A Journey In Verse Through Namibia
Audrey Salvage (Self-published)
British-born Audrey Salvage settled in Cape Town with her South African husband Norman – and then the retired pair discovered Namibia.
Salvage was not new to Africa – she had worked in Uganda and the couple had lived in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Kenya, but Namibia cast its spell over them.
They had a first holiday there in an ordinary car, went back a year later in a 4x4, and then became regular visitors, eventually becoming tourist officers in the Etosha game reserve.
She concedes that some people find the country “dried up land, dusty and monotonous”, but it was never that way for her. “This is the last empty place. It is a magnificent country which enchants,” she writes.
Over the years, she and Norman criss-crossed the country, and the magic it holds for her shines from every page. Some of her descriptions are in prose; many are, as the title suggests, in poetry. It doesn’t matter that she will never get a Nobel Prize for verse, because this book is a love letter that carries her through.
At a camp site in the Fish River Canyon, Audrey and Norman met a young man who waved his hands northwards and told them: “If this is what it is all about, you can have it.”
And have it they did. From lonely Sossusvlei in the south to Etosha in the north, along the Skeleton Coast and inland past the dunes to the vast stony peaks of Damaraland, they drove and hiked and drank it all in.
On the road north to Etosha she was struck by the rare farmhouses:
There is a lonely stretch of dusty road
From Kalkfeld to Outjo
Where farm roads lead from side to side
Out into the blue.
She writes: “It was only after we travelled on day after day that I began to realise how blessed was the peace the farms enjoyed. Why, some people might even prefer to be lonely…”
The book is illustrated with gorgeous pictures of Namibia, mainly sourced from Wikimedia Commons, an online collection of free-use images, sound, and other media files.
Now widowed, Salvage is 90 and lives in a retirement centre in Cape Town. This is her first book.
A Journey in Verse through Namibia is not a guidebook, it is, rather, an inspiration. You’ll need the guidebook later. - Cape Argus
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