Brief Sign of Life

Hello subscribers (and welcome new ones!),

this is just a short Newsletter, as I am still “on the road”, as it were, namely in the UK (for family visits). But the three weeks in Namibia earlier this month were fantastic and yielded substantial material for the DT Blog and my main website. When I’m back home next week I’ll have to start developing, processing and sorting thousands of photos, make selections, and then begin the writing up.

For this Newsletter I’ve picked just the image above, taken before sunrise at the fabled ghost town of Kolmanskop near Lüderitz. The fuzzy “ghost” walking through this shot is in fact my wife. To be able to get into Kolmanskop that early we had purchased a special photographer’s permit the day before. Normally the site opens at 8 a.m., well after sunrise, and then the place quickly fills up with tourists. So the main benefit of getting that special permit (which is not all that expensive), in addition to the early morning light, is the chance to take pictures without people in them, as befits the atmosphere of a ghost town much more than hordes of smartphone-wielding, selfie-taking tourists in the frame all the time.

You can expect many more ghost-town photos in DT Blog posts in the coming weeks/months, also from other, much less well-known (and much, much less visited) ghost towns in the “Sperrgebiet” (‘forbidden zone’) south of Lüderitz that I visited on private tours with a specially licensed driver-guide.

Other than ghost towns, I saw an ex-POW camp from WW1, an early former concentration camp site (now actually a camping site!), a couple of special cemeteries, a number of shipwrecks, some weird North-Korean-designed monuments and Namibia’s Independence Museum in the capital Windhoek, as well as plenty of barren, “end-of-the-world” desert scenery.

But for this Newsletter, I’ll leave it at this short sign of life and taster for things to come soon(ish).

Best wishes

Peter