TSUMKWE

At the end of June I left South Africa and the World Cup to go on a trip to Namibia with my friend Phil and his brother Jonah. After a couple of nights in Windhoek, where we rendezvoused with the anthropologist Richard Lee and a group of researchers, we hit the road north towards Tsumkwe and the Kalahari Desert. Tsumkwe is a small town in northeastern Namibia about fifty kilometers from the border of Botswana, and has been the hub from which Richard Lee has been conducting his research over the last few decades. It was an eight hour drive from Windhoek with the last 250 kilometers being on a dirt road, and I'm pretty sure that the one paved intersection in 'town' was the only one for hundreds of kilometers in each direction. Tsumkwe's electricity comes from a generator that runs from 5 AM to 10 PM, and also cuts off for a few hours in between lunch and dinner. It gets really dark after the power cuts out at night, but man alive is the star gazing amazing - no light pollution! It's a very small town, surrounded by a lot of desert, but it didn't take me long to realize that there were a lot of things to do....