Namibia. Land of Contrast (Mini Curio)

Author: Peter Joyce
Struik Publishers
Cape Town, 2005
ISBN: 9781770071827
Paperback, 21x17 cm, 32 pages, throughout colour photo

Description:

This attractive Booklet is an ideal give-away to animate relatives, friends or partners to join a journey to Namibia, one of Africa’s top tourist destinations. The photographs clearly show the architectural beauty, the people, wildlife and magnificent landscapes: The dune deserts, rugged Fish River Canyon, forbidding Skeleton Coast and game-filled plains of Etosha.

About the Author:

Peter Joyce is an experienced travel writer with a perceptive understanding of Botswana’s historical and current issues. He lived and worked in Zimbabwe for 24 years, during which time he edited a national consumer magazine, became an editor for ‘Books of Zimbabwe’ in Bulawayo, and was editor-in-chief at College Press in Harare.

City of citadels:

Windhoek, Namibia’s capital started life in 1890 as a German Imperial outpost and grew, quietly and with some stylishness, into a graceful little metropolis of wide and unhurried thoroughfares, a 170000-strong, culturally diverse citizenry and an architectural character in which the modern blends happily with the elegant German colonial style.

Many of the older buildings are visually striking, as well as historic: the first white settlers erected a romantic, Beau Geste-type fort named Alte Feste, today part of the State Museum, and a number of other imposing structures that confer a picturesquely European flavour to an otherwise African city.

Among these are the so-called Tintenpalast, or ‘palace of ink’ (it served as the headquarters of the early administration), three other castle-like residences and the tall-steepled, charmingly gabled Evangelical Lutheran church, or Christuskirche.

Windhoek lies well inland, on the high central plateau 350 km from the Atlantic seaboard. The countryside here looks bleak, even forbidding in its parched ruggedness, but appearances are deceptive: the land is in fact kind enough, sustaining cattle ranches and vast spreads that nurture flocks of commercially valuable karakul sheep, and the surrounding hills embrace several warm mineral springs.

Indeed the 19th-century Herero and Nama residents knew the area as Aigams, which translates as ‘waters of fire’. The region also has its lushness, its patches of greenery, seen at their most refreshing in the gardens of the city itself (above), and in the Daan Viljoen game reserve, a 5000-hectare sanctuary for mountain zebra, blue wildebeest, red hartebeest and an impressive array of birds. The latter tend to congregate around the reserve’s pleasant, tree-fringed dam, an ideal place for picnicking.

Herero tradition is still much in evidence in the Windhoek area, most obviously in the colourful costumes worn by some of the women, and in the ‘ethnic’ wares - among them these exquisitely crafted dolls (above left) - displayed on sidewalks and in the curio shops. [...]