Namibia cont’d

We are now in Swakopmund, our “last stop” for civilisation. Four blog entries will be posted from here, and I’ll check up on my email as well.

The Score, so far

So far, we have:

Springbok (a tasty little deer-like creature)
Gemsbok
Oryx
Mountain Zebra
Ostrich
Baboons
Great White Sharks
Southern Right Whales
and countless types of lizards (including the ones that switch feet on the hot hot sand), beetles (including ones that stand on their heads to catch moisture & ones that drum the ground to call mates), scorpions, ants, ant lions, turtles, and more…

And have spent most of our time on the coasts and in the desert. We have more desert tomorrow (we head from the Namib into the Kalahari, which stretches from here to Angola. We have (today) crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, so it is officially hot. Unlike in the subtropic climate we were in before, which was, um, hot.

For real.

Current thoughts and reflections
I’ve had a lot of time on the truck to think. I mean a *lot* of time, and it’s been good, overall. I did listen to a couple of audiobooks and definitely did some zoning out dozing while staring at the side of the road passing by… But a lot of what’s come out is my career thoughts and directions, some of which has to do with the current market climate and some of which just has to do with lessons learned, strategies for getting where I want to go using what I have, etc.

Today, I decided to revisit Matt from (Re)Bar‘s List. As he told me at Ra & Xtna’s wedding, he got to making a living running (Re)Bar by making this list. I made a list, which spanned big things (I want to create positive chagne in the world) to little things (I want to ride my bike to work), and that’s what got me to Oxford. I kept thinking that I should revisit it, and I have. It’s been enlightening to look at some of the positions I’d applied for but hadn’t really wanted (and have turned down, in some cases… perhaps not the right thing to do in this market, but I am little if not goal-oriented) with my new list in mind. It’s also been very good to re-examine some of what I do want to do and start to re-think my own “value proposition” in terms of my list. So that’s good.

The Photos
What’s one of my blog posts without some photos, preferably without me in them?

Sunrise, sunset… Sunrise, Sunset. Many early mornings. This is the sunrise from Dune 45 in the Namib Desert. A rough and *cold* 130m dune climb before the sunrise, but worth it.

Another Canyon, another sunet, this time Nick & I climbed back up…

The next of the weaverbird. They keep building these until they collapse, and then they start over. There’s a whole ecosystem going on in here with a small hawk and some wasps that live here, protecting the weaverbird from snakes.