African-American - like Obama

Best damn apple cake in the Namib Desert, not that it's a real high bar. (photo courtesy Rye Druzin)

Welcome to Namibia, kindly step back.

Our guide, perhaps making it up as he went, but entertaining us nonetheless.

The unofficial motto of Namibia.

Gnu mohawk.

And yes, they did cross the road, often.

WINDHOEK, Namibia - On our last day in this Teutonically-tinged capital we completed our quest - we found a Namibian craft beer.

Out of season, sure, in the dead of the southern hemisphere winter, but a fine hefeweizen from Camelthorn Brewing, nonetheless.

Most of the trip, however, was spent in the backcountry (although that describes almost all of Namibia) of the second least-densly populated planet on Earth (Mongolia nudges them out for the title).

Like the first Namibians, we survived on wild animals and Windhoek Lager. The country is game meat wild and I think we ate an entire national park worth of antelope (I recommend the springbok, though mom dug the zebra).

Our English also got progressively weirder the longer we stayed. Everyone speaks English, which is the country's official language, but, like much of Africa, everyone speaks it as a second or third language. This leads to a lot of awkwardly phrased and sometimes downright confusing Namiblish.

The best example was a warning at one of our hotels about dinner time: "Dinner is served from 6:30-9 p.m. but, as we serve venison, it is best to arrive by 7 p.m." We spent a (fruitless) hour trying to puzzle it out - I won't bore you.

Our journey began in Etosha National Park, where the landscape alternates between brushy grasslands, open savannahs, and yawning bone-white salt pans that stretch for miles.

We have a tradition, passed on from my South African cousin and safari/whiskey afficionado Julian, that every time you see one of the 'Big Five' (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo) you have to have a swig of local beer. It's a fine tradition (don't drink and drive, kids!) but we're particularly good at the wildlife spotting game and much of the spotting happens early in the morning. Etosha was no different and there was many a lukewarm 7 a.m. Windhoek Lager swig. Best not to cross the game gods.

After a quick stop in Vingerklip (Finger Rock), described aptly by a local as "Monument Valley with giraffes," we hit the misty coast at Swakopmund, where the dunes meet the sea and rainfall is a once-every-few-years event.

The area north of Swakopmund is known as the Skeleton Coast and the shipwrecks lying haphazardly in the surf attested to this reputation. Other than the few bizarre creatures that live in the dunes (pictured above) and make their living off the moisture from fog that blankets the area most days, the area does not support much life (humans rely on a desalination plant) and early sailors who washed up faced an arduous, waterless, inevitably fatal journey over 50 to 100 km.

These days, marooned sailors can find not only fresh water, but beer brewed to Deutschland's rigorous purity standards in Swakopmund, where out of place half-timber German buildings dot the landscape and schnitzel is on every menu. Germany hasn't ruled their former colony since 1915, but a sizeable German population still resides in Namibia (socks and sandals - no problem).

Bryce and I took in a rugby game and some local flavor at a bar in town one day. We were chatting with the bartender, a member of the Ovambo tribe from the north, and we mentioned that our dad is from South Africa.

"So you are African-American, like Barack Obama," he deadpanned. Bartender 1, Druzins 0. Well played.

With a long drive ahead the next morning, we asked our hotelier if there was any place to stop for food on the way. He informed us there's only one place to stop for anything on our route.

"Stop at Solitaire - they have wonderful apple cake. Don't worry, you can't miss it, there's nothing else there."

I was skeptical, but halfway through our soul-rattling four-hour gravel road drive, there it was, a Mad Max-looking outpost with rusting old cars for landscaping and a bearded, barrel-chested German with a crazed look in his eye making rich, piping hot apple cake.

A couple hours later, we arrived approximately nowhere - but a starkly beautiful nowhere (again, perhaps redundant in Namibia, where there are almost no paved roads). Wide open savannah was inerrupted abrupt rock outcroppings and craggy mountains. It was late afternoon, in the 70s, and a hike and a rock scramble seemed in order.

"Is it ok to hike up the rocks?" I asked one of the bartenders at the collection of cabins where we were staying.

"No, it's very dangerous," he said.

"Uh huh," I thought, thinking that he was worried we were going to turn an ankle on the rocks. I was just about to ignore the advice, when he added the crucial phrase:

"There are many snakes in the rocks - black mambas and Cape cobras - and we won't be able to get you to a hospital in time."

We stuck to the trail, where we spotted a horned adder about a foot off the path (verdict from the staff: you wouldn't die if it bit you, but you would be in bad shape).

The next day we arrived on Mars; a rust red dune landscape called Soussisvlei, where Angelina Jolie visited on her bizarro birth tour of Namibia (to talk to some Namibians it was like a head of state visited - I don't think many heads of state do visit).

It's a mountain range of sand, topping out at 1,200 feet, with cracked, white clay pans holding dead trees frozen in the pose they were in many years ago when water last flowed there. Our guide was a little fuzzy on the facts, but took us on 4x4 roads deep into the dunes where we hiked a dune's serpentine ridgeline, learned about the ancient sea that used to cover the landscape, and got to see the tree under which Angelina gave birth - and even touch the hallowed spot (I'll never wash my hand again).