Back from Mariental

Hello everyone, I’ve arrived safely back in Windhoek from my fieldwork in Mariental. Instead of giving you a day-by-day account of my adventures, I’m going to make a few posts about my experiences. First, I’ll talk about the town itself: Mariental, Hardap Region, Namibia.
Mariental was originally built around the railroad that goes through the region. Engineers were advised not to build in the flood plain of the Fish River, but you know how those things go. The Fish River is an ephemeral river, meaning that all or part of it only flows a month or so out of the whole year. The rest of the time it is a dry riverbed. The Fish River is also big. And when it rains in this region, it rains hard and the river floods. It all starts at the Hardap Dam which is an absolutely huge dam that sits on the Fish River. The Fish River is one of the only ephemeral rivers in the world that has a dam. Right in the Hardap Dam reservoir there is always water though. It’s only downstream of the dam where it is dry most of the year. Now the reason this river is dammed isn’t for hydropower or anything like that, it’s to provide water to the 25 or so farms that are between the dam and Mariental. Water runs from the dam into irrigation channels directly to the farms. They use what is called flood irrigation to provide water to their fields, which is actually a very inefficient method of irrigation. The water just floods the entire fields and some parts get a lot of the water while other parts get only some water, and sometimes the water runs quickly over the field and washes away the fertilizer. Then you have a lot of runoff of water with fertilizer that runs back into the Fish River and fuels the growth of the reeds. But that’s getting a little too much into the details of my project. My original point was that there are farms above Mariental. They mostly grow maize, wheat, and grapes.
The town itself is relatively small. There are almost no restaurants. There’s a large Engen gas station that has a Wimpy, a burger joint. That’s really the only restaurant. We did go to the restaurant at the Mariental Hotel, but that’s a story for another time. So we mostly cooked our own food at the place we stayed. For lunch though, we had two options: Wimpy or the deli at Spar, the grocery store. So we ate at Wimpy a lot. I had the vegetarian burger almost every day. It was terrible. So there are various businesses in Mariental. The other part is the informal settlements. I’ll talk more about those later as well.
More to follow later. Right now I have a bad cold so I need to get some rest. I might not post everything before this weekend. This weekend we are going to Etosha national park for safari activities. We’ll be living in tents. Whee. So no internet there. We’ll see how much I can post about Mariental before then.