18 minute read
On the Wings of a Storm
A 200-KILOMETRE EQUESTRIAN SAFARI ACROSS A SLICE OF THE NAMIB TURNS OUT TO BE A RELEASE FOR THE CAPTIVE URBAN SPIRIT.
BY LES AUPIAIS
THE SEEMINGLY ENDLESS Australian deserts and Africa’s own Sahara are young and raw in the face of the Namib. This is an ancient roiling mass of a desert in southwestern Africa, a red silica tsunami that drifts into the Atlantic Ocean on a vast 2000-kilometre front. But what a landscape it has carved: dunes 300 metres high, temperatures that soar to 45°C in summer and, in many parts, land that rarely sees more than a few millimetres of rain a year. At the coast, desert heat collides with the air over an icy Benguela current to form thick banks of fog; treacherous for ships that lose their bearings and are stripped by sun and tide to iron ribs in the sand. It is an environ pocked and blistered with ancient craters and once, 80 000 years ago – yesterday on the Earth’s violent timeline – pierced by the world’s largest known intact meteorite. There are immense swathes of the Namib’s 81 000 square kilometres that have never seen human inhabitants and never will.
Who would venture here on sand and stone, lichen and lava rock, and into this unforgiving world where only the most impeccably adapted creatures live and die? Perhaps, like our deepest and still uncharted oceans, the Namib remains one of the last places on Earth that we can call true wilderness.
Photographer Chelsea Wilson rides ahead for the perfect vantage point to capture rides in full gallop across the desert terrain. There are frequent stops and horses have time to walk at a steady pace.
OPPOSITE, FROM TOP If you’re going to trust your life to your mount, the partnership must be solid. Ride the Wild matches horse and rider in weight, temperament and your equestrian skill; In off season, horses are left to roam and gather strength, and arrange themselves in natural herds. On a safari, horses are then selected from these herds. Mates stick with mates and there’s calm in the ranks. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP Your steed is your responsibility for the week: you groom, feed and saddle your mount to create a special bond with your trusted companion; Tired bodies hit the stretchers for a good night’s sleep but at dawn, it’s wise to check your boots for any nocturnal visitors.
This is a sweet spot for Ride the Wild, an adventure traveller’s dream company that defines luxury not solely by Egyptian cotton bedlinen and solicitous staff at every moment of a day, but often by the expert commingling of the untamed with the ‘civilised’. They link with operators that offer a distinctly unique and wild experience, only partnering with those they’ve ridden firsthand, and bringing along the best photographers and videographers to capture these extraordinary moments.
On a May 2021 custom route, it is Namibian Horse Safari Company led by veteran guide Andrew Gillies that heads out from a base camp at St Nowhere on the Skeleton Coast and follows a looped 200-kilometre route that passes through the basin of the Messum Crater, and ends at Henties Bay. Riders sleep swaddled in bedrolls on stretchers under the stars. No tents. No room service. No cellphone alert tones. Seven days of frontier life in the 1800s.
It begins with a commitment to let go – not easy when you’re tethered to a demanding professional life but it takes only 24 hours to change perspectives.
‘I’m lying in my bedroll looking at the night sky and watching shooting stars,’ says Ryk Neethling, marketing director at Val de Vie Estate. His usually ubiquitous mobile phone is buried in his backpack. Somewhere. ‘Later on, I’m woken by a powerful white light – I think someone’s left their headlamp on. It was a full moon rise and suddenly the desert around me was so bright you could see every rock and blade of grass.’
Ryk is one of a group of 12 who flew into Walvis Bay and headed north by road to Swakopmund to meet their fellow travellers and their support team. But it was also to connect with the desert-adapted horses that would be their lifelines: full and crossed Arabs, Boerperds, Quarter Horses, Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods – combinations of breed that produce the stamina, sure-footedness and temperament needed for this terrain. The horses are selected from a herd of over 100 that spend four to five months of the year free to forage and become lean and desert fit. Each horse does a 10-night safari every six weeks or so between April and late October with the group that it has formed natural social bonds with during the other half of the year.
‘When selecting the 12 to 15 horses for a safari, it makes a massive difference if they have a natural harmony,’ says Emma Finney, founder and director of Ride the Wild. ‘This cohesiveness ensures a better experience for the rider too.’ While the small string of horses settles into an instinctive hierarchy, there’s one more step in the selection process. ‘We get to know the riders through detailed forms and chatting about what they wish to get out of this once-in-a-lifetime experience, so that individual horses are expertly matched to riders for temperament and skill,’ says Emma. ‘If the rider is over 85kg, they’re given two horses for the duration of the safari.’
At one point on the route, the path crests a high, steep krans that falls away to the desert floor hundreds of metres below. Ryk wryly admits that he softened the hold on his reins, tilted his head away and let the horse lead, picking its way, hoof for hoof, like a softly padding leopard. ‘It’s an incredible experience,’ he says, ‘because you have to put your full trust in your mount and let it take the lead.’
ABOVE The routes change frequently and traverse areas of the desert that have never seen human inhabitants. This is true wilderness. BELOW LEFT A few sturdy vehicles carry food, water and essential sustenance for the horses. There’s no cellphone coverage in the desert but there is a satellite phone on board for emergencies only.
While there are stony tracts that demand a slower gait, there are many chances for long canters and gallops – and for professional photographer Chelsea Wilson, the opportunity to capture the horses and riders in action against the rugged terrain. One set of photographs shows the riders racing in a zig-zag dash, dust rising and swept horizontally from the desert floor. Frame after frame shows the riders begin to spread out with stronger horses taking the lead, flanked by the free, unmounted ‘spares’ playing to their naturally wild hearts. One is a grey and he is a flash of white coat against ochre sand and sky. Another is a burnished bronze bay with the delicate lines of an Arab. It is through Chelsea’s lens that we begin to grasp the proportion of land to sky, rider to mount, colours bleached out to monochrome in the sun.
Chelsea has serious equestrian credentials but on this trip, the group is mixed in age and skill: two athletic young North Americans who’d essentially never ridden before, a woman in her 40s looking for respite after a recent family loss, three practiced eventing riders from Jo’burg, and a woman who rode every day but never at this speed or on this terrain…
Everyone’s keen, amped for adventure, but unsure what to expect. One of the young guys asks about rain. They’re filming and carrying expensive gear. Gillies smiles. ‘We’re in the Namib. It doesn’t rain here.’
A guest’s backstory on a trip may remain private, although riding alongside a fellow traveller seems to loosen up any natural restraints. But everyone has one thing in common – the rhythm of the day and that your horse’s wellbeing and care remain your responsibility.
You rise at dawn and from scattered positions radiating outwards from the two camp vehicles, check your boots for scorpions, then make your way to the fire for coffee and breakfast. Once in your riding gear, you grab your horse off the line (he’s been heartily fed and groomed already), take him for a drink and then head to the custom-made truck lined with saddle racks, where you’ll find what you need to tack up for the day ahead. At the end of the day, you remove the tack, let the horse roll its sweat-streaked flanks in the sand, feed it, water it and then tether it to the line next to its mate, where a substantial stash of hay awaits. Even horses have their preferences. Only then do you meet for a sundowner and supper cooked over the fire.
The in-camp chef, however, is no leather-chapped cowboy serving beans in a pan. Rayne Brehem is an award-winning chef who earned her stripes interning under Margot Janse from Le Quartier Français. There’s no gas hob and gadgetry here though; just the campfire and several dutch ovens and pots. She creates a delicious variety of dishes including chicken or game-rich potjies paired with fresh vegetables and salads, with no dish repeated. No one manages to stay awake much beyond 9pm as the days demand stamina for six to seven hours in the saddle to meet a 25- to 40km daily target.
There it is then, the rhythm of a desert safari day. No webinars or meetings, no Zoom calls and chatter. The corporate world ceases to exist and social life goes on without your post.
‘I barely saw another vehicle or person other than our group for most of the safari,’ says Ryk. A luxury safari on a private reserve anywhere from the Sabi Sands to the Serengeti may offer powerful encounters with wildlife but this isn’t wilderness…
And wilderness has a way of being unpredictable. On the second to last night, in the desert where it never rains, a small miracle happens. An anvil of high clouds builds, the night is split by thunder and lightning, and the heavens dump sheets and sheets of rain onto a desert that drinks it greedily. In an hour, it’s all over. It will be a week before the first seeds burst into life and turn the sand into a carpet of green. They’ve waited 10 years for the signal.
‘After all the lockdown restrictions, anxiety and uncertainty driven by the pandemic, this was pure escape for me,’ says Ryk. He’s already keen to book the next equestrian experience. ‘More Namib, perhaps a different route, and in September, maybe Botswana or Kenya.’ There’s longing in his voice and a distance in his eyes… The freedom is addictive.
On the last night, the group checks into a 12-bedroomed villa overlooking the ocean at Henties Bay. There were hot bucket showers in the desert but here, after the first real sluice in more traditional luxury, the last vestiges of ochre sand wash away and the group sheds the wild like a second skin.
There’s exuberance at making it across the desert. There’s wonder at what you’ve seen and experienced. There’s regret that it’s ended. There’s a final stroke for a horse that you’ve entrusted with your life and who’s carried you safely for 200km, a sure-footed, agile beast as fleet as a desert wind.
Something shifts in the way you see nature, life… perhaps even in the way you see yourself. t
The Real Illuminati
PIONEERING LIGHTING CREATIVES HAVE SET NEW FRONTIERS AS DESIGN AND INSTALLATIONS HEAL, CLEANSE, SOOTHE – AND COCOON US FROM TECHNOLOGY.
BY MARTIN JACOBS
New Yorkers Eric Forman and Ben Luzzatto’s Dis/Connect chandelier is a contemporary take on traditional chandeliers. Its design ingeniously furthers wellness in the home by blocking digital connectivity within a limited radius. OPPOSITE Inspired by scientific light research, Studio Roosegaarde’s GROW is a light-based installation that harnesses the healing properties of blue, red and ultraviolet light to bolster agricultural crop growth and resilience.
IT HAS BEEN almost two decades since visitors to London’s Tate Modern lay on the floor of its Turbine Hall, basking in the artificial sunlight of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003).
A seminal work in the art world insofar as light-based installations go, the images from the exhibit became iconic, remaining instantly identifiable. Eliasson’s ‘sun’, in reality a semicircular form reflected on the bespoke mirrored ceiling above, comprised hundreds of monofrequency lamps. Most commonly used in street lighting, the lamps emit light at a frequency so narrow that colours other than yellow and black become invisible, rendering the surrounding visual field a duotone landscape. For many – particularly natives to the city known for its inclement weather – of greater appeal than this was the opportunity to bask in the warmth (even if imagined) of a sun.
With only the slightest suspension of belief, visitors could feel that the light from The Weather Project’s sun was as healing as that of the sun itself. That man himself, in the form of a then 30-something Danish-Icelandic artist, could recreate the weather using lightbulbs was to serve as inspiration to a wealth of experimental artists and lighting designers to come. The sky had truly become the limit. So perhaps it is little wonder that 18 years and one pandemic later, a manmade sun of a very different sort, Studio Roosegaarde’s Urban Sun, lays claim to sanitise public spaces of coronavirus.
The mastermind behind this claim is Dutch creative thinker Daan Roosegaarde. While his boyish face says little of his 42 years, the mind of Studio Roosegaarde’s founder seeks to make tomorrow’s future today’s.
His boyhood fascination with the luminosity of fireflies and jellyfish paved the way for his Rotterdam-based studio that endeavours to interrogate the relationships between people, space and technology. Having won the LIT Lighting Designer of the Year Award in 2017 and their Visitor Experience & Museum Exhibition category award in 2019, it’s safe to say that lighting is Roosegaarde’s means of doing so.
One such award-winning project, GROW, reveals the same preoccupations with the wavelengths and healing properties of light that Urban Sun does. Informed by consultations with experts at Wageningen University & Research as well as the World Economic Forum in Davos, GROW is a 20 000-squaremetre artwork. At its core, the project is inspired by photobiology light science technologies – research into which has revealed that certain wavelengths of blue and red light can enhance a plant’s growth while ultraviolet light can bolster its immunity. Across farmland planted with leeks, solar-powered LED lights dance vertically along the vegetables’ leaves, stimulating their growth while offering a more long-term and future-focused solution to that of conventional growth aids. The artwork asks how cutting-edge lighting design can help agricultural crops to grow more sustainably and with reduced use of pesticides.
Such progressive thinking encouraged collaborators to work with Studio Roosegaarde on Urban Sun, a light installation that creates a coronavirus-free ‘clean’ zone in which human interaction and touch are once again normalised.
‘Suddenly our world is filled with plastic barriers and distance stickers, our family reduced to pixels on a computer screen. Let’s be the architects of our new normal and create better places to meet,’ says Roosegaarde of the project, which has garnered global attention.
FROM TOP Ekene Ijeoma’s Breathing Pavilion comprises a ring of vertical lights that modulate in brightness. Their undulations in intensity encourage visitors to regulate – and thereby calm – their breathing; Known for their projects that connect audiences to nature, Studio DRIFT’s Franchise Freedom is a drone-based installation that mimics the flight patterns of starlings. Here it is ‘performed’ above a Burning Man festival; The images of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project remain iconic almost 20 years after the artwork drew many thousands of visitors – eager to bask in the glow of an artificial sun – to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Planned before COVID-19, the pandemic’s sudden arrival had Roosegaarde challenging his team to hasten their research into the ways in which the power of light can combat viruses and, subsequently, enhance human wellbeing.
To the sceptics who may doubt this assertion, Urban Sun is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research from Columbia and Hiroshima universities: specific ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 222 nanometres (far-UVC) can reduce the presence of viruses, including various strains of coronavirus and influenza, by up to 99,9 percent. While traditional 254nm UV light is harmful, this specific light is considered safe for both people and animals.
It’s easy to recognise that the hope that such a project can inspire is akin to the feel-good warmth of Eliasson’s sun. Scaled up, an Urban Sun installation has the potential to combat the negative impact of social isolation by adding an additional layer of protection to government protocols. It can improve social gatherings like sporting and cultural events as well as those in schoolyards and markets.
At much the same time as Urban Sun’s 2021 launch, across the world in the heart of Brooklyn’s cultural district, artist Ekene Ijeoma unveiled his light-based installation Breathing Pavilion. An assistant professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Ijeoma’s circular pavilion comprised 20 three-metre-tall illuminated columns that slowly modulate in brightness to illustrate a deep breathing technique designed to bring calm. While the quality of light was not chosen for its scientific properties, Ijeoma regards his light to be healing.
‘Between the ongoing struggles in the racial and political movements in the Unites States and the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be difficult to find the time and space to breathe deeply and rest well,’ he says. ‘I held my breath for most of last year, waiting to exhale into a new administration and new vaccines.’ Visitors to the pavilion, while maintaining social distancing, were encouraged to breathe in time to the changes in light, attuning themselves to a shared rhythm of respite.
A similar need for calm was the driving force behind New Yorkbased Eric Forman and Ben Luzzatto’s Dis/Connect chandelier. Working with engineer Dan Gross, the industrial desi gners created a talking piece that blocks wireless signals, making it impossible to make calls or browse online within a 1,5-metre radius.
‘It’s not that we can’t turn our phones off, it’s that we don’t – they are too addictive,’ says Forman of the project. ‘To be wholly present with ourselves and each other, we must design new tools to create spaces of digital quiet in our homes.’ Upending classic chandelier
design, Dis/Connect includes antennae where the candles would conventionally sit and acrylic arms that illuminate. Wires that transmit signals to the antennae hang in curves that reference traditional chandelier design. With signal jamming illegal in most countries, Dis/Connect was conceived as an artwork intended to stimulate debate rather than as a product with commercial viability.
Equally encouraging though, through a focus on light’s potential to soothe and to reconnect man with the natural world, is Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta’s 2017 installation Franchise Freedom. The founders of Studio DRIFT spent years studying the flight patterns of starlings, translating them into bespoke software embedded in drones. Once activated, the hundreds of drones’ light sources change in intensity and colour as their flight patterns in the night sky mimic the density of starling flocking behaviour. With no two ‘performances’ the same, it’s a mesmeric experience watching the installation – one that the studio hopes encourages audiences to look afresh at, and learn from, nature’s patterns and survival mechanisms.
The start of this decade, marked by Covid-19, has amplified growth within the global wellness industry. Lockdowns have forced us to reflect on this existential crisis, to shelter and cocoon within our homes, and to seek out accessible and novel ways to quell our anxieties and ensure our wellbeing during such trying times. As technology evolves and industry endeavours to meet our domestic needs, the forward-thinking work of such visionary artists and designers will be interpreted, adapted and commercialised. It will filter into our homes. Their light will illuminate our future. t
PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF DAAN ROOSEGAARDE Urban Sun, by Studio Roosegaarde, was conceptualised to form pools of far-UVC light (proved to greatly reduce the presence of respiratory viruses). Within these ‘clean’ zones, human touch is once again normalised during the Covid-19 pandemic.
