Something in me wants to make a dumb joke about "The Spice", perhaps to drop a name like Muad'Dib and see how many people get it. My suspicions are that we don't have a HUGE number of Dune fans out there, but I'll have to confess I was a passionate, rabid devotee of the Frank Herbert series. All of which leads me to this article from Namibia, which has nothing to do with worms or oil or Muadib, but rather with sand, large, lovely mountains of sand.

The writer Joan Scobey takes us to the Namib Desert, a long, thin strip, some 120 miles wide, along Namibia's 800-mile Atlantic coast between South Africa and Angola. There, she dines on oysters, rock lobsters and fresh asparagus and gazes up at the Southern Cross in a rather wonderful sounding journey published in the Washington times. I confess to a somewhat painful twinge of jealousy as I read this, as a friend of mine, travel writer Andrew Tarica once told me that Namibia is one of the best places he's ever been. One interesting bit I gleaned from the piece here is that this region is populated by Germans, who arrived to Africa rather late to the region during the great colonization boom (the whole unification thing preoccupied them for a while in the late 1800's). So, all's I got to say is, check it.

Filed under: History, Learning, Stories, Africa, Angola, Namibia