how it happened.

As soon as we arrived and before we entered the desert, we wanted to explore the town of Namibe.

Peaceful, by the sea, it is difficult to believe that it is surrounded only by desert and sea. It preserves some imposing colonial buildings, with a highlight on the vintage Cine-Estúdio, an architectural work signed by Botelho de Vasconcelos, a futuristic building never completed, possibly from the 1960s, whose first impression reminds one of Oscar Niemeyer. Creative times.

We wanted to try right away, on the spot, the tasty crab from Namibe.

It tasted like the sea. It had the taste of the desired arrivals. Finally.

The food is inexorably linked to sensations that last from wherever we have been happy.

Namibe, whose name has its origins in the local-language word namib, means «vast place». The desert is indeed a gigantic 80,900 km², extending for 1600 km along the Atlantic coast of southern Angola down through southern Namibia.

We entered the desert late at night, unable to rely on our sight. We used our hearing because we heard the beat of the waves, and our sense of smell because we could smell the sea, and our imagination, irrigated with adrenaline, took us beyond the next dune.

The lack of sight heightens the imagination, and the desert was that which imagination dictated.

We arrived at Flamingo Lodge, where we would stay for a few days.

Completely isolated, it has a ‘roots’ but comfortable environment that everywhere in the middle of the desert sought out by surfers, sports fishermen or merely desert lovers should have.

Here, we feel time slow down…

At sunrise, we have an invigorating breakfast, looking at the sea, with our adrenaline rising, as we just want to hit the road.

Will we see a wave that is 3 km long? And seals, dolphins and whales? Beaches with sand dyed purple by seaweed?

And this time (again), last night’s over-active imagination lives up to the reality.

The jeep drives along the shore, playing with the water, seagulls flying all around us, crying, as excited as we are, and I knew, there, at that exact moment, the taste of freedom.

We found the Vanesa Seafood wreck, stranded an immeasurable time ago, reminding us that all that desert had once been sea.

And the dunes…

The dunes were everything we had been promised. Fine golden sand, undulating so perfectly that they seem to have been styled the night before by a patient stylist whose function was attributed to him centuries before.

I sigh.

How does so much nothing form an empire of sand, and allow unique landscapes, nothing equal to the earlier ones?

We became lost looking around, without being able to contain the astonishment and the smiles, dazzled by the sun shining on the sand and by the blue sky, clearer than anywhere else.

The Canyon seemed to me the perfect place for an opera in the middle of the desert, but I don’t know if the sand mounds, like monumental rocks, would support the intensity of an aria.

The Arc, an oasis in the desert, contains three lakes, the middle one the most famous, the existence of naturally formed arcs in the sandstone giving this heavenly place its name.

At the time without water, completely dry, a plaque indicating that diving is prohibited challenges the limits of our imagination.

We have to return, we promise, to see the lake and, who knows, to make a prohibited dive on a night with a full moon.

Time does not slow down. It goes on, indifferent.

With a heart full of so much desert, I find myself back at my desk, looking through the window. Skin tanned from the desert sun, remnants of sand in my luggage, more tales to tell, I smile, happy in the knowledge that there is still much more to live, and to discover.

May there be time, always.