Mine is, as I've just discovered in this video clip of a drive through the town of Lüderitz in what is now called Namibia but which was in 1968 still known as South-West Africa.
I took the above photo in 1968. It shows the "kantoor" in which I had to spend my entire day. It was straight out of Charles Dickens: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who "commandeered" two other Afrikaner women. Then there were three German men who had something to do with the fuel storage down by the harbour and the hardware store behind the office. The whole lot was presided over by a thin and ageing man known as "Lügen-Müller". My own work was simple and totally undemanding: keeping a mechanised debtors ledger (on a ledger-machine straight out of the Ark), reconciling several bank accounts, and other bits and pieces around the office. For an aspiring accountant, it was a dead-end job!
The photo below is from the above video clip - fast forward to 2:44 - and shows the same office as it was just two years ago, and still recognisable by the flagtower on its roof. The company I worked for then, Metje + Ziegler, no longer exists but the building is still there.
I spent six months in Lüderitz, a very German town squeezed in between the desiccating sands of the Namib and the freezing waters of the South Atlantic’s Benguela current, where German is spoken as much as Afrikaans (with a bit of English by those who are neither Germans nor Afrikaaners). There is only one road in and out, as the town is surrounded by the vast "Sperrgebiet" a 'no-go' diamond-mining area controlled by Consolidated Diamond Mines, or CDM as it was generally known, who created their own town Oranjemund at the mouth of the Orange River for the ten thousand or so Ovambos (the black people of the area) and thousand whites employed there.
The houses painted in improbable pastel shades make Lüderitz look like a toy town at times. The air is tangibly clean, even on the foggiest of mornings. Locals say that Lüderitz can have all four seasons in a day, as the weather can change in hours from bright, hot and sunny, to strong winds, to dark, cold and foggy – and then back to sunshine again. This variation, together with a cold sea and the prevailing southwest wind, rule out Lüderitz as a beach destination, though brave souls still take brief dips. I did - ONLY ONCE in the whole six months I was there!
The rest of the country - after Mongolia, the second least-densely populated country in the world (2.7 inhabitants per square kilometre) - has a lot more to offer than Lüderitz which has become something of a ghost town ever since nearby Kolmanskop ran out of diamonds. The above video clip of a 3000-kilometre roadtrip may whet your appetite.
