Embrace the Stillness
From the mountains of Canada, to the deserts of Namibia and Angola,. to the skies of Turkey, and the lakes of Cambodia...
There are very few instances during travels where I am fully immersed in silence. Where the stillness is louder than any noise.
One of these times is when I stupidly decided I was ready for heli-snowboarding in Canada. Right up in the Northern part of Alberta, close to Revelstoke and Banff. After some very serious safety training, which included a bubble boy demonstration our helicopter took off for the highest peaks. This is the moment that my fellow snowboarders revealed that they have competed in the winter Olympics - excuse me, you’re Professional snowboarders? The woman next to me then decided that this was the perfect time to tell me that she has been training for this excursion for, oh I don’t know, three years.
Of course, at this point I had to say, well I snowboard once or twice a year, I have also broken my knee. Well there was silence. A deep silence where only the blades of the helicopter distracted us from the upcoming feat. We touched down on a glacier really, we huddled together as a group and what seemed to me the only way to get down, the helicopter, then left. And boom, the group took off - everyone into the zone, into their single minded focus. So picture this, I am standing with my snowboard thousands of feet up on a mountain’s edge and my group has now headed down this insane hill. Silence. The loudest silence of my entire life. I could only hear my own breathing, which at this point was becoming a little louder, as you can imagine.
How was I supposed to do this? Well, I decided I was going to try to remember every childhood ski lesson, combine it with my love for sincere snowboarding and an absolutely meditative concentration with the silence and get myself down to earth again. Luckily I noticed our trainer guide was waiting a little way ahead of me, he seemed to trust that I knew what to do. And trust me, if you’ve been in Canadian snow - it’s mostly powder, once you’re moving, you have to stay in motion or the object in motion will sink into a tree well or worse. So it was me and the silence, and I think some luck that brought me down to the lodge.
Of course, there are also times where you actively choose silence. Like the ten day silent retreat in the winelands of South Africa I studiously attended. I drove a few hours from Cape Town and pulled up at this farm, with a few structures (I assumed where I would be sleeping), massive gardens where vegetables and herbs were grown and a whole section of farm animals. I checked in and handed over my phone and my Kindle, an emergency contact and every other piece of memorabilia from my life. They suggest you don’t bring any distractions - no books, no games, not even photos from home. I was all in! Actually day one, like most new adventures, feels fresh and exciting anyway - so to me it felt like a normal settling in. Oh before I forget to tell you this, as you check in you take a small vow of absolute silence - for the next ten days you will not speak one word, to anyone.
Day one was odd, I smiled when someone handed me a plate of food. I smiled when I watched everyone sit down for a four hour meditation, I smiled when I watched everyone take towels and go shower. I mean I was even smiling when someone showed me a tiny single bed with a small pillow where I was meant to sleep. When I realized that there was only one meal a day, plus a silly tea break and the rest was for 14 hours of meditation I wasn’t really smiling anymore. But onwards I marched.
Day 2 I was starving. Since you don’t dish your own food, I couldn’t dish extra food for myself or go back for my usual plate of seconds. This was my daily food allowance. Oh, lucky me, water I could have as much as I want, what an act of kindness! How wonderful, how benevolent. And suddenly water became my elixir. By day 5 I was ready to leave - and a lot of people gave in at this point. You’d think it’s the silence that disturbs and sends you off the edge. But no, after a few days you sort of forget to speak and the silence becomes a soothing balm. By day 6 and 7 my mind was seriously playing tricks on me, was I in the Matrix? Was I captured and voodoo mind tricked to stay here?
The amazing thing that happens on day 8 is - you’re in full zen. The silence becomes you. Sleep was never this deep, food never tasted this good - even that water started to taste like the finest thirst quencher of my life. Meditating for 4 hours straight, no problem - my knees and back were fully on board with my new life and not giving me any pain. I broke through and flung past the pain in my body, and mostly my mind, and I was no longer fighting the silence. I was silent. Of course I stupidly decided to have lunch with my parents on the last day as I left the retreat - and after 10 days of silence the world seems all so silly, petty...they weren’t amused and thought I was being far too monastic for their liking.
And then sometimes the silence chooses you. Although not rich with savannah like Kenya or bestowed with gorilla filled rain forests like Uganda or Rwanda, the sparsely inhabited sandy country of southern Africa has something else - the forever, and ever, silent dunes. And that is the exact appeal of Namibia, the extraordinary-ordinary.
There is something primal and truly earthed about Namibia, away from the usual glut of tourism, the country holds a deep connection to the beginning of time. Although now only a small percentage of the local tribes still exist, Namibia is home to some of the original hunter-gather people. Our very first ancestors. Their presence, and their untouched virtue, somewhat propagate the remote parts of the land right here. Even their fertile lessons and simple life philosophy opposed to a constant drone of bigger, better are more or less written in the sand even before you arrive.
One of the many African tribes, the San have inhabited southern Africa for at least 30 000 years and are one of fourteen known surviving "ancestral population clusters" from which modern humans descend. My knowledge of these sand people, with their unique click sound vernacular, actually comes from seeing an old BBC production from the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post who called these people the "lost soul" of all mankind.
To ponder what that looks like - it helps to get some perspective. I hopped a tiny bush plane and ticked off into the big African skies with the wind creeping around us. Looking down at a wad of nothingness framed by cyan and dust, the understanding of real luxury whispers to me. Space and freedom with a dollop of limitless time is where it all resides in reality. Pristine wilderness, eternal views and the desert’s magical cape have enveloped even me, the city dweller, as I head out to the northern territory of Namibia. Where all you get is just endless space and space.
Damaraland, an inland area close to the famed Skeleton Coast, romances with early morning mist coming off the numb-cold Atlantic Ocean and hot desert air kissing all the way from the canyons. The area is where I find my next moment of meditative calm – the isolation, and the world I know at bay, of course helps. Although not thick with wildlife this tract is a perfect example of how nature’s laws of sustenance ordain treks for the animals, and humans just visiting.
Days here, which feel like weeks, are well spent tracking down either the shy desert-adapted elephant that lives in the area, the magnificent oryx or of course the pointy lipped black rhino. Fast paced life is something I now look at from the outside in, the window of it slightly smudged and the jerk of quiet desert life prevails. Even my attire changes, t-shirts become more slumped and the need for shoes simply dismantles. My longing for anything digital is replaced by simple moments observing an ant, or stretching out at the sunset. After driving dunes and dunes I suddenly saw an oasis, no mirage, a real oasis where some wildebeests and zebras were quietly drinking, I jumped right in as they silently watched me be a goofball.
As you move by tiny charter to the Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp the privilege of access to the wilderness becomes apparent. Located in a private concession between the Palmwag area and the Skeleton Coast National Park, this area is as remote as the Kaokoveld can become. Flying over old shipwrecks and the stark coasts, the ancient navigators and conquerors come to mind – their desires to grasp Africa and its soulfulness liken to my own. How can this continent, with all its toils, hold such a grasp and a love on me and so many of its swains – the great beauty and the great silence are what speak to us all perhaps.
The coastal camp is accessible only by light aircraft and is located in a wide basin at the confluence of two tributaries with hills smiling from east and west. Besides being able to find rare plants like the Welwitschia, called a “living fossil,” and animals like the shaggy hyena, the lunar-like landscape is what overawes me. The gravel plains covered with some low-lying plants, rock formations, flood plains and dry riverbeds quiet any monkey mind and bring a retreat state to the fore. Days are spent on nature walks, game drives and dunes become playgrounds with buggies and boards. Nights are long in the desert, they allow for proper rest away from modern-day sidetracks and those bright lights – here the stars rock me to sleep and the silence is what wakes me up.
Again by charter, the next stop on my journey of the area is Ongava - just a small flutter inland where Namibia meets Angola. Situated on a hill, strategic for the watering hole below, sundowners here are in the company of wildlife. The game drives from Ongava are to the famed Etosha National Park that encloses a giant pan with silvery mirages toying with the savannah grassland and thorny shrubbery.
The park, proclaimed game reserve in 1907, is known for the abundance of game and is even visible from space. In the rainy season the flamingos congregate in the salt pan and the park proudly count 340 bird species to be found. I hung up the binoculars to picnic on the grass to contemplate wildlife sanctuaries and the need for conservation in the world right now – of course this is where my feet sink deep into the sand and a scorpion decided to bite me. The strangest thing happens in these life or death situations, the world falls silent. Time stands still. My whole body just gave in to this excruciating pain. A local tribal guide came to speak to me as he probably saw me jumping up and down like a fool yelping in agony. He looked at my leg, and he looked at me and he said - we have about 20 minutes. Oh 20 minutes before the pain stops right? Um no, 20 minutes before the poison kills you. Unfortunately airlifting to a hospital will take 30 minutes. I was trying to just embrace the stillness, it was becoming harder. This man took my leg, sucked on it, plucked on it - and did some kind of magic but somehow the poison came out. The pain, not so much. He saved my life.
Now that I didn’t die from a scorpion bite, which sounds rather bad ass, I took deeper breaths and went into a more contemplative headspace. Life goes on as it always has, but Namibia’s fingerprints are all over me reminding me of my very existence.
Of course there are also times where the silence is so deafening and so undeniable that it simply consumes you. Like the Bolivian salt flats, where you can actually see that the earth is round it is so flat there. The horizon actually curves - maybe we should suggest the Flat Earth Society hold their next conference there. I know this year they are on a cruise ship - oh the irony. And there are Hot air balloons with their moments to go into silence - I have been a few times but Cappadocia in the center of Turkey and the Serengeti, in Tanzania, stand out.
Hot air ballooning is an early morning activity. And if the wind isn’t right, well you’re staying on land. In Cappadocia wake up time is 4am. As you approach the field your eyes seem to be deceiving you - hundreds of colorful balloons, all waiting on the ground with their little baskets filling up with people. And as the sun comes up, the fire in the balloon gets jazzed up just enough that you gently lift right up in your basket for four (well five with your instructor). For the next two hours the only sound is the sound of the occasional fire spurting upwards into the balloon to keep it up in the air. And you have this bird eye’s view of distinctive “fairy chimneys,” which seem like you’re on another planet as they stand tall, as these cone-shaped rock formations. And you can see these Bronze Age homes carved into valley walls by cave dwellers. A little dip into the past...
It’s all kinds of magical peacefulness. Nobody speaks, because the silence feels too valuable to waste. In the Serengeti, you have a bird’s eye view of the animals. Herds and herds of every animal you can imagine - what’s so different about safari in the Serengeti vs. Kruger in South Africa is that here you have giant open plains that seem endless, so you can see animals in massive quantities, you see them as they move from one area to another to feast or to find water. In South Africa, it’s bush and shrubbery, so you can get much closer to them from a game vehicle but you don’t see them in such quantities.
Well from the balloon, a few hundred feet high up in the sky you quietly watch as the herds go about their business - young elephants playing, the elder giraffes teaching baby giraffes how to lean down to drink water, zebras flirting with each other...this is one of my favorite silent moment of my whole life, animals in perfect nature harmony. The other was in Cambodia, close to Siem Reap, where there is this huge lake.
And on the water are people who actually live on little boats, in fact, people who have never been on land before - they have lived on the water, and have never touched their feet on earth before. They are born on the water, and die in the water. Turns out many of them are actually Vietnamese. So I spent an afternoon here, just floating on a Buddhist prayer boat. I sat crossed legged on this floating temple and just meditated as the sun came down with incense burning and flowers being offered up to the statue of Buddha. Surrounded by hundreds of little boats, all floating happily along.
And the silence gave me this brief moment, this tiny opening in time to think about my life, and about how fortunate I am. Is it luck? I don’t think so, is it fate? Probably not. It just is what it is. What a perfect reminder that the silence gave me...
Daniel
I miss you!!! I loved this article! I am headed to Namibia in late August! Your description sounds like it is just what i need..minus the scorpion bite!
Hope you are doing well! If ever in Carmel again, get in touch! Big hugs, margi