Though I had dreamt it would happen some day, I never imagined sharing a bedroom with Angelina Jolie would require breaking my leg. And doing so in Namibia, at that.
OK, perhaps some explanation is in order.
The broken leg … came during the first - and now, last - skydive of my young life, when I became one of the unlucky few whose main parachute decided to malfunction. From there, it's all physics: Smaller reserve parachute means less wind resistance, thus leading to a quicker free fall, which equals my fibula splitting like a piece of dry wood. Ouch.
Jolie … gave birth to young Shiloh Jolie-Pitt in the same tiny, understaffed (one doctor) Namibian hospital in which my leg was mended.
And Namibia … is where I spent my spring break. Take that, Cancun.
Typically, these World Record things talk about the wonderful places where the writer is studying abroad, which for me, would be Cape Town, South Africa. But there's really only one thing you need to know about Cape Town: It should be on your list of places to visit before you head to the big Gasson Hall in the sky.
Sure, Athens has the Acropolis, but Cape Town surrounds an entire mountain. London has pigeons, Cape Town has penguins. Berlin had the last soccer World Cup, Cape Town hosts the next one. Moscow averages 22 degrees in February, Cape Town hits 80 with ease.
So that's Cape Town. And since I minced the Mother City down into one pithy sentiment, I suppose Namibia deserves the same: It would be the perfect place for CBS to hold its next rendition of Survivor.
Indeed, I feel my 10 days spent in the Namib Desert taught me more about myself, my life, and my role in the world - or at least that the axiom "If at first you fail, skydiving isn't for you," is only funny the first 14 times you hear it.
So, utilizing that laziest of literary forms, I give you a list of 10 things you won't learn about Namibia in a Lonely Planet guide.
1. When in doubt, and in a country where only 1 percent of the land is arable (read: it's all desert), take the road most traveled. Fewer than one in 10 roads in Namibia are paved, and the other 90 percent don't take kindly to rented Nissan sedans. Gravel roads also have a tendency to morph mysteriously into sand pits, and a navigational error on my part - "No, I don't need to stop for directions" - may or may not have mired our car in one. Or three.
2. Animals run wild in Namibia. Ostriches on your left, kudu on your right, and … watch out! … a guinea fowl (think pigeon, only fatter) slamming against the car windshield.
3. Strangers aren't always out to get you, as we found out when "John," an Afrikaner farmer with an elementary grasp of English, pulled our aforementioned sedan out of the aforementioned sand pit and offered us a place to stay for the night. Given the fact that we were stuck in the middle of the desert and the sun was setting - and I always thought it would be cool to live out a horror movie - we took him up on the offer.
4. The last thing you want to hear in Southern Africa is that someone will be there to help you "just now." This is certainly better than "right now," but much worse than "now now" in the local parlance. Thus my dismay when my doctor downgraded me from "right now" to "just now" as I sat in some degree of pain in the triage line.
5. Given that Namibia's Rossing Uranium Mine is the fourth largest in the world, I think we can safely chalk up the false pretext for the war in Iraq to President Bush playing hooky during the lesson on African uranium-producing countries that start with "N."
6. When a skydiving company says it has a "100 percent" safety rating, it is lying.
7. If Wikipedia says a country is the world's second least densely populated, it means it - Namibia would be America's second largest state, but would barely eclipse Manhattan as New York City's third most populous borough. Perhaps that explains why "John" told us the road we got lost on usually sees one or two cars … per week.
8. Namibians, like most Southern Africans, have intense pride in their country. A recent poll found that 95 percent of South Africans were "proud to be South African." Where there are mass expanses of nothingness, Namibians see wide open spaces. Where there's unfathomable poverty, many see opportunity. It's a distinctly optimistic viewpoint.
9. You'd be safer leaving a can of beer in the Mods on Marathon Monday than leaving any post-1995 model car parked on a Namibian street for more than three minutes. We learned the hard way with a lost passport, digital camera, wallet, and - though yours truly was airlifted out with the broken leg - a 17-hour drive with a black trash bag serving as the passenger-side window.
10. Corporal punishment isn't limited to Guantanamo Bay. The Namibian police officers, or glorified security guards, proceeded to beat a "suspect" in our robbery case with a shoe as part of their interrogation.
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