I made that word up, but it does roll off the tongue nicely, doesn't it? By way of making conversation people will often ask the traveler what his favorite place was. This is of course usually unanswerable. In my case though, if pressed I would blurt out Namibia. So far at least.
One thing that is special about Namibia is that it is the world's second least densely populated country (Mongolia is number one, Canada is around 8th) and it shows. Previously I wrote about the extteme emptiness of the Australian Outback. In doing so I painted myself into a rhetorical corner which makes it hard to describe how much even emptier most of Namibia is. Not only devoid of any sign of the hand of man, but entirely pre-human, primeval. For hundreds of kilometers you are treated to sweeping views of the raw earth with mineral fragments small and huge strewn about and the land riven with odd straight spines of irregular dark stone, looking very much like the crumbling walls of a forgotten civilisation. Mountains, perhaps unnamed, rise abruptly from parking lot flat plains on horizons further than any I have ever seen. This is all deeply impressive.
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