Beholding beauty

After making the friends we did it was sad to leave and a little unnerving that we were to travel to a new place with entirely new people. A part of me didn't want to leave, but part of me was also excited about what the new camp would bring.

But, our journey south very slowly began to reveal to us what our next week had in store. There's just one word: beauty. We never felt short changed in our first week and those Naukluft mountains never got boring but as the landscape changed, and the colours came alive, it began to dawn on me what they told us back on the first day, we had some surprises in store for our second week. They were not kidding.

There's a subtlety to this landscape that perhaps we'd not seen previously. Those rugged, rocky hikes profuse with gnarly trees and thorny bushes were stunning but now it was as if some creator had used up the most exciting pieces in the lanscape kit and began to fashion something a little more thoughtful. The jawdropping cliffs had been replaced with silky, sweeping, velvety dioramas. It didn't look real. It looked painted. I almost had to rub my eyes. When homo sapiens entered Europe they found terrifying forests and homocidal winters. Some of those who stayed behind had this.