It’s been nearly a month since I visited Oland and saw the devastation the ongoing drought has wrought. When I wrote the post, ‘The Dry Season’, it had started to rain in many areas in northern and central Namibia. Today was the first time since the rains have come that I’ve had a chance to travel out of the Erongo Region to Windhoek.
As I have explain in ‘The Dry Season’ post, the lack of rain had made everything brown and dead looking. When I last traveled to Windhoek on the Trans-Kalahari Highway (B2), which heads northeast from Swakopmund to Usakos and Karibib, then east to Okahandja, where the terrain graduates from sand and the occasional inselberg to the north and rugged Khomas Mountains to the south, to rolling brush and bush covered hills and valleys, the area between Karibib and Okahandja looked like one vast tinderbox waiting for a match.
On a road south of the Brandberg Massif. This area hasn’t seen rain in months.
This week I had to go into Windhoek and this time the area between Karibib and Okahandja was transformed into an endless carpet of green. The area got some decent rain and is still getting an occasional shower. It’s enough to wake the bushes and the few hardy trees. Even the rocky hills, which don’t hold water, are now covered with green like stringy green comb-overs valiantly trying to cover bald spots. The further inland I go, the greener it got. I even saw puddles of water in once bone-dry riverbeds.
Hills and clouds along B2. When I came through here a few weeks ago it was all brown under a cloudless sky.
I’m sure the wildlife welcomes the change. I hadn’t seen the seemingly plentiful warthogs scrounging along the roadside in a very long time. This trip I saw two. I also saw a small troop of baboons, normally another common roadside sight that seemed to have disappeared during the dry season. The few cows that I saw grassing near the road were still skinny, but they looked far healthier than those I’d seen on my earlier trip.
This is the time of year when many Namibians head north to their homelands and farms. I’ve talked to some of my friends and they are overjoyed with the amount of rain they’ve gotten. Even here, in the Erongo Region, people seem happy and somewhat relieved with the amount of rain their families and friends up north have gotten.
Rainy season typically ends around the end of March to early April, that they are getting lots of rain at this point bodes well for the drought stricken and thirsty north, and all of Namibia.
For the sake of comparison; this is a stretch of the B1 highway outside of Okahandja taken 3 weeks ago, just when the rains were starting.
And this is the same stretch taken yesterday. What a difference.
To be clear, the drought is not over, this rain is just a reprieve. It will take several years to undo what more than 7 years of low rainfall has done, but as an African proverb says, ” A little rain each day can cause a river to overflow.” Keep your fingers crossed that these rain will eventually cause the the rivers to overflow.
Stay tuned.
Vern
GoGeezer 