Namibia tells its story in colours. Each season paints the landscape with its own paintbox, transforming greens to golds and coppers, and pale yellows to ochres and reds.
On the route north from Windhoek towards Otjiwarongo, I’ve watched the same swathe of land year after year, season after season and love watching the way the landscape transforms. Termite mounds with the backdrop of the Omatako Mountains set the scene.
It’s a continual magic show. Nature doing its thing. After a dry winter of browns and parched sand, towards September the clouds start to build, teasing the thirsty earth. With the first rainshower, the fresh smell of water meeting earth permeates the air and can change the mind of a non-believer with a scent that is like no other. During a fleeting spring the ground is carpeted with the yellow duwweltjie flowers that emerge quickly, trailing their greenery behind them. The hoped-for wet summer follows when the long green grass shoots from the ground, blows in the wind with fluffy seed heads and shines in the late afternoon light. Intense thunderstorms rage and lightning flashes over the countryside, leaving puddles behind them and urging rivers to flow to the sea. And then the dramatic rainstorms are gone, as suddenly as they appeared. The clouds clear, a blue sky dotted with a few lone clouds returns, and after a brief autumn, a winter chill settles in the air for the months of June and July, until the temperatures start to rise again in August.
It's a cycle that keeps me fascinated. At the end of summer, I watch the tall golden grass harvested to be used as fodder in the dry months. And I watch the pattern repeat itself in a cycle of wonder, with all the wisdom of Nature’s ways.
I also witness the cycles of droughts and floods, Namibia being a land where the ‘seven years of plenty and the seven lean years’ is often a reality.
Once again this year, I watched the land transform after a celebratory rainy season that ended a long drought.
Over the decades, I’ve stopped on the roadside and captured the moments that show the wonderful cycles of nature that keep us travellers amazed and enchanted, and we’re privileged in Namibia to be able to travel year-round. They are the pics from the road that speak of Namibia’s seasons and their colours, wet and dry, heat and cold, and always the promise of rain.
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