Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Circa 75,000 members of our own species live in Swakopmund, and a great many more visit, as tourists.
Below, you are looking at its beachfront, as viewed from a hotel window at 7. 20 am on 20 November 2022.
Namibia’s third largest city – and its one “seaside resort” – is sandwiched between the chilly, easternmost waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the westernmost dunes of the Namib Desert’s “sand sea”, whence I took the featured image at 5. 11 pm on the previous day.
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As last updated on 02 January 2025, on www.WA.gov.au:
If you are thinking about owner-building your own home or small commercial building, you will need to have been granted owner-builder approval from the Building Services Board before you can be granted a building permit from your local government authority.
Indian bureaucracy is globally-notorious, but in at least some parts of Rajasthan, the “DIY housing sector” is subject to very much less “regulation” than is Western Australia’s.
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The mammalian world’s biggest family – the rodents – includes six genera which (collectively) contain at least 110 living species of “gerbil”
Some of them – on their own turf, at least – are more commonly known as “jirds”.
Jirds are members of the genus Meriones.
As is generally true of gerbils, jirds live in deserts, and other “arid” or “semi-arid” places.
Unsurprisingly, most are nocturnal; but not the Indian desert jird, Meriones hurrianae.
One Indian blogger has described this post’s highly atypical hero as the tiny musketeer of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.
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The Thar Desert’s other name accords with reality: it is India’s biggest desert, although 15% of it is in Pakistan.
Most of it – around 60% – is in Rajasthan; the Thar Desert occupies a little more than 60% of India’s largest state, by area
According to most sources, around 40% of Rajasthan’s human population live within the Thar Desert.
Rajasthan is far from India’s most populous state, but it is currently home to more than 80 million humans.
Unsurprisingly, the Thar Desert is “our” planet’s most densely populated desert, by a large margin.
It is also remarkably rich in wildlife.
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Today’s chapter in this series’ “wet sands” section features a fast-scuttling crab, on a northern Namibian beach,
Here, rain hardly ever falls, but fogs often roll in from the cold Atlantic Ocean, and thence into the western section of the Namib Desert.
Q: a terrible place to be shipwrecked?
A: yes…but this shoreline is far from “lifeless”.
The waters that lap it teem with life; human population density is among the lowest on “our” planet, but the local seafood is abundant and excellent.
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“Rippled sand + moving water + rock” is one of my favourite natural “recipes”, especially when other humans and human-made structures are not part of the “mix”… or are only a tiny, discreet element.
“Remote” ocean beaches are not the only places that offer such delight.
The pictured location is much more than 1,000 kilometres straight-line-distant from any ocean shore – and there is absolutely no “straight line” (let alone “same-day”) transport route to one.
By definition, when a river flows through a valley that bears its name, that river’s bed is the lowest ground within the local landscape.
The pictured low spot – just a little upstream of where this river flows into one of the world’s most significant rivers – is more than 2,700 metres above sea level.
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“White Sand Lake” is the most common (in English) of many and various names applied to this particular lake and/or its dunes or “dune mountain/s”.
To my knowledge, nowhere else on “our” planet is quite like it.
The alleged altitude of this Chinese lake’s surface is also “many and various”, but it appears to be at least 3,300 metres – approximately 11,000 feet – above sea level.
It sits right beside/below the Karakoram Highway, about 150 kilometres southwest of Kashgar (aka “Kashi”) in Xinjiang,
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This post’s featured image is far from great, but it does show a particularly surprising place.
I took the photo through “our” vehicle’s tinted window, as we zoomed past the pictured dunes at 5.09 pm on 22 October 2019.
Nearby, was a very large, salty lake.
The nearest ocean shore was circa 1500 kilometres distant, in a straight line.
No “straight line” transport connects to that shore; reaching the nearest ocean beach would require an arduous one-way journey of circa 2,000 kilometres.
Unsurprisingly, this particular vicinity is sparsely populated.
However, when I took the photo we were just 100 or so kilometres distant from a metropolis which is home to at least two million people; we would reach it before nightfall.
Q: where in Africa were we?
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In this series’ first six chapters all relevant sands were either on beaches, or in locations still not far from an ocean’s shoreline.
The next several posts take us inland, and to higher altitudes.
Australians – well, those who have travelled well west of the Great Dividing Range – are familiar with the “red” sands/sandy soils that are a feature of much of our “Outback”.
Q: what makes them red?
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You are looking at the kind of beach with which Australia is particularly well-endowed.
Many Australians love to frequent such beaches..and to brag about them to Europeans.
Key features, all present here: frequently-intense sunshine, clear, unpolluted, “blue” water, plus plenty of clean and bright sand.
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