Jumé Irmscher

Part II: Swakopmund & The Namib Desert All photos were taken by my husband, Steffen Irmscher and I. You know, thinking back on my time in Namibia I realized that it’s actually quite a mad place. I don’t mean angry. No, the people are lovely, welcoming, and just a delight. I mean, certain things about the country are completely insane, kooky, just tripping on fairy dust. The first thing you notice when reading up on Namibia is that it’s large. I mean, it’s really big. We often found ourselves staying at places where the nearest town was a 2-hour drive away. That’s the first mad thing, right here. If you’re surrounded by dust, huge stretches of nothingness and wild animals – you might want to make sure there are other people nearby in case you find a clan of hyenas in your backyard up to no good, there’s a power outage or your car battery died. Also, the regular rule of thumb is if you drive on the highway you ’ ll  roughly  cover a 100km in an hour. In Namibia, h...

Part II - Urumqi, Hami, Dunhuang, and Turpan Words seem to fail me when describing the above towns. It's not that they were simply so beautiful I can't find the correct words to describe my awe, but it's rather that they were more Chinese than the Middle East feeling you get in Kasghar, that I simply don't want to go into too much detail about them. I am a bit disappointed, I guess you can say.  I flew 7 hours from Shanghai to go to Xinjiang. Seven hours. Spend that much time on a plane from Germany and I'm almost in my mom's front yard in South Africa. You can experience an entirely different world in that distance, but I didn't really have that when I flew to Xinjiang.  Kasghar overwhelmed me because it was such a complete contrast to Shanghai and other Chinese cities I've visited. Once I left that small city and traveled to Urumqi, I was right back in China. The buildings, the people, and the food - everything was just like any other Chin...