As the end of the year approaches, it is a good time to reflect on the past months. The year has turned lives upside down and forced us to change our lifestyle. As a travel journalist I sometimes made 3 return flights a month, while now I have only flown back and forth to Switzerland twice since March.
Not traveling does activate your memories of the last long journeys you have made. For example, I have been thinking back a lot about the trip I made to the Andes where I visited the Andes Mountains in Peru, to an altitude of more than 5500 meters. I wrote a reportage about the very rare black Alpaca with its fantastically soft wool. Now it seems like an endless time ago.
I also think back to the long journey I made two years ago to Namibia. A journey that contributed to the development of the recently launched YVRA 1500. I got the idea of developing a perfume with a sort of shock effect from a memorable encounter. I made a long car trip by 4-wheel drive from the capital Windhoek to the North, towards the border with Angola. All the way in the North you sometimes do not encounter a single living being during a day's drive and the world seems endless. After hours of traveling through endless sandy plains, I ended up in Kunene where I saw a deserted settlement of a Himba tribe. You cannot imagine how isolated these nomads live together with their cows and goats under the most primitive conditions. They own little more than a cabin and some water from a nearby well.
Both men and women hardly wear any clothes. Their traditional clothing is made from the skins of slaughtered animals. Because water is scarce, Himba women never wash themselves, but rub themselves in with ash and otjize, which is an extremely strongly scented mixture of goat fat, herbs and ocher. In puberty, girls braid their hair into little ponytails that are rubbed with this red colored mixture. The scent of Himba women, and especially their hair, is so extremely strong that you have to turn away from it at first. If you did not know that that striking scent comes from people, you would think that the scent comes from an old donkey.
Together with my guide, I gave a Himba girl a ride to a nearby community. A day after she got out of the car, the car still smelled of the bizarre scent mixture, which, despite the vehemence, had something interesting. The same is true with the recently launched YVRA 1500. At first, the scent is very intimidating and you can almost smell it with your stomach, but over time the scent also takes on something intriguing because you have not smelled it before. This powerhouse, consisting of osmanthus, bitter orange and mint can now be enjoyed by a group of enthusiasts. At YVRA, we are already looking forward to a life where there is again room for positivity, travel and winter sports. To celebrate that new era, we are already working on a new energetic and fresh formula that should please both women and men.
Keep you all posted and kind regards,
Yvo