Syringa trees rise out of the Kalahari sand in the wild expanse of Kavango East, as the humid heat warns of afternoon showers. It's easy to imagine this place has looked the same for a hundred years.
Except, that is, for the road. Recently widened, graded and ramrod straight, new roads like this mean change is coming.
Carved out of the trees and surrounded by a chain-link fence, that change comes as a shock: a giant oil rig towers above these flat lands, dwarfing the trees.
In this northeastern corner of Namibia, on the borders of Angola and Botswana, a Canadian oil company called ReconAfrica has secured the rights to explore what it believes could be the next -- and perhaps even the last -- giant onshore oil find.