The Gobabeb Research & Training Centre is mostly a collection of low and unremarkable buildings – except for one.  It’s iconic water tower is visible for miles in every direction.  Water is pumped into the bulbous top of the tower from shallow wells in the (dry) Kuiseb river bed.  From there, the tower provides pressurized water to the Centre.  The water is pure and sweet; not salty at all.  The tower has sort of come to symbolize the station and everything we do here, because isn’t a desert defined by water, or lack of it?  Without the tower we scientists just couldn’t survive here.  The native plants, animals and microorganisms may not have a water tower, but each species has it’s own tricks for collecting and conserving water.

For example, some native beetles here spend hours standing on their heads during early mornings when there is coastal fog.  Water droplets condense on their bodies and run downwards into their mouths.

The conference is over.  Tonight we camp in the dunes.  I’ll try very hard to keep the sand out of my camera, because I need it to collect data.  Tomorrow after we get back from the dunes the fieldwork begins.

I slept through the night and woke up just 45 minutes before dawn – time to climb the Station Dune and see the sun rise over Africa.  It happens so quickly, because we are in the tropics.  The sun just appears to shoot vertically into the sky.

There is lots of beauty, and interesting little animal tracks running all over the dunes; everything from beetles and lizards up to Jackal-sized animals.  They must do this every night.

Today is a day of conferences.  I gave a short talk on Drake High School’s World Wide Artificial Hypolith Project, and heard a lot of others.  Some highlights:  A bird biologist was doing a study on songbirds, weighing them all day long to find out how much body mass they lost from dehydrating.  So how do you weigh wild birds?  The easiest method was to place a tiny meal worm on an analytical balance that was sitting outside in the bird’s habitat.  The bird hops onto the balance to get the worm.  You read the weight while the bird is on the balance.  No need to catch the bird, which takes effort and stresses the bird out.

There was a fascinating talk by JB Raymond on Fairy Circles:  patches of ground in the Namib Desert where a ring of grass has nothing growing in the middle.  JB was able to show that there is a chemical poisonous to plants in the soil inside the circle, but what organism made the chemical, and why, remains to be seen.  Fairy circles haven’t been reported from the California deserts, but I am pretty sure I have seen some somewhere in my home state.  I am going to keep my eyes open for them from now on.

Sometimes hearing a talk reminds you of an idea you already had but forgot.  Brian Jones’ talk mentioned Winogradsky Columns, which are colorful bacteria habitats, and I resolved to build one and use it as a teaching tool in room 414.

There was even a talk on Petrichor, which is the smell of rain in the desert during and after the rainfall.  It turns out it is mostly a compound called geosmin, but which microorganism makes it and when is debatable.

Tomorrow: another half day of conference, then we are going to camp out in the dunes.  It is 40 degrees Celsius here, which is VERY hot. I’m too jet-lagged to figure it out in degrees F, but it feels like over 100.

It took a day and a half but I’m safely in Namibia – specifically at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, in the Namib Desert, about two hours drive inland from Walvis Bay.   I’m kind of Jet-lagged.  If past experience in any guide I will fall asleep at a normal time but then be wide awake at 3 AM.  Still, it’s great to be back.  I visited this place last in 2012, and before that in 2010.

With me are about fifty scientists from lots of countries – South Africa, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, the United States and Israel to name a few – who are all experts on microbes that live in extreme environments.

Tomorrow is a conference.  I will give a talk on my artificial hypoliths project.  Later, fieldwork.  Pretty soon, bed time.  I saw an ostrich today on the way here.

Ten years ago I went to Namibia to start my World-Wide Artifical  Hypolith Project.

Now I’m going back.  I’ll be at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, in the Namib Desert.  Accompanying me will be 30 or 40 astrobiologists, professors and graduate students from South Africa and around the world.  I hope to move my project forward, with their input and help.

What to pack?  Gotta travel light, but:

Laptop computer with power cable and Ethernet cables,
USB Data stick, South African plug adapter,
Digital camera with battery charger and cable,
Coordinates of my arrays and photo templates,
Drake pennant,
Binoculars, hand lens, compass, global positioning system (GPS) with spare batteries,
Books to read on the plane (I’m thinking African authors like Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola and Dinaw Mengestu),
Field notebook, pencils and pens,
Colored pencils and regular pencils as gifts for local school children,
Hat, hiking boots + socks, sunglasses, sunscreen, lip balm, toiletries, bandana, clothes,
water bottle,
PASSPORT, official paperwork, cash (dollars and South African Rand), boarding pass.

I will fly from San Francisco to New York to Johannesburg to Walvis Bay.  It takes about 36 hours to do this.

I will try to post from Namibia April 26-May 6, but internet connection here is always kinda dodgy.