A Drink of Dry Land

We dedicate this book to travelling companions Les Bush, Noel Watson, the late great Herman Potgieter and the constant inspiration of Lawrence G Green. It has also been written for the enjoyment of those who love the open road …

– Chris Marais & Julienne du Toit

First published in 2006 by Struik Travel & Heritage

(an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd)

Company Reg. No. 1966/003153/07

Wembley Square, First Floor, Solan Street, Gardens, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.randomstruik.co.za

Copyright © in published edition: Random House Struik 2006

Copyright © in text: Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit 2006

Copyright © in photographs: Chris Marais 2006

Publishing Manager: Dominique le Roux

Managing Editor: Lesley Hay-Whitton

Project Coordinator: Samantha Menezes-Fick

Editor: Deborah Louw

Cover Designer: Melanie Kriel

Senior Designer: Daniele Michelini

Proofreader: Roxanne Reid

ISBN (Print) 9781770072749

ISBN (ePub) 9781920545567

ISBN (PDF) 9781920545574

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner(s).

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Contents

Production Notes

Chapter 1: Jo’burg to Hotazel

Miles from Nowhere

Chapter 2: Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

Meerkat Patrol

Chapter 3: Northern Cape

Trance Kalahari

Chapter 4: Namaqua Memories

Lawyers, Guns & Donkeys

Chapter 5: Bushmanland

Pella Cinderella

Chapter 6: Springbok to Namibia

Riders in the Rain

Chapter 7: Fish River Canyon

Roadhouse Rock

Chapter 8: Ai-Ais to Lüderitz

Crazy Chewy Nama Radio

Chapter 9: Lüderitz

God Rest Ye Merry Buchters

Chapter 10: Kolmanskop

Beer & Skittles

Chapter 11: Wild Namib Horses

Breakfast with Champions

Chapter 12: The Namib Naukluft

Under a Gibbous Moon

Chapter 13: Namib Naukluft – Kuiseb Canyon

Henno’s Place

Chapter 14: Swakopmund

Black Forest Cake Walk

Chapter 15: Mondesa Township, Swakopmund

‘I am an Afrikaner’

Chapter 16: Cape Cross

Belly Safari

Chapter 17: Skeleton Coast

Tobacco Road

Chapter 18: Kaokoveld

Frontier Town

Chapter 19: Khorixas-Kamanjab

Chateau Huab

Chapter 20: Opuwo-Khorixas

Damara & Damara

Chapter 21: Otjiwarongo

Cats & Dogs

Chapter 22: Etosha

Pyjama Party

Chapter 23: South West Afrikaners

Dorsland Trek

Chapter 24: Owamboland

Dog Biscuits

Chapter 25: Angola Days

Across the River

Chapter 26: Grootfontein and Beyond

Back to the Meteor

Chapter 27: Rundu-Impalila Island

Caprivi Stripped

Chapter 28: Palmwag, Damaraland

Rock Star Safari

Chapter 29: Serra Cafema

Crocodile Country

Reading Room

Glossary

Contact Details

Production Notes

The road trip my wife Jules and I undertook in the spring of 2004 wasn’t meant to end up as a travel book. It was planned – with the Namibian Tourism Board’s Johannesburg office – as a series of magazine articles covering the country from its southern tip to its eastern exit.

From Day One, however, as we approached the dusty Kalahari town of Hotazel, it started shaping up as something special. As we continued to Namaqualand, 30 years of memories returned: past exploits, a murder case of biblical proportions, an old man and his donkeys and a diamond town in the misty scrub desert on the shores of a rather wild Atlantic Ocean.

But the main course – this vast, dry cathedral called Namibia – invoked even more sensations of times gone by, of pure space and the joy of road travel in a simple farmer’s bakkie, not always staying “five-star” but relishing each new day in this gorgeous blonde land.

Yes, it’s true. You don’t need a 4x4 muscle machine to travel through the best bits of Namibia. And if you do come here in a four-wheel-drive, make sure you behave responsibly. It’s heartbreaking at times to see how many trashy tourists have left their skidmarks on this old country – and to know that most of them were left by our own compatriots. Some of those tracks in the lichen fields have been there for decades, and they’re nothing more than eyesores.

We also found that reading up on the various facets of Namibia helped us tremendously in getting a handle on the country, on peeping below the surface where its 1,8 million-odd people live and work for their existences each day. Our reading list follows at the end of the book – but there are scores of other relevant books we have yet to delve into. Namibia has always been a fertile ground for the writer and the photographer.

As such, A Drink of Dry Land is a simple account of a man and his wife driving to and through Namibia and having a couple of adventures along the way. Forgive an old national serviceman’s honest outrage near the end of the book – it just had to find some utterance and I thought it was appropriate here. You can’t be expected to relish the present-day miracle of most of southern Africa without occasionally recalling some of the bitter flavours of the past.

When we’re on the road, Jules is the mad genius fact-finder, researcher and keeper of the journal. She spends more than two hours a day fattening the “road book” with trusty information, interviews, background and impressions. Her journal has become this book.

Me, I’m the photographer, driver and drinker of single malt whisky on safari – at the safe end of the day, of course. The voice of A Drink of Dry Land is a blend of Jules and Chris. We invite you to take the third seat in the bakkie. Sit back and enjoy the ride …

October 2005

Johannesburg

Chapter 1: Jo’burg to Hotazel

Miles from Nowhere

Looking back on it all, I wonder why we didn’t pack the lounge curtains, the kitchen sink and the two cats.

We certainly stuffed everything else into our grey Isuzu diesel bakkie for our two-month Dry Lands journey: four kinds of sardines, mussels, whisky, pickled fish, candles, five torches, six kinds of beans, three dozen two-minute noodle-packs, bags of sucky sweets, wine and sauces of all descriptions. Two laptops, three cameras, six lenses, a big box full of double adaptors, USB leads, batteries, chargers, dusters, a wind-up radio and 100 compact discs. Oh, and a pack of playing cards, for the various gin rummy championships along the way.

I had just been reading about the eighteenth-century journeys of flamboyant Francois le Vaillant, an adventurous Frenchman who never travelled anywhere without his baboon Kees, hordes of camp followers, wagonloads of exotic condiments, trading tobacco, a fully stocked mobile kitchen, 4 kg of chocolate, thousands of beads, hundreds of scarves, an armoury of 15 muskets, a monster of a scimitar and an ostrich feather in his hat.

Maybe some Le Vaillant spirit had rubbed off on me. But this was 2004, a year by which, it may be said, a substantial amount of travellers’ comforts had been established in southern Africa, unlike the late 1780s. These days there are all manner of filling stations, snack shops, department stores, restaurants and yes, even camera stockists, along the way into the wilderness. And we weren’t even going into such a wilderness, just a couple of months of long tar and gravel travel with plenty of human settlements in between. But it’s fun to pretend, so we packed for the expedition as if our very lives depended on it.

We left Jo’burg in the early spring. When we go on long trips, Jules and I always escape from the city after dawn on a Sunday. There’s no traffic except for the breakfast-run Harleys with their trademark engine growls and shiny merchandising, the lycra-clad bicycle crowd with their praying mantis alien-bug helmets and the all-night party studs racing from red light to red light, their shades barely covering little piggy-eyes.

Heading west, we made a detour through the village of Magaliesberg to Koster, from where we would drop south towards Lichtenburg. For a few minutes, we tracked a hot air balloon full of tourists, Brie and champagne as it sailed silently towards the mountains. Approaching Koster, I had a sudden attack of heartburn, brought on by a 20-year-old memory.

The newspaper where I once worked sent a photographer named Noel Watson and me to cover a mampoer (moonshine liquor, sometimes also affectionately called stook) festival in these parts. For good luck we took along some beers and a Welsh Afrikaner called Llewellyn Kriel. We arrived in the early afternoon full of good cheer. We left under cover of darkness, having thrown our names away somewhere in a mealie field. Along the line, there had been a Minister of Agriculture, a bottle of Mafeking Relief and the wink of a farmer’s wife, all of which led to a hasty retreat to Jo’burg, with anxious glances backward.

The previous time Noel and I discovered the dubious pleasures of mampoer was on a farm outside Lichtenburg, at the end of a very long and emotional string of assignments in the vast north-west. Our last port of call was the home of a family who owned a 300-year-old distilling licence. A quick interview, a photograph and we’re outta here, was our plan.

“Sit,” the farmer’s wife instructed us, pointing to a couple of overstuffed chairs on her porch. She brought us a pint of clear, sluggish liquid and two litres of Coke. She warned us before leaving:

“Make sure you add the Coke.”

Well. Fancy an old boere tannie telling us how to drink. Noel and I shared a smirk and set about our business with the mampoer bottle. It was like having lots of little jet-fuel shooters. Then we had an argument about a girl we both fancied, made friends over some more mampoer and decided to fly home in our office car. Our hostess had vanished.

We made it as far as the farm entrance. The gatepost leapt out in front of us like a vicious kudu bull and broke itself on the front bumper. I left a R20 note in a tatty envelope under a stone at the battered gate, with a note saying sorry. Maybe we really should have mixed a little Coke into our jet-fuel shooters.

Jules and I cut through the Verwoerdian facebrick suburbs of Lichtenburg and the only signs of life were the vendors waving the Afrikaans Sunday newspaper Rapport in our faces. The headline read “Ai, Dis Lekker” (Oh, It’s Good). We had just beaten the New Zealand All Blacks in a game of rugby and the platteland seemed to glow briefly – with pride. Lichtenburg, however, looked like a hollow-cheeked, fever-eyed kind of place to live. Out here, it probably pays to be tough and thund’rous of brow. To know your way around a mealie and the innards of an old Mercedes-Benz.

But these were just drive-through observations. For all we really knew, the local Jews, Afrikaners, Englishmen, Indians and Tswana folk were gentle, peaceful and contented citizens.

One thing is for certain. Lichtenburg’s most exciting day ever was 13 March 1926. On that day, a young farmer called Kobus Voorendyk and his labourer Jan (I could not track his surname) were digging fence-pole holes, when Jan upped and yelled:

“Baas, hier’s a diamant!” (Master, here’s a diamond.)

Kobus took the object, which could well have been a shard of broken glass from a bottle left over from a hasty picnic during the Anglo-Boer War, rode off and showed it to the science teacher at the local school. They dropped it in an acid bath and left it for a couple of days. When they returned, it was intact.

That discovery sparked off a world-class diamond rush. By the end of the year, more than 100 000 men were scrabbling in the dirt around Lichtenburg. Such excitement! Kobus Voorendyk coined it Big Time. You had to pay him 15% of anything found on his farm – and you bought his water. Within months, Kobus’s farm was organised chaos. Church ministers and circus performers vied for the hearts and minds of the diggers, you couldn’t see for all the dust and in less than ten years more than seven million carats of diamonds had been excavated from the area. And then Lichtenburg slumped back into a coma. As far as we could see, it still awaited the kiss of a sweet prince – or perhaps a sharp-eyed tourism tout – to bring it back to life.

We slid onto the N14 south and entered the town of Sannieshof.

I’d been here six months before with my friend, photographer Les Bush. We saw a shop in Sannieshof that displayed an Osama bin Laden T-shirt on a rack outside. Which was rather strange, considering we were nowhere near his allegedly favourite spot, the north-west territories of Pakistan.

Les had come to teach me the time-honoured art of birdwatching. He had chosen Barber’s Pan, because it’s an all-year water source and the migrating birds love it here. Little-known fact: birds are South Africa’s most exotic foreign tourists. They fly down from Europe, Russia and Asia, dodging Spanish hunters and Chinese trappers on the way. En route we had seen the Russian-bred lesser kestrels chasing bugs in the mealie lands, perching on telephone lines and enjoying the prospect of a gathering storm, which was turning clouds into castles in the sky.

Once ensconced with beer and binoculars in a hide at Barber’s Pan, I heard Les luring the birds out with enticing calls like:

“Show yourself, or I’ll heave half a brick at you.” Les found a European nightjar dozing on the branch of a dead tree and behaved like an instant Lotto winner as he recorded a “lifetime twitch”, dancing a merry jig in the moonlight.

Never mind. In the face of persistent organic pollutants, expanding agriculture, devastation of habitat, hordes of humans, hunting, acid rain, damming, oil spills, pesticides, fire, electrocutions, the household cat, squatter encroachment, avian diseases, commercial fishing, the caged-bird trade, climate change, deforestation, drought and invasive aliens, it’s great to know there’s a place like Barber’s Pan, where they can rest, congregate and eat in peace.

It’s also a bit of a love nest for the likes of the Diederik cuckoo. The male of the species finds hairy caterpillars, calls the female over and lures her into having sex with him for the price of dinner. Very Old School, the Diederik cuckoo.

I also met the bar-tailed godwit at Barber’s Pan. This major international traveller is a stocky, stilt-like character who can fly up to 8 000 km without rest.

Now, six months later, we drove on, Jules and I, passing Barber’s Pan and entering the town of Delareyville, named after one of the giants of the west, General Koos de la Rey. With some keen foresight he was given the second Christian name of Hercules. De la Rey was considered to be one of the top Boer generals of the Anglo-Boer War, and he was practically invincible in this, his own back yard.

Although not officially schooled in military ways, General de la Rey was a natural soldier, especially in the new type of guerrilla warfare, in which a small, mobile force could successfully pit itself against a larger one. He also had his very own fortune-teller in the form of Nicolaas van Rensburg, aka Siener van Rensburg.

Van Rensburg, about whom much has been written, is an icon for the more apocalyptically focused Afrikaners of South Africa. And as we drove through the west, Jules and I often encountered, stuck mainly onto traffic signs, decals that read: www.siener.co.za. The Boer Nostradamus had a website dedicated to him.

Two of his major predictions were, according to historians, the Boer victory at Tweebosch and the death of General de la Rey, which still keeps conspiracy theorists up at night. Younger South Africans associate a red bull with a buzzy party drink, but the red bulls of Siener van Rensburg’s dreams were all symbolic of the British colonial presence. Every time he dreamt of a red bull injured, limping or dead, his followers would cheer.

The “Sienerism” that interested me the most, however, had more to do with the local diamond fields than the battlefields. Van Rensburg once dreamt about a diamond the size of a sheep’s head. When his son, after futile efforts, quit the diggings in disgust, he sent him back there. Soon afterwards, Van Rensburg Jnr came across a 42-carat diamond. Which isn’t exactly like finding one the size of a sheep’s head, but it means he didn’t leave the diggings empty-handed, either.

My favourite “digger quote” came from a guy called Franz Marx:

“Seeing a diamond in the pan is like spotting a gentleman in a tuxedo standing in a roomful of bums. You can’t mistake him.”

My favourite “digger story”:

Three brothers – built small and compact, like gnomes – once lived and dug for diamonds out near Makwassie. One day, they found a donderse groot goen (an extremely large stone of immense value) just when they’d practically given up on their diggings. Such was the shock of discovery that one brother immediately fell to the ground and had an epileptic fit. The other ran straight into the bush and was never heard from again. The third one, however, had a little more sense. He went into town, bought a bottle of brandy and celebrated until the wheels fell off.

And never you mind about mampoer, either. In the nearby diamond-digging district of Wolmaransstad, Oom Pieter Ernst makes a brandy that will bring tears to your eyes. I used to be a whisky guy, but three strong hits of Oom Pieter’s Klipspruit brandy (run over ice cubes, with a hint of spring water added) immediately converted me to the browner stuff. Although he had to pack for a holiday at the coast, I kept him there ruthlessly, pouring me drink after drink, on the pretext of wanting to hear all his brandy secrets. Smooth brandy from the harsh west – “out of the strong, something sweet” (Judges 14:7).

The western Transvaal, I assured my wife, had always been a place of reprobates. I told her about one Scotty Smith, whose life story reads like a dishevelled pile of facts garnished with fiction. They should erect a statue to this guy somewhere out here, just like they did with the Aussie Outback outlaw Ned Kelly. In fact, Scotty could bring one of these towns some much-needed tourist-fortune. Everyone loves a story, especially one told about a big strong gunman with a twinkle in his eye and couple of coppers for the poor.

Scotty, whose real name was George St Leger Gordon Lennox, came out here with the British army, deserted and made the southern fringes of the Kalahari his stamping ground. He stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, ran illegal firearms and generally behaved like an overgrown child with attention deficit disorder. He was finally caught and sentenced to four years’ jail for armed robbery. He served less than a year, and much of that time was not behind bars, unless you count the hotel bars of Griqualand West. He simply gave his jailers his word of honour and they told him to be back after closing time.

Finally, we arrived at Kuruman. The sky was watercolour-blue, the land sepia and the road a viscous black and white. Jules wanted to see the mission station where the Moffats had worked. She was quite taken with the fact that the explorer David Livingstone proposed to Mary Moffat in this town back in 1845. It was also here that Robert Moffat had the Bible translated and printed in Tswana.

With Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) singing Miles from Nowhere on the bakkie tape, we finally drove into Hotazel. Ever since I began this insane road-trekking more than 30 years ago, I had wanted to come to the Kalahari town with the strange name. A manganese mining town, Hotazel had a deadly Sunday afternoon dorpie feel to it. Even the yard dogs were silent. A sign put up by the local Combined School invited us to a performance – later that week – of Ipi Tombi, the “smash hit musical”.

“Welcome to a long time ago,” I said to Jules …

Chapter 2: Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

Meerkat Patrol

After the shimmering baby-crap-coloured flatness of the drive through the old Western Transvaal, it was a relief to come and play in the world’s biggest sandpit – the Kalahari. The word itself carries the same totemic powers of African icons like Zulu, Kruger, Mandela, Masai, the Nile, Kilimanjaro, Timbuktu, Cape Town and the Great Karoo. The Kalahari, which takes up a fair chunk of southern Africa, is a magical land of half-lost tribes, a huge, spidery delta complex supporting a massive ecosystem, remote settlements and ancient lakes beneath an all-encompassing overlay of sand.

It’s not simply a desert. The Kalahari is a place of deep solitude, nurturing creativity and healing. Yet over all this spiritual and visual enchantment looms the ever-present spectre of drought and desolation. Stretching from the Gariep River to the Equator, it’s the largest continuous mantle of sand on Earth. The Tsamma melons you find in the dry parts of the Kalahari remain edible even in the very dead of winter, yielding moisture and food when they’re most needed. Perfect sustenance for the animals and the wily Bushmen, who had all the tricks of survival hard-wired into their genetic systems.

And even the animals who live in the Kalahari seem to help one another out – obviously when they’re not stalking one another for supper. The aardvark, for instance, digs homes for half the creatures of the Kalahari with its incessant burrowing for termites. He makes underground dormitories for foxes, genets, spring hares, meerkats and mongooses.

As a city dweller, however, you don’t move to the Kalahari on a whim – or with a streaky plan of action. It’s the Mojave on speed. Heaven on earth for those in the know – hell for a tenderfoot.

The Kalahari comes in many flavours. You get your Okavango Kalahari, your Central Kalahari, your Bushman Kalahari and your Gemsbok Kalahari. We were heading for what we called the Oppenheimer Kalahari, a patchwork of former farmlands that is being stitched back together and rehabilitated into the Classic Kalahari of yore, when the grass was high and herds of game filled the horizon. The Old Kalahari, as the people who drive donkey carts on its dirt roads still call it.

The story of Tswalu Kalahari Reserve began in the bitterly cold winter of 1998, when scion of the legendary mining dynasty Nicky Oppenheimer and his wife Strillie slept over at this game farm, now larger than most national parks in South Africa.

They remembered the flaxen land, a convivial, fire-lit night in the boma, a sky bright with stars and a fleeting encounter with owner Stephen Boler, a man with a broad Manchester accent and a burning passion for Africa.

Stephen died suddenly a few months later. While going through his effects, his lawyer found a document stating that in the event of his death the Oppenheimers should be contacted and offered first option on Tswalu.

After having this enormous piece of thirstland wished upon them, the Oppenheimers grew to love the place and took ownership of Tswalu a year later.

“But we’re just the temporary owners,” Nicky told us back in 2000, when we first visited Tswalu. “For the stretch of time that we’re here, we have an obligation to the land.” It was refreshing to hear such words uttered by a mining magnate. I asked him what kind of sightings we could expect on Tswalu, and I remember his answer:

“I can promise you nothing but the stars.”

In fact, as you’ll find out, he was being modest. There’s a lot to see at Tswalu – some of it very, very weird indeed.

We were interested in what had happened to this part of the Kalahari in the four years since our last visit. As we made our way across the tawny plains towards the purple Korannaberg Mountains, plumy yellow grasses waved cheerfully along the road verges, while on the business side of the barbed wire fences the farmlands had been grazed down to the gravel. Thorn bushes were spreading to protect the stripped earth from cattle and goats. And then we arrived at Tswalu, where no livestock had lived for a while, and we saw that the land was recovering well.

The old books tell of the trekbok migrations through the Karoo and the Kalahari, where upwards of four million springbok and associated plains game would move through settlements in the space of a week.

One remembers the legend of the trekboer Gert van der Merwe, whose wagon was meandering down the barren Molopo River on the Bechuanaland (now Botswana) border one dry and dusty day. Gert’s Bushman guide suddenly urged him to take his wagon up to higher ground, and from there they spotted hares, jackals and snakes rushing by. Then came a huge cloud of dust and a 5-km-wide front of approaching animals. Then the Van der Merwe party, huddled in a rocking wagon, found themselves adrift in a sea of pure, unadulterated springbok – more biltong (that Kalahari staple of dried meat) than Gert would see in his whole lifetime. The trekbok stampede swept every one of Van der Merwe’s cattle along with it.

On our previous visit, we stayed at the luxury end of Tswalu as part of a media party pack. This time, we were accommodated at lodgings reserved for researchers – which was about as much of Tswalu as we could afford. We were taken to a house in the middle of the Kalahari that looked like it had been snatched from a Jo’burg suburb and dropped here, face-brick, slick plumbing, high wall and all.

Gus van Dyk, the manager of Tswalu, explained that the house had been built by an Austrian as a hunting lodge. This was one of the farms acquired by the Oppenheimers to add to the Tswalu legacy.

So now we’re in the Tyrolean Kalahari, I mused as I saw the Teutonic designs of the toilets and the general Eurocentricity of all the fittings. How strange to have a light socket flown in from Vienna. What feelings of Old Country nostalgia must have washed over someone to have gone all the way to Europe to buy a tap fitting?

But then why should I find this bizarre? I live in a city – Johannesburg – where the overriding style in the upmarket areas is Tuscany through and through. Judging by the stressed walls and faux-Tuscan village look to the hives of gated settlements in the northern reaches of Jo’burg, I’d have said most of us were Italian. Or perhaps we have fond memories of package bus tours through the bucolic majesty around Florence. Or should that be Firenze? God. Who knows these days?

“I hear what you say,” said the laconic Gus. “If I had my way I’d tear the whole place down.” But no matter, we hadn’t come for a hot time in a swanky shag palace. We had meerkats in mind.

The road between Hotazel and Vanzylsrus forms the northern border of Tswalu’s 97 000 hectares. When Gus arrived in 2003, he found unlikely species like buffalo, nyala and waterbuck wandering about. He also found, to his amazement, specially bred freaks like white blesbok, black and totally white springbok. Stephen Boler may have been dead keen on Africa, but it turns out he was also a bit of a Dr Moreau. He had introduced all these strange non-Kalahari species and their sub-breeds to titillate the hunters, who were always on the lookout for something strange and exotic to shoot and turn into a conversation piece above the fireplace back home.

This was so not-Kalahari PC, however. Gus quietly began to sell off many of the strange beasts and turned the freaks into snacks for predators such as the wild dogs of Tswalu. The species reintroduced to this neck of the Kalahari, however, are fine animals such as the majestic Kalahari lion, Hartmann’s mountain zebra and the black rhino – all desert-adapted.

Early the next morning, one of Tswalu’s section managers, Mark Rutherfoord, took us off to look for the dark-maned Kalahari lions. With us was Morgan Leeu, a former goatherd who had become an expert tracker. Mark and Morgan found the tracks of a heavily pregnant lioness, but they led up into the shale mountains and disappeared. She was denning, and totally unavailable for comment or camera session.

Then they found the spoor of some lion cubs who had recently entered this world, but that was all we saw of them. While we were sniffing about for sign of lion, I came across a strange, spiky plant that looked like a cactus that someone had smoked and stubbed out in the dirt.

“That,” said Mark, “is the Hoodia.”

Well now. To botanists worth a bloom, the Hoodia gordonii is potentially the miracle plant for the wonder drug of the twenty-first century. Have you noticed how fat we’re all becoming here in the so-called civilised world? Have you felt the incredible effort of lifting a TV remote control device these days? Have you experienced the instant bliss of double-cheesy pizza delivered to your home? Have you developed a love affair with your new four-door fridge and, more to the point, its highly calorific contents?

That’s right. We’ve turned into a culture of porkers. While most of the world stumbles by on less than one American dollar a day, we’ve got our grubby noses firmly stuffed into the fast-food trough, with our baseball caps turned ’round for easier access to the fried goodies on offer. And the servings are growing bigger and cheaper every year, while our clothes are now approaching the size of your average Bedouin tent. Yeah, fatties. You know who you are.

But before you and I rush off for more comfort food to escape the reality of our expanding girths, we should pause for a moment and consider the humble Hoodia. And, more to the point, the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

These relics from the Stone Age are now seen as artistic and wise beyond anything we know. Which is a case of “too little, too late”, because we’ve hunted and persecuted and likkered them up to the edge of extinction over the last three centuries. We used to think Bushman art was nothing but naïve rock scratchings performed by lazy, cow-stealing sub-humans. We fought them for the right to live in their space. We hunted their eland. They rustled our cattle. And then we incorporated them, and now they wear sneakers and they like a drink and a smoke too much. And when we say sorry, they say that’s fine – it’s your round, mate. I guess the same kind of sad song can be sung around the campfire in countries like the USA and Australia, where the shattered First People are now largely remembered only in misty-eyed legends.

Back to the Hoodia. For more than 27 000 years, the Bushmen roamed these parts. And somewhere along the line, they discovered that a bite of Hoodia on the hunt could keep them going all day long. They called it xhoba, and it staved off their hunger pangs. Scientists still have to give the final word on this member of the milkweed family, but all the signs point to its being the Viagra for the circumferentially-challenged.

Tom Mangold of the BBC went up into the Kalahari and ate some. He attested to the feel-good effect of the Hoodia and then the “magnificent deception” that many of us crave: for nearly 24 hours, his stomach informed him it had consumed its fill, even though Tom hadn’t eaten a morsel.

Now they’re talking about Hoodia Bars in London, Hoodia Hangouts in New York and Hoodia Burgers in LA. One can only hope and pray that the original Masters of the Hoodia, the Bushmen, get some percentage of the profits. And, more importantly, that this money is used to restore their lifestyle in some way. In the words of Jim Morrison (or was it Kojak?): Hoodia Love …

“You’re studying that plant like your life depended on it,” observed Jules as she passed me crouched in the Kalahari dust, and I re-entered Earth’s atmosphere with a jolt. “Wait up,” I replied, jogging after her, “I’ve got a great Hoodia pun for you.”

There are few other dry places in the world so full of edible and medicinal plants. The lavender fever-berry knocks the hell out of a headache. Grewia flava, the velvet raisin, is sweet and furry in your mouth, chasing away thirst. Add the !Nabba truffle, the shepherd’s tree berries and the spinach-like leaves of the buffalo thorn and you have a New Age vegetarian feast in the making. Then eat some liquorice-flavoured Hoodia for pudding and you’ll develop a welcome case of eating amnesia.

We met up with Gus van Dyk and a farmer friend at one of the nearby waterholes. We’d been talking about meerkats, and the farmer told us how he used to shoot meerkats for target practice when he was a kid growing up in the Karoo. As always, there seems to be a good way to farm, and then a really stupid, arrogant way to earn a living off one’s imagined mastery of nature and her beasts. Anyhow, the rather likeable farmer said he had changed his ways and left the Meerkat Hunt Club in his later years.

Tswalu has its own habituated meerkat family, and we headed out early one morning with another Tswalu man, Andrew Stainthorpe, to meet them.

My camera trigger finger was twitching. I’ve always loved those cheesy “meerkat on a mound” shots where the little animal sits dreamily contemplating the sun, seemingly lost in a world of fat grubs and dagwood-sized worms. I found out later, however, that the meerkat on a mound is actually the designated lookout, keeping a beady eye on the sky for raptors on the down-swoop. And snakes, they hate snakes with a passion. No dreams here. In fact, a meerkat eats lots of scorpions and spiders that give him an in-built resistance to poisons. One of the Tswalu meerkats was once bitten by a highly venomous puffadder and lay there motionless for two days, as if he were in a coma. But then the little fellow came round, and gradually recovered.

Meerkats are a bit like movie stars, really. They’re ambivalent about cameras and are always so much smaller than you’d expect. We arrived at the burrow of the habituated troop and met Maureen Matshikiri, who was Tswalu’s meerkat wrangler at the time. Every day she would come out to the same troop, make the same noises and do the same things. Once she’d been crossed off their raptor threat list, Maureen became an honorary meerkat – khaki division.

The meerkat on the mound had often taken the trouble to warn Maureen about approaching snakes by chittering and pointing them out to her, she said.

“And once or twice, when a martial eagle flew over the burrow, they clung to my leg for protection.” The meerkat on lookout duty always seeks a good vantage point – a tree stump or stone – and emits a periodic peep to let the others know all is well. Researchers call it the “watchman’s song”. Sometimes Maureen would be the only tall object available, so the lookout would shimmy up her clothes and sit sentry on her shoulder.

At dusk, we met up with the not-so-very fearsome Cape buffalo of Tswalu. Normally, a buffalo looks at you like you owe him a lot of money and he’s found out you’re stalking his sister. He gives you that mean, streetwise squinty glare and more often than not it’s you who breaks eye contact. Not this lot, however. They had a beseeching mien about them as they made round cow-eyes at us. A massive bull came roaring up to the vehicle, and I thought maybe our time had come. He would surely blow us over with pure body weight, and then gore us with those bossy horns. He screeched to a halt, however, and looked up at Andrew imploringly. Words were not necessary: he was begging. Of course, I wondered why.

“That’s because we bring them their lucerne about now,” said Andrew. “This is a temporary measure to see the buffalo through the nutritional downtime of late winter – we had a very poor rainy season.”

And when the feed finally arrived, the buffalo were tame as Jersey cows, falling hungrily on their dinner supplement, a bit of protein to support their less nutritious main meal of winter Kalahari grass. I resisted the urge to fondle the big bull’s silken, and reasonably tick-free, ears. Maybe, somewhere deep in that Billy-buff brain of his, there still lurked a bit of angry Africa …

Chapter 3: Northern Cape

Trance Kalahari

To the untrained city eye, not much happens in the southern Kalahari. A cow slouches lazily out of the shade towards a patch of grass. A listless wisp of wind toys with a spot of dust somewhere between Hotazel and the horizon. A mongoose approaches the roadside, looks left, looks right and looks left again, finally sloping across into the blonde infinity of the summer prairies. Out here, one day is the same as a million years in its passing.

So we really stirred things up, Jules and I, as we came barrelling down the Dedeben farm road in our grubby bakkie towards the village of Olifantshoek, where, the legend goes, there may once have been a great African elephant graveyard.

We stopped on the side of the calcrete road and waited for a dot in the distance to join us. That dot soon became a little Kalahari family, their donkeys and their goats. We introduced ourselves and, in the manner of the region, they reciprocated via the patriarch.

“Thank you for asking, sir. My name is Matewis Bezuidenhout, sir. This is my wife Anna. And our little niece, Minna.”

I requested permission to photograph them.

“Thank you for asking, sir. Yes, of course, you may take some pictures.”

I enquired, in mid-shoot, where they might be going.

“Thank you for asking, sir. We’re going to the auction to sell our goats. We hope to get R300 for each of them.”

Mr Bezuidenhout had won me over. There’s normally not much respect around for us travelling paparazzi types. It’s usually bugger off, how much are you paying me, I’m in a hurry or I don’t photograph well from where you’re standing. Here was the stately Matewis thanking me for showing an interest in his life – and in the future of his rather nervous goats.

And then suddenly the Kalahari boiled over in a dusty cavalcade of muscle trucks, 4x4s and old, low-slung Mercedes-Benz veterans from the days of Jim Reeves and Elvis Presley, hooting and hollering as if they were on a serious snipe hunt. They were all heading off to the country auction near Markramsdraai. There would be brandy. There would be delicious boerewors. There would probably be more than a dash of manly Kalahari farm humour. But somewhere in that party mix would be the Bezuidenhout family, with rich ancient San Bushman blood yet bearing a proud Afrikaans name, flogging their beautiful brace of goats.

In the shop window at the filling station in Olifantshoek were two posters announcing the imminent musical performances of Wynand Windpomp (enquire at Langeberg Abattoir) and Jurie Els, who was booked to perform at the Show Hall on 3 September. I love these platteland shows, mainly because I used to sing bluegrass for the Silver Creek Mountain Band and we were part of the dry country circuit. The odd policemen’s ball here, a high-school charity show there. Ah, the constant problems with lighting, three-point plugs, reverb and the enigma of that very fat fellow in the tight khaki shorts with a girlfriend who makes eyes at the bass player with the rings on his toes. The Olifantshoek Show Hall – you’ll find its equivalent all over the world, where there’s very little water but loads of beef, hard liquor and a strange attachment to the Old Testament.

I slipped in a tape of Dixie Chicken by Little Feat, the best band in the world, as we climbed onto the back of the N14 to Upington, desert safari oasis of the Northern Cape and the capital of Gordonia. We cranked up the volume and were outside the Upington police station photographing their “camel cop” statue in no time at all.

The police camel patrols of the Northern Cape used to walk at a “sand shuffle” of 12 km an hour, covering as much as 70 km in a day. They would be on the lookout for river pirates, diamond crooks and general outlaws. But camels, especially the Australian-bred “Ghan” types, were also used to carry the mails through this harsh land.

Upington excites me immensely. It lies on the Gariep (formerly Orange), South Africa’s mother river. From here, you head north to the glorious Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, west to the flower fields of Namaqualand, east back home to Jo’burg or south to Verneuk Pan (Deception Pan), where Jules and I once trance-danced a weekend away with the fire-weavers, the flame-breathers, the Goths, the hip-hoppers and a very naked and extremely stoned lady who insisted on mooning the moon.

Being a baby boomer with a lust for the music styles of Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the aforementioned Little Feat, I cannot be accused of being a rave bunny. But you’ve got to look at a thing at least once, as they say. So, back in the summer of 1996, off we went, Jules and I, in the company of grizzled senior photographer Les Bush and the youthful Lorna Phillips, our “spirit guide and mentor”, to the rave in the desert at Verneuk Pan, where Malcolm Campbell once tried to beat the world land-speed record in a Bluebird.

We pitched our tent and partied until dawn, when Les came barging in to announce that he’d seen a huge black chicken at the edge of the desert. We went to have a look, and his black chicken turned out to be a lean-to shelter made from ebony silk. A short lunar eclipse was on the go at the time, and in the beguilement of moon and desert, the flapping contraption had eerily taken on the shape of large poultry.

But the contents of this chicken really gobsmacked us: a naked woman in a yoga stance, upside down, with her pert bottom exposed to the likes of us and the big black moon in the royal blue sky. She remained in this impossibly rude yet almost erotic position for ages. Then she flicked on some rave threads and danced off into the distant mirages.

Later that day, a Cessna Caravan arrived at the “Desert Storm” gig, landing nearby and taxiing right up to the tent town. It disgorged a dozen shaven-headed fellows in camo pants, who immediately set to work on their dwellings. Just after lunchtime, when the heat was starting to get really silly, a Cessna 210 taildragger landed and out climbed a long-limbed woman passenger wearing aviator glasses and high boots, with an overnight togbag slung over her shoulder. “Gucci Girl” strode into what was by now affectionately known as Barter Town and disappeared into a cloud of dry ice.

Desperately in need of a bath, we drove out to the nearby town of Kenhardt. At the exit gate, officials were handing out pass-outs. One young man with a yellow bandanna came over and gave us three pass-outs.

“But there are four of us,” I protested. “You’ve only given us three.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said, ever so politely, and very slowly. I knew instantly that he hailed from Cape Town. “I thought you were a cushion.”

“What? And cushions don’t get pass-outs?” I asked, as if we were having the world’s most normal conversation. I must confess right now that I had been stroking my tent flaps affectionately all morning. I didn’t really know why. Maybe a naughty youngster had dropped something strange in my tequila, was the current theory. Anyhow, my brain was merrily frying away.

“I see your point,” the official said, flipping a luminous green Frisbee out into the scrub desert towards no one I could see. “Sorry. Here’s another.”

The barman at the Kenhardt Hotel pub, whither we freshly laundered adventurers repaired for beer, had his own theories. By his lights, anyone who was going to pitch a tent in the desert and hop about to industrial clamour was one Calamata olive short of a cocktail party. While he was telling me this in no uncertain terms, my eyes could not help wandering up to the wall space above his head, where the heads of dead warthogs and meerkats were on display. The Lion King lives – or not – in Kenhardt. Every third beer turned into a toast to Timon and Pumba.

Meanwhile, locals from near and distant Northern Cape settlements like Keimoes, Kakamas, Springbok, Grootdrink, Pofadder and Putsonderwater had jumped in their pickups and rushed out to Barter Town. When they got there, however, most of the boere were, understandably, a little wary of one-on-one contact with the tribes in their Celtic body paint, hammering away on their bongos, sucking mournfully on their didgeridoos and feeling their partners in full Ecstasy mode. You don’t just walk up to these guys and say Howzit. They might eat you.

So the boere just circled the camp slowly in their Japanese trucks, pointing out the occasional naked breast and cracking up at the trance-dreamers baking themselves brown in the Kalahari sun. They looked like an advance team of de-programmers just waiting to pounce on a cultists’ cabal. They sat on the backs of their pickups in folding chairs, drinking beer and enjoying the strangest show they’d ever seen (far better than King of the Kalahari, Wynand Windpomp, even in full cry). And then the idea hit me. One day I would stage a Kalahari Elvis Contest, perhaps even in this famous space called Verneuk Pan, and it would be a world event. A plan that’s still in the pipeline.

I rummaged around in our car and found something simply called The Paper, published out of Upington. There was a piece about aliens from Jupiter that were expected on Earth shortly. They were, according to this newspaper’s sources, coming to promote the Afrikaans language. Jupiterians, said The Paper, received Afrikaans TV soaps on the space-waves and had grown to love the language. Well, and why not, I thought. I moved on.

“A Cape Town man has stunned the world press by announcing that an evil alien held him down in a bar-room brawl and stole his face,” another story informed me.

Les returned once more, recounting a rural urban rumour that reeked of mischief:

“They say one of the farmers around here tried some Ecstasy two nights ago. He said he’d never drink brandy again. He went home and hugged his family for hours. Now he wants to farm llamas.” And off he buzzed, to find more scurrilous anecdotal material.

“Say, Les,” I called after him. “Have a look at this newspaper I found. They’re looking for a chief photographer.”

I left Les engrossed in The Paper and went over to meet the happiest man in Barter Town, a certain Mr Haffejee.

Mr Haffejee had driven all the way from Durban in a huge refrigerator truck packed with bottled water. He was selling small bottles of still water to dehydrated ravers at R5 a pop. He was also allowing them two minutes in the freezing darkness of his truck at R1 a minute. They were queueing in their hundreds for access to Mr Haffejee’s Chill Room. I removed my baseball cap and saluted a very smart man, after a ten-minute interview with him in the frozen darkness.

Back to Upington, 2004:

“And do you remember when we went north?” Jules asked, as we drove to a massive spares shop and parked between two overloaded Land Rover Discos. On the advice of wiser folk, we were going to buy another spare tyre and some fuel jerry-cans for the six-week odyssey that loomed before us.

I nodded. God, who could forget that drive up on the R360 past Hondejaag, a series of sociable weavers’ nests that resembled big hairy toffee apples on the telephone poles and the Caution: Bat-Eared Foxes Crossing sign? I also remembered my friend, the photographer Doug Lee, telling me about meeting the Jannewaries up here somewhere. Isak Jannewarie was 92 and his son Niculaas was a sprightly 70. They had not seen rain on their farm, “Louter”, for decades. A nearby windmill managed to draw something wet from the water table for the Jannewaries, however. They told Doug about their weggooikind (throw-away child) called Boet, whom they had found orphaned and abandoned on the desert fringes of the then Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.

They treated Boet as one of their own. In return, he grew up in this hellish sand box to be a strapping young man, fiercely protective of Isak and Niculaas. And so they lived. I told Doug I thought a monster of a movie script lurked in the background of this story, but then it might well have been the whisky talking that night down at the pub.

Many years ago, Jules and I found our very own Jannewaries near the park, as they were struggling to inspan two donkeys, literally shoving the sulky beasts into the traces. They were slightly less courteous than Matewis Bezuidenhout, but understandably so in the light of their current crisis. Donkeys can be so bloody-minded at times.

The park? Well, Jules and I were yuppies on safari back then. We had a fancy Toyota bakkie on loan from the manufacturers, all shiny and silver, we had savoury boil-in-a-bag wild rice, avocadoes stuffed with sardines and peppadews and carrot salad. Bush tucker fresh from the northern suburbs of Jo’burg. We drove around with the air-conditioner full-blown, playing Santana and Enya at low volume while springbok, wildebeest, Kori bustards, oryx, kestrels and pygmy falcons frolicked about in the vastness.

We played gin rummy at night, and ate stir-fries made of broccoli, patti pans and ratatouille. But the best parts involved our blue igloo tent and the delightfully mischievous Kalahari mistral wind that tried its level best to blow us all the way to Kansas. Or at least to Lekkersing. We ended up tying the tent strings to the barbecue stand on the right, the thorn tree on the left and the Toyota in the front. It was not elegant.

Even less cool, however, were two English girl-tourists in their little hired sedan, who giggled their way around the Kgalagadi with no equipment to speak of, perhaps a tot or two of peach schnapps to hand and a little pocket torch for their inevitable night-time arrivals in camp. They were having such a helluva Thelma & Louise of a time, however, that our hearts went out to them almost instantly. The thoroughbred camping types around us, weighted down with everything an adventure store could legally hurl at them, were a little headmasterish about it all.

The Kgalagadi is easy on the eye and restful on the soul. Get there before the ground squirrels and the Camping Style Police take over.

Chapter 4: Namaqua Memories

Lawyers, Guns & Donkeys

I found Oom Kallie Gagiano back in 1981 on the outskirts of a town with a name that sounds like a car horn with a nasal condition: Nababeep.

It was so dry out there that the goats were kissing each other to get their lips wet. Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze was blaring away on the old Good Hope Radio station’s Housewives’ Hour as I drove into that remote copper town and asked for directions to the Gagiano residence. I’d heard about Oom Kallie’s donkey troubles from a barman in Pofadder.

“Turn left at Pretorius’s place near the Caltex station. Then go on to the Scholtz house, you really can’t miss it, and head off past the firing range.” Those were the pump attendant’s directions, and they were dead accurate.

The 76-year-old man crept out from a corrugated iron lean-to, followed by three puppies, their eyes squinting in the harsh Namaqua sunlight. Oom Kallie slapped one of his curious donkeys on the rump and shouted: “Grasveld! Grasveld! Must you always be in my way? Hey? Must you?”

He sat on the bonnet of my hired car and looked me up and down. His beard was so white, his face so wrinkled, he could have passed for a desert Santa. Willie Nelson was singing Till I Gain Control Again on the radio and I silently marvelled at the Cape housewives who were requesting music from my heart, like they knew my very soul.

Oom Kallie Gagiano in a nutshell: a prospector for most of his working life, he did his time on the diamond fields from Lüderitz to Hondeklip Bay, keeping company with his beloved donkeys and whittling his social skills down to a bare minimum. Nearly 25 years before this day he’d returned from a field trip and moved into a tin hut 3 km out of town.

“I’m a bachelor, always have been,” he told me. “I’m not snipped and neither are my donkeys. They roam the veld as I did when I was a young man, dancing and kissing the girls. You see all those other donkeys down there in the valley? Who do you think fathered them? Grasveld. No one but my dear Grasveld.”

His current donkeys were the children of the beasts that had walked the hard road with him, through a country so biblical, burnt-amber and beautiful that its images remain lodged in your dreams forever.

“I’m going blind, you know. I have a sister in the town and I really love her. She wants to look after me. I would like to live in town for a change, where there are nice gardens. Instead of this pile of rubbish,” Oom Kallie gestured about him in disgust. I asked him why he couldn’t just pack up and move back to Nababeep, and so he told me the story.

Some time back, in the drought (is there ever anything else out here, except for a few delirious days each year when rain brings this land to life?), Grasveld and his four brothers were starving. Kallie began staging a series of midnight raids into Nababeep. He used to lead his donkeys into town and open the gates of well-tended properties belonging to people he did not know (or like) well.

The beasts ran amok among the painstakingly watered gardens and gorged themselves. Until, that is, the night Grasveld got his hoof caught in an old tin while foraging in a yard. He made an awful noise escaping down the road (step-step-step-clunk) and the homeowner woke up.

Oom Kallie’s donkeys were banned from Nababeep. He was allowed in, but only he. This was his dilemma. I asked the old prospector about his tin house, and why he had been under the lean-to when I arrived earlier.

“I lost the key to my house two days ago. I’m damned if I can find it,” he said. We spent the better part of an hour looking for the key and then Oom Kallie said not to worry, it would turn up sometime.

“But did you know that I used to play the fiddle? I was good. And then the fiddle neck broke. They (pointing at his donkeys) used to love my music.”

Oom Kallie Gagiano is no doubt looking for diamonds (and perhaps his key) somewhere in the Milky Way these days, with Grasveld et al getting in his way. But I’ll never forget him, because this old man showed me a glimpse of the true nature of Namaqualand.

Then came the court case in Upington, where I got to see a little more Namaqualand for my money. I also learnt about the Gariep River and what a totem it is. Not only to the riverside locals living off its bounty, but to the whole South African nation.

The facts of the case were, initially, simple. Gariep River farmer gets into financial trouble. Takes a loan from a rich senator and signs his lush family ground over as collateral. Defaults on his loan payments, loses his land and his senses at the same time. Shoots the senator dead one moonlit night in a desperate gun battle on said farm.

I spent three weeks covering the case for my newspaper back in Johannesburg, the Rand Daily Mail. In that time I got to know all about dank little country hotels. I got an inkling of small-town politics. And I fell in love with the Afrikaans language all over again, via the highly musical and entertaining lilt of Namaqua-speak.

Apart from being served a string of heart attack-inducing breakfasts by silent hotel staff and trying to tickle court secrets out of a judge’s pretty secretary (and failing), I also learnt a bit about the heat in Upington. Every morning at the tea recess I would climb into my parked and sunbaked car and watch as the plastic of the steering wheel moulded itself around my fingers. Then I would yell out loud and startle the main street.

In the evenings I would travel around the river oases that make up much of the Upington community: Keimoes, Kakamas and such. At Keimoes the café man had wondrous sweets. He said they came from a travelling Greek who found them somewhere in the Transvaal. I’d never seen rocket-shaped bull’s-eyes before. The café man’s only gripe was that his newspapers were selling out too fast.

“I never get a chance to read about the case,” he grumbled. So I filled him in on what I knew.

But it was only as I was leaving Namaqualand on an SAA flight, after the death sentence (later commuted) had been passed on the luckless farmer, that I realised what was indeed at the heart of the murder trial. Below me, the scrub desert of Namaqualand spread out for an eternity. The brown monotony was broken only by the Gariep River, cutting a lush, verdant line through it.

If you own land on this river, you’re a made man. A couple of hundred metres away and you’re nothing but a dirt farmer. Or a karakul king who needs huge tracts of scrub – and the attentions of a fickle overseas market.

During the trial I had to entertain staff photographer Noel Watson, a colourful man with the attention span of a Boland Skollie butterfly, to stop him from chasing the married ladies in town and getting us into a world of trouble. So I took him off through the desert, over the Anenous Pass and finally into Port Nolloth – diamond country.

Port Nolloth looked like an opium smoker’s den after a police raid as we drove in. It was smothered in fog and quiet as a crypt. Little figures disappeared in the coastal milk, slipping off to the shanties on the outskirts as an angry rooster crowed and Ou Willem rose to meet us. Tatty tail erect as a bushpig’s aerial, he was the sentinel of Divers’ Row.

We met his owner, one Alf Wewege, the self-proclaimed Mayor of the Divers. Alf waved us into his modest home, pressed beer glasses into our hands and told us of his life and the “spinklers” he and his mates lived in hope of finding. He also told us of the loneliness of living in Port Nolloth, and of one particular weekend with a Lonely Hearts Club girl.

“I found her in a magazine. She was from Sabie. I paid for her ticket and she took the train out to meet me.” The girl arrived at the Bitterfontein railroad siding, where Alf was waiting. “She was 15 years older than her picture,” he said. “But she had two bottles of mampoer.”

They spent a glorious weekend together. Alfie showed her the western ocean sunset across the fleet of diamond boats moored in the bay. She showed him some Lowveld charm and the mampoer showed them both just how frail the head can be in the morning.

“On the Monday, I took her back to Bitterfontein.”

That first encounter with the diamond divers of Port Nolloth only whetted our appetites for more. A few years later we did the trip again. Our first stop this time was the Scotia Inn bar, where we hoped to find some more of the adventurous souls who wrest stones from the seabed under nearly impossible conditions.

The gods were with us. Not only did we come across some amenable divers, but one of them turned out to be an old schoolmate, Louis Kriel. He said the seas were too rough that week for serious diving, but that he would take us out anyway for a few days, to get a feel of it all.

Everyone knew everyone else in town. Especially the divers. And when we headed out the following morning in Louis’s boat, the Gemini Star, the rest of Port Nolloth wanted to know if the Jo’burg boys were seasick yet.

We, in the meantime, learnt to cook bacon and eggs in the captain’s cabin in the midst of a vicious storm, huge breakers bearing down on us, dolphins following us up the coast and the Rolling Stones doing their thing on the eight-track stereo. In a dancing catamaran, the simple art of frying an egg becomes a feat of agility and balance. Opening a tin of bully beef and forking it out onto a pan to heat requires the timing and skill of a short-order cook and part-time juggler.

At night we slept below decks. After that experience, I believe I know just what it is like to be trapped inside a washing machine during its rinse cycle.

In the early 1990s, I had a burning need to visit Namaqualand in The Season, when more than 3 000 floral species erupt from impossibly barren ground and you’re suddenly enveloped in a world of aloes, succulents, lilies, lichens, herbs and daisies in their billions.

The timing of the trip was left to my mate Les Bush, and on a certain day in August we planned to set out towards the western horizon.

“Are you sure the daisies will be out?” was all I asked – and received a frosty glare.

“Yes,” came the terse reply. “Three more sleeps and then we’re gone.”

Our first major stop out of Jo’burg was the Eye of Kuruman, where, under a Voortrekker memorial stone, were carved the immortal words: “Moenie vir mekaar kwaad word op die pad nie – Genesis 45:24.”

Which basically means do not get tetchy with your travelling partner on the road. Words to live by.

Les had found us accommodation in the town of Springbok, where I picked up a self-published book by boxer-turned-Hitler-fan Robey Leibbrandt.

“This is a boarding house,” I said when we arrived at our overnight stop.

“No, it’s a guest house. And it comes cheap,” snapped Les.

Within a few hours, we were settled. We shared a country house overlooking one of the town’s main streets with half of the Namaqualand Old Folks Society and everyone nodded politely at one another as we each put our cheese, beers and sweet wine into various nooks of the fridge.

Then the owner’s sister, who looked a bit like Meryl Streep, came to invite us to a game of blackjack in the main dwelling. We sat down in the lounge with our beer and our whisky and said hello to two linesmen from the telephone company and their three buddies from the local prison. Betting was restrained at first, then things took a serious turn. Bush was raking in the bucks for a while there, but suddenly Meryl Streep had a second wind and cleaned us all out.

At five the next morning, after exactly 30 minutes’ sleep, I stumbled through to the bathroom. I was mugged en route by five old folks who accused me of keeping them up all night. I ran for my life, feeling more than slightly liverish.

“And besides,” they shouted after my retreating form, “you idiots missed the daisy season by weeks. It’s all over. Ha, ha …”

Undaunted, we went out to the Goegap Nature Reserve, where, the drunken prison warders had assured us, we would definitely find some kind of floral display.

Les spotted a solitary daisy, nestled cutely into a fold of rock. He planned to lie right in front of this flower with his wide-angle lens and create the impression of abundance. I, on the other hand, hurled myself out of the car and threw up. On the last remaining daisy in Namaqualand.

Some years later, Jules and I travelled out there in the flower season to celebrate the noon-blooms.

We stayed in the copper town of Okiep, in the annex of Narap Lodge. Our window looked out on what came to be known as The Garden of Good and Evil. At night we could hear the township folk sloughing off a day’s work with a bottle of wine and a howl at the moon.

After the turn of the New Millennium, I took Jules off to Port Nolloth, which in boys’ terms is the equivalent of showing your girlfriend the inside of your tree house. Like most things in life, the little port had changed radically in the past decade or so. Definitely more of a cappuccino town these days.

Before heading back, I had to show her The Bus out at MacDougall’s Bay.

Way back then, Noel Watson and I had discovered a double-decker bus parked in the middle of Mac Bay village. Although it was locked, we could see signs of habitation. It especially fascinated Noel, who grew up in an Irish tinker’s caravan in the back yard of his parents’ home in Knysna. We took photographs.

The bus was still there. No one had bothered to give it even a lick of paint, however. It seemed to have done duty as a bush bar at some stage, but now stood derelict and faded. Like memories of four days at sea, one egg in the pan, one egg on the floor and a helluva big wave on the way.

Chapter 5: Bushmanland

Pella Cinderella

The first time I stayed over at the Augrabies Falls I shared my lunch with the granddaddy of all Chacma baboons. I’d been sitting on the stoep of the chalet catching up on notes from the road, sipping a beer and contemplating a brace of ham sandwiches waiting on the table inside. They had little cheese wedges shoved into them with a dash of Tabasco to give the meal more personality.

The falls were thundering away in the middle distance, the dassies were skittering about over the rocks and the flat lizards were catching some serious rays. The world was spinning away perfectly.

And then this fellow sauntered up to the chalet. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and sat there very quietly as he approached. He carried himself like a vacuum cleaner salesman who works out a lot in his spare time and has been around the block more than once. There was no fear in those amber eyes, just pure speculation. He sized me up, thought he could take me on with both arms amputated and his tail tied to a braai stand and simply walked inside.

No fuss, no bother. He came out with one of my sarmies clutched in his right hand. Found himself a good rock about five metres away, sat down and began nibbling thoughtfully. Suddenly he made a face, glared down at the sandwich and I thought uh oh, this is where he beats the living daylights out of the cook. But he turned out to be a bit of a gent, and simply flicked the Tabasco cheese off the bread and onto the ground, where a platoon of ants began to celebrate.

The baboon polished off the pirated food, looked up at the slightly outraged silent form that was me, blinked once and took off down the road. I rushed inside and claimed the other sandwich, which was lying there untouched. He’d taken what he thought to be his fair share – and no more. This Augrabies Chacma was nothing like his rude Cape Point counterparts, who will rob you blind given half a chance and bark at you to boot.

Some years later, Jules and I were driving up to Augrabies and the mountains of Bushmanland began doing some very tricksy things. One minute they were symmetrical and low on the horizon. Then they suddenly popped up huge, as if someone had inflated them. Then they rushed behind us and deflated again.

“Maybe they’re breathing in and out,” said Jules.

We arrived at Augrabies in the middle of a sand storm. Strong winds had sprung up, generating positive ions that turned us into negative, crabby travellers. We had temporarily forgotten that quote from Genesis back at the Eye of Kuruman, the one that urges you not to squabble with your road-partner.

The wind got us into such a tangle that we muddled about from chalet to chalet, parking in the wrong place about four times, our tempers fast overheating. Fear and loathing in Augrabies. We unpacked in bristling silence. Then I made a “peace drink” and calm returned to our universe.

Listen up, just in case you ever get the traveller’s blues. Don’t murder your companion. Instead, just make yourselves some instant coffee with a lot of condensed milk. We call it the Nama Super Latte, but you can call it whatever you like. It works like a charm. Suddenly you’re on a caffeine-and-sugar high and darting about the place like a grinning ferret.

In the late afternoon, just as the sun dropped down through the haze of dust, we walked over to the falls. The Gariep River took five million years to slice deeply through volcanic rock formations left over from the Great Gondwana Takeaway, during which Australia and Madagascar left Team Africa and formed their own very close corporations. The Nama call it Aukoerebis, the “noise-making place”, and the Khoikhoi, who used to live in these parts, avoided it like the plague. Many unfortunate souls, among them an old friend of mine, Savvas Georgiades, have fallen to their deaths off these rocks.

We had our own near-disaster at one of the vantage points. My shoes slipped on the rocks while I was trying to photograph the rushing water and for a moment I was dangling on the wire fence, my feet not finding purchase. I took my slippery shoes off and padded about on my bare feet, which worked better.

Taking photographs at Augrabies is a trip. At first, you get caught up in the majesty of moving water that rolls loudly over the rocks. Then the wide-angle beauty of the surrounding rock-scapes hits you. And then you see one of those fiesta-coloured flat lizards and you wonder: how close will he let me get? You step in cautiously, constantly focusing your lens. You’re eventually amazed when your lizard fills the frame and he has not skittered off in alarm. Augrabies lizards are cool. They stay put. They know tourists don’t want to eat them.

So there I was, scampering from lizard to dassie to waterfall to rocky gorge, when I heard an anxious gurgle behind me. Jules had inhaled a midge, and was choking on the bug. But it was nothing that the Heimlich manoeuvre and another cup of Nama Super Latte couldn’t cure.

They say the bottom of the Augrabies Gorge holds a treasure chest of diamonds – and a Great Snake. Every self-respecting major river in Africa needs its very own Great Snake, like the Zambezi, which is home to a character called Nyami Nyami. The huge Gariep Serpent has diamonds in its eye sockets and rules from Augrabies to the distant Richtersveld. Experts have seen real-life pythons of up to eight metres in length around here, and it’s a well-known fact that they swim like demons. But where do the reports of diamond-eyes come from? A late-night campfire and some Kakamas soetwyn, perhaps.

But we do know that the Augrabies is one of the world’s great waterfalls, that it drops down more than 150 metres to the gorge and that, amazingly, it was once privately owned, by a Mr Piet Nel. He sold it to the Union Government for £9 000 in 1910.

On the Dry Lands Journey of 2004, however, we arrived in perfect conditions, with high cirrus clouds cresting like milk streaks above us and diffusing the harsh light. I took a walk to the gorge opposite the falls and found a lone dassie meditating in the late afternoon, gazing over his fiefdom of rock, water and sky.

Back at the chalet, we held a bird party for starlings, weavers, sparrows and bulbuls. We laid out a feast of rusks, and they cheerfully tucked in. I kept a lookout for my Augrabies Chacma. In fact, I had prepared a sandwich for him – without cheese or Tabasco this time.

The next day we headed off to our favourite Bushmanland haunt, a cathedral-oasis (I’ll explain) called Pella, tucked away in the scrub desert about 30 klicks (kilometres) west of the town of Pofadder. Many people think Pofadder is named after South Africa’s famously lazy (but very poisonous) puffadder snake. In fact, the town gets its name from a local chief named Klaas Pofadder, a livestock rustler who lived and died (in a hail of bullets) at this spot. The place was called Theronsville but the name never stuck – so it reverted to Pofadder, in honour of the most dramatic event to have taken place here.

On the way, with Jules behind the wheel, I read her old journal entry from the spring of 1999, when we first came here:

“I can feel my bladder is full, but I know we’ll be in Pella soon, so I shut up, quietly cursing the corrugated road. I see donkeys under two date palms – you can tell we’re in the land of missionaries.

“By the time we arrive in Pella, my bladder is close to bursting. We drive through this hot, dusty little village and just before the church we see a small wooden sign that reads Kultuur Koffiekroeg. Then we’re at this incredible cathedral that was built more than 150 years ago, using a picture in an old encyclopaedia for reference, by a group of gifted amateurs.

“Three nuns emerge from the cathedral to greet us: Sisters Anne-Dorothy, Marie-Felicity, and Therese-Henriette, who assumes the role of guide for us. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the 86-year-old nun was probably looking forward to a nap. Now she has to play with tourists but she’s full of good cheer.

“I should ask her where the toilets are, but I get distracted again as we enter the cathedral, where it’s wonderfully cool compared to the still, baking air outside. We make an appointment to meet again at five that afternoon, when the light will be much softer for photographs. Chris wants to discuss camera angles with me, but I can’t concentrate. Have to find a loo or a secluded spot behind a tree.

“Sister Therese-Henriette tells me where the toilet is. I go off to one of the houses and find the toilet signs but Drat! All three doors are locked. And I can’t pee just anywhere, there are kids with big eyes all over the place. Then I see another gate, another house, another door and I just walk in. The place is filled with gospel music and delicious Sunday dinner aromas and chattering voices. Sister Anne-Dorothy finds me, gives me the toilet key and I rush back past a bemused Chris, who doesn’t know what’s going on here.

“I make it just in time. Utter bliss. But the saga is not over yet. As I flush, my sunglasses fall off my head and into the whirling bowl. All I can do is laugh. It’s all too silly …”

Shame. And there I was that day, thinking that my wife had just had a touch too much sunshine.

Anyway, we trooped off to our lodgings for the night at the Kultuur Koffiekroeg, a matjieshuis (literally “mat house” in the Nama tradition, and adopted by the old-time white farmers of Namaqualand) containing a king-sized bed covered in a jackal kaross and a potty behind a curtain. On a table next to the bed was a bunch of fresh flowers in an old enamel cup. All this for 50 bucks a night – what a bargain.

Jules set up her laptop inside the reed restaurant, kicked off her shoes and dug her feet deeply and happily into the soft Bushmanland sand. On the hessian walls were faded murals showing date palms and matjieshuise and a rough watercolour of Pella Cathedral.

We met the pretty Paula Simboya, the manager. She and owner Christina Jannetjies, who also goes by the name of Ouma Toekoes, were on the local tourism committee.

“Would you like to be our guests at the Miss and Mister Junior Pella competition later this afternoon?” she asked shyly. And why not, we replied.

So Jules and I attended the local beauty competition at the Pella Community Hall. We sat behind a raft of naughty teenage boys, who were eyeing some equally flirty teenage girls. An orange-peel fight erupted, followed by some melodramatic behind-the-hand whispering, accompanied by the noisy consumption of those rather devilish cheesy curls that come in jumbo plastic bags and stain the fingers an unforgettable saffron.

Sister Anne-Dorothy arrived and immediately rushed off to help some of the younger contestants prepare their outfits. The boys emerged from the back, strutting onto the raised stage in their slacks and checked shirts. Wild cheering ensued. Mothers faffed, backstage and frontstage, there was much sucking on flavoured ice in little bags and the applause was deafening. One by one, the girls each made an elegant turn onstage, their hairstyles wavy and large.

We had to leave the competition to make our appointment with Sister Therese-Henriette. She took us around the museum and showed us the Pella version of the Holy Grail – a beautifully embroidered Namaqua daisy immaculately sewn onto red vestments. It nestled there, like a precious golden jewel in a crimson bed of silk. The devout nuns of Pella belonged to the Order of St Francis de Sales who, incidentally, also happens to be the patron saint of journalists.

Sister Therese-Henriette, who grew up in Pofadder, was a veteran of hot religious places. In her 50-odd years as a Roman Catholic nun, she had served in Upington, Nodonsees, Onseepkans, Pofadder, Matjieskloof, Port Nolloth, Vergenoeg and Pella. She had also done two spells in Namibia, at Hyragabies and Keetmanshoop. And when she went home to Pofadder on leave, the devout nun would be astounded by all the material goods around her, as well as a little embarrassed when someone let bad language slip into the conversation.

“But there’s a lot of love in our lives here,” she smiled at Jules. “People think being a nun is like being in prison, but that’s wrong. We go out, we have fun.”

In the gloaming of a Sunday evening, Jules and I sat outside our matjieshuis with a modest single malt and water to hand. I found myself in a great mood. The light was rich, the people were hospitable and the whisky hit the spot.

A small, shy but triumphant procession arrived at our front door. Pushed to the front of the crowd was a little girl in a smart dress with a plastic tiara on her head and a sash proclaiming her Miss Junior Pella. She held onto her prizes: a packet of those cheesy curls, a banana and a small wrapped present. She sidled up to me and whispered, every inch the young beauty queen:

“Ek het gewen (I won)”.

“What’s your name?” I asked, scrabbling for the appropriate camera.

“Beulah,” she softly replied.

“And how old are you, Beulah?”

She held up her tiny hand and uncurled four fingers. This was indeed her day of glory, and there was a photographer on hand to record it. I did the honours, and Jules sat down with Beulah and the lovely little girl sailed through her first celebrity media interview. Everyone, including Beulah’s mom, Jacinta April, looked quite pleased by the proceedings.

After the proud little group left, I sat in the garden among the Madagascan periwinkles, the wild figs, the mother-in-law’s tongue and the Namaqua daisies, had another whisky and listened to the Pella soccer team making a raucous victory drive around the village, while the Games Tavern down the road pumped some kind of trance music out into the desert.

Later, Jules and I lay flat on the ground next to our hut and looked up in wonder at the starry canopy above Pella. Back in Jo’burg, the only stars we see are of the television soap opera variety.

And later, when we finally met Ouma Toekoes, she would say:

“I pray that they never put up street lights in Pella, because then we wouldn’t see the stars at night. I also pray that it will rain soon.”

Just before bedtime, I did brief battle with a noisy mosquito that refused to take Tabard for an answer and then I fell into a deep sleep and dreamt of the Pella Cinderella and her prize bag of cheesy curls …

Chapter 6: Springbok to Namibia

Riders in the Rain

I learnt a deep respect for the Great Namaqua Highway a long time ago, on a black, moonless night as my mate Noel Watson and I headed west out of Upington.

The murder case we’d been covering was adjourned for a few days and I wanted to see if far-off Port Nolloth had a real lighthouse. I suppose one well-placed phone call would have told us all we needed to know, but we both needed a long drive in the country. We filed our story, had a couple of drinks with the defence lawyer, packed a bag and left town.

Within the hour, Noel was snoring lightly in his seat and I concentrated on the blacktop before me. Someone had requested an old Neil Young song on Radio Orion and it sounded perfect for the occasion. As a white boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, I’d been conditioned to love things American, like rock ’n roll, the denim artistry of Levi Strauss, roadhouse milkshakes and Hollywood Westerns.

Then I travelled around the USA for many months during 1980–81, driving literally thousands of kilometres in an old blue van across the vast heart of America. I drank with colourful trailer-park folk, I partied with Sunset Boulevard vampires, I played pool with rock ’n roll survivors in Montana and, sweet lord, I had three LSD-filled Mardi Gras days in New Orleans and I survived it all. I even helped the municipal cleaners pick up the after-party trash down Bourbon Street.

But for me back then, nothing beat cherry-picking the chewy bits of American culture and enjoying them back home in southern Africa. These days, however, African culture has revealed itself to be as sweet as anything that ever emerged out of America, so my loyalties are more local. But on that fateful night, I was listening with relish to Mr Young’s After the Goldrush and fondly remembering a little town in New Mexico called Truth And Consequences, when suddenly my Namaqua nightmare began.

Somewhere between Aggeneys and Springbok a face covered in blood, eyes wide in terror, flashed past in the headlights. I drove on for a short while, then stopped the car, my heart pounding. A ghost? Couldn’t be. Then what? I woke Noel, and we turned back.

A young army corporal in uniform stood at the roadside, his head bleeding and his right arm hanging limply. We jumped out and ran to him.

“I killed my father. I killed my father,” he groaned, again and again.

In my headlights I saw the soldier’s wrecked car in the veld, and then the body of an old man, about 20 metres away. We rushed over and felt for vital signs. There was so much blood that his breath came shallow-gurgling out from his mangled face.

I left Noel cradling the father’s head in the veld, while I took the boy back to Aggeneys for medical attention. We literally flew. I was more worried about the soldier’s guilt at falling asleep behind the wheel than his physical injuries. The medics at the Aggeneys clinic packed their ambulance and put the boy’s arm in a sling and we returned in convoy to the crash site.

I will never forget the next scene. Our headlights sliced into the blackness and picked up the loneliest image on Earth: Noel, far out in the pitch-dark, totally silent Namaqualand scrub, holding a stricken old man in his arms. As we loaded him into the ambulance, we heard his death rattle.

“And that’s just where it happened,” I told Jules in 2001, as we passed an innocent-looking curve in the road. We arrived in the town of Springbok a short while later. We wanted to shop for provisions on this Saturday morning before driving up to Port Nolloth. As usual, we got sidetracked by people.

At the filling station, we saw a group of Rastamen, dressed in well-tailored sackcloth. The reek of Old Richtersveld (the local marijuana) hung in the air around them, as did the strong tang of fresh garlic from their stall-display of roots and ’erbs. They were Rasta doctors, it turned out, flogging roots, tubers, stems and plants that apparently sorted out everything from high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer to stress and midnight flatulence.

“Where do you live?” we asked.

“In a ghetto in de hills outside town,” said the Rasta called Ruben, who was holding a small potato stuffed with Old Richtersveld and taking deep drags on it for inspiration. His accent carried a rich overlay of Bob Marley.

“Where do you grow this wonderful stuff?” Jules enquired, staring pointedly at the whacky backy.

“No sister, we grow nuttin’. Jah gives. Life is as it always was. Wherever dere is smoke, dere Jah is. Sun shall not smite you by day, nor de moon by night.”

I wanted to photograph this group of cheerful characters. They asked for modelling fees in the region of R10 000. We settled for buying a bag of their cure-alls (unfortunately the Old Richtersveld was not on the market) for R20 instead – with a photo thrown into the deal.

Travelling north from Springbok to Okiep, we met Francois Jansen, one of the trainee guides on the South-North Tourist Route between Cape Town and the Namibian border. He took us to the Goegap Nature Reserve (where I had disgraced myself years before by puking over the last remaining photo-op daisy in Namaqualand), and we discussed far more than flowers.

Francois, a Baster who hailed from Rehoboth in Namibia, said he had grown to love the people of Namaqualand, whom he called Manakwalanners.

“Apartheid laws could never be properly enforced in Namaqualand,” he said. “Everything is just too far away from everything else. This is a frontier full of all sorts of people – Basters, Nama, San, Afrikaner trekboers, Irish, Cornish, Scottish and even folk from St Helena Island. We are friendly, open, inquisitive, proud and short-tempered.”

Between forays into the succulent garden to discover plants called Sigaretvygie, Vetvinger, Noordmannetjie, Bobbejaan t’neitjie, Asemsnak Malva and Bokrambos (who needs poncey Latin names when you’ve got good old “Namafrikaans” to work with?), Francois told us a juicy tale from the days when Jannie Smuts launched the Siege of Okiep during the Anglo-Boer War:

“It used to be a risky business, going to the Okiep Hotel bar for a drink, with Boer snipers shooting through the windows. However, there was a gentlemen’s agreement in place: women and children would not be shot at. But then the Brits began dressing like women so they could sneak into the bar. And when the Boers caught on, they began shooting at butch-looking women in skirts.” War is not only hell, it’s downright rude.

On the 2004 gig, we headed straight for Goegap. OK, you’ve read this far. You deserve to know a secret. The Goegap Nature Reserve has a perfectly charming guest house and I think it’s among the finest accommodation establishments in Namaqualand, especially perfect for the flower season. The guest house is of simple pre-fab construction, but the beds are comfortable, the taps work and it keeps out the cold. Also, it’s not very expensive. And here you’re staying in the middle of a flower reserve, full of daisies and a myriad succulents with cute names, and all the major Namaqua sights are less than a day’s drive away. See. You’ve got more than your money’s worth, already.

But the one drawback is the Crazy Goegap Cat. It suddenly appeared in the house one afternoon, a cross between a tabby and a wildcat, with a reddish cast to its stripy pelt and an attitude that could open tin cans. It was Dr Cute and Mr Bite-you-in-the-Ass Monster rolled into one. Purring frantically one minute, as if starved for affection and ready to give it. Then snarling and doing cornered-leopard impressions the next.

He bit me and I sat down immediately, waiting for the onset of rabies. Jules emptied a can of tuna into a dish and took it outside, while my assailant danced and twirled for the fish like a circus star. She then rushed back inside, slammed the front door and we made sure all entrances to the guest house were barred. The cat appeared shortly thereafter at various windows, begging for entry, but we knew better. It had those jiggly eyes – never a good sign.

Did I have rabies? Over the next few days, Jules kept waving bottles of water in my face.

“What’re you doing that for?” I demanded to know.

“If you were rabid, you’d be seriously hydrophobic,” she replied. “You would not only bite me, you would fear water like nothing else. Have a sip.” I did, and we went out to look at the flowers. No cat in sight. And I didn’t bite Jules.

I began to take photographs at the quiver tree garden on the reserve, when a cold front from Cape Town arrived and spoilt the session. So we found a bottle of sherry, pulled out the playing cards and held a quick Namaqua Rummy Championship, while outside the mad little lion head-butted the front door and then mewed piteously like an abandoned kitten.

The next day we realised that Flowers in the Rain was to be the theme tune of this year’s Namaqualand experience. Cool. So we drove down to the Skilpad Reserve outside Kamieskroon. There I had a ball, photographing drenched goats, droplets on daisies and the baby bloomers getting their act together for the upcoming tourist season.

I love taking photographs of the Namaqua fields in the spring – all of it, the getting there, the close-ups, the wide-angle sweeps and the roadside floral displays that can turn a squatter hut into a king’s palace overnight. But, for my money, the boss of all the Namaqualand photographers is Colla Swart of the Kamieskroon Hotel.

Colla was past her middle years when, in 1978, she was asked to take photographs with an old Instamatic of a two-headed tortoise. She enjoyed the experience. Her husband Coenie then bought her a Pentax, and she began capturing her back yard on film.

One night, Coenie suggested that Colla give a slide-show of her images to hotel guests after dinner. One of the guests was Freeman Patterson, a famous Canadian photographer who would change her life forever. He came up to her after the show and gave her a book on photography. She stayed up most of the night, reading it. Just before dawn she realised that the author was Freeman himself. It was the beginning of a famous friendship. Freeman inspired Colla to start running photographic workshops from the Kamieskroon Hotel.

Jules and I attended one of her slide-shows. We sat in the dark as the pictures flashed and merged on the screen, depicting southern Namaqualand through all its seasons. Tears rolled down both our faces. They were far more than photographs.

“The spring flowers are only the lipstick on the face of Namaqualand,” she told Jules. “I love it all. It’s like seeing my father’s face. I didn’t just love his smile. I loved all of him.”

We had the honour of meeting another legendary Namaqualand photographer once, a Japanese fellow by the name of Shin-Ichiro Sawano. Shin first visited South Africa because of a single photograph he’d seen in an old SA Tourism pamphlet. It was of a carpet of flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, captioned “Namaqualand in Spring”.

He came to South Africa in 1991, went looking for Namaqualand and missed the blooms. He did, however, meet sheep-farmer and botanical conservationist Neil MacGregor from the town of Nieuwoudtville.

“A month ago,” Neil teased him, waving at some barren-looking farmland, “this was a mass of pink Senecio blooms. Next time, come when the flowers are out. And bring your family.”

Which is just what Shin did. He stayed for three months, entranced by Namaqualand. More than 1 000 rolls of slide film later, Shin produced Forgotten Paradise: The Eternal Heritage of South Africa, a quirky-beautiful coffee-table book on the region. He still returns regularly, bringing eager groups of Japanese tourists in his wake, buzzing around in their rented cars in search of the blooms. And when he goes back to Tokyo, he holds Namaqua slide-shows and serves his guests Cape wines and rooibos tea.

On the way back from Kamieskroon, we spied a little meerkat family trying to cross the N7 highway. They had two sentinels, tails up, a kind of small-mammal crossing guard. Fast cars approached from both sides, either resort-horse-keen to get home to Cape Town or in a flower-driven rush to Springbok. The meerkats waited for a gap in the traffic and ushered the little meerkids across to safety on the other side. Jules made up thought-bubbles for each of them, imagining their frantic conversations to herself. I said it was time she drove the bakkie. I wanted to bone up on the eighteenth-century wanderings of Francois le Vaillant, whose life proves that, in explorations, there is a very thin line between “intrepid” and “mampara” (silly). The jury’s still out on this guy, but I found myself intrigued by his misadventures, as related by Jane Meiring in The Truth in Masquerade.

In 1783 Le Vaillant and his entourage were in these parts. He told the world at large he was heading for Cairo and, eventually, home to Paris. What a route. Along the way, his beloved baboon Kees seriously pissed on his battery by stealing all the hens’ eggs for himself. He was caught out one day when Le Vaillant spotted him running off to raid a hen’s nest.

Aware that he was being spied on, Kees, according to his master, “assumed a careless attitude, balanced himself on his back legs and, winking his eyes with a silly air, walked backwards and forwards several times … employing all his cunning to divert my attention.”

Somewhere between Nababeep (a Nama word meaning Place of Giraffes) and the Gariep River, Le Vaillant shot a giraffe and skinned it. His band of Hottentots feasted on the huge animal and he enjoyed some of its cooked marrow. According to the local histories, giraffe once used to hang out in these dry parts in great numbers. Now, of course, you don’t see them at all.

“There used to be a lot of acacia trees in this region,” I remembered our guide Francois saying. “They were much loved by the giraffes. Then copper was discovered here and all the trees were cut down to feed the smelters. So, no more giraffes.”

Pretty soon, Jules and I were barrelling up the Copper Highway through the arid Richtersveld to the Namibian border. Hugely excited we were, barely able to contain ourselves at the prospect of a whole month of swirling through the magical spaces of Namibia. And then the cellphone bleeped with an SMS, out here, in the middle of vast nothing and dry places. It was a text message from a movie company in Sandton, Jo’burg, offering us a free pizza slice with every ticket purchased. We were so not interested …

Chapter 7: Fish River Canyon

Roadhouse Rock

We brave souls lined up on the South African side of the Gariep River, waiting to “take Namibia” in well-stocked overland vehicles. Our little convoy of SUVs, bakkies, 4x4s of all descriptions and desert-adapted motorcycles looked like a dusty cavalcade from the Thunderdome episode of the post-Apocalyptic Mad Max movie series. One expected a dishevelled Mel Gibson to be somewhere out front, plotting our survival with a Marlboro in his mouth and a sawn-off shotgun in his hands.

We all seemed to have read the same guidebooks, which must have warned:

“Namibia has nothing. Bring your own fuel, your own water, your own bully beef, your own TV set, your own sleeping bags and your own wife. Don’t forget your own GPS, otherwise you might get lost on our excellent road system. And if you want something sweet for pudding, bring that along too.”

Obviously, we’d all overpacked. Why? Were we a bunch of suburban poodles in fear of visiting a place that didn’t have a mall every 5 km? Was it merely a lot of fun to play Survivor – Namibia? Boys and their toys? Had we all read one too many Africa adventure magazines? Or did we really think that a two-minute noodle purchased in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg tasted better than a two-minute noodle bought in Windhoek?

We made it across the border to the Namibian side at Noordoewer without incident. The cheerful Namibian customs guys walked up and down the queue, admiring all the machinery on show. The convoy members, soon to be scattered, a mix of South Africans and intrepid foreign tourists, checked their supplies and mentally prepared for a tough old time ahead.

And so it came as a bit of a surprise to Jules and me to find a perfectly civilised BP filling station in Noordoewer, where we bartered South African rands for a couple of chocolate Ola ice creams.

“It’s hell being in Namibia,” I smiled at my wife, as we wolfed down two heavens on a stick and stained our brand new, all-weather, bring-it-on Cape Union Mart khaki safari shirts. What would Sirs Laurens van der Post and Edmund Hillary think of us?

We soon forgot to worry about all that, however, as the wonder and majesty of our neighbour on the far western side of southern Africa called out. Namibia might be ancient, but she sure is blonde and very beautiful.

To our right were the Karasberge, a low, jagged range of mountains that looked like the geological teeth of someone without a good dental plan.

We took the bright black B1 highway to the north, turning left onto the C10 dirt road to the Fish River Canyon, deep in the Land of Look Again.

“Hang on,” I said to Jules, as we drove into the canyon lands. We were dwarfed by the dry cathedrals looming over us. “What do you mean by Look Again?”

“At first glance you see nothing,” she said. “You cannot imagine a single creature living out here. There’s only rock and sky. Then you look again, and you see something. A bird. A klipspringer. Why don’t you pull over right here?”

We climbed out of the bakkie. I was sure I’d bought a silvery-grey one. Who had nicked it, leaving me this old brown number with the wheezy diesel chest? We felt a silence so overwhelming our ears rang with it. And then we heard the sweet sound of a distant bird, and I caught a small movement out of the corner of my eye, at a rockpile not far from us. We called out and hollow echoes returned, like vocal boomerangs.

“Now you start seeing individual holes in the rock,” said Jules. “That’s where the dassies, the Egyptian cobras and the puffadders live. Here, somewhere, are also leopard, kudu, Hartmann’s mountain zebra, ground squirrels and look, there’s a baboon hiding behind those stones.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, a little querulously.

“Some of us watch too much TV, while others do their homework,” my wife replied. Was there a touch of smugness on her face, or was it just the chocolate makeup she was wearing at the time?

We arrived at the Ai-Ais resort deep in the canyon just after lunch, and the man at Reception immediately passed on a great gift from the Namibian government: an extra hour of sunlight, an extra hour of life. We wound our watches backwards and I made plans for a second lunch.

Ai-Ais is Nama for “scalding hot”. Stone Age inhabitants must have used the springs thousands of years ago. A Nama shepherd looking for livestock back in 1850 (and how often have people gone down in the annals of history as great discoverers when, in actual fact, they’d really just lost their sheep and stumbled upon a significant place?) found these hot springs, flowing out of the ground at 60˚C, rich in fluorides, sulphates and chlorides.

In Lords of the Last Frontier, legendary travel writer Lawrence Green says: “The radio-active water has a high magnesium-sulphate content. It acts as a purgative and many sufferers from arthritis benefit from the heat treatment. I met people who were carried down to the hot springs on beds and who recovered the use of their limbs. There is a store at Ai-Ais and a shack for the caretaker. Visitors camp out in the shadeless gorge. It is far from comfortable among the scorched rocks of the riverbed, but invalids are sustained by their faith in the waters.”

Well, that was back in 1952 and times had changed. We didn’t see a single invalid at Ai-Ais, unless you counted the sufferers of self-inflicted rugby-hangovers wandering around the grounds one Sunday morning. And if the waters really had been radio-active, the place would have been deserted.

In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, travel legend Bill Bryson indirectly explains why Green would have said something so “utterly Chernobyl” back then:

“For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radio-activity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radio-active thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its ‘radio-active mineral springs’. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938.”

The Germans used Ai-Ais as a base to fight the Nama rebellion in 1903. In 1962 the canyon was proclaimed a “natural monument”. A game reserve was proclaimed six years later and a modern rest camp was opened in 1971. It was promptly washed away by floods the next year, and rebuilt the following year. The camp retained an old-fashioned 1970s feel. Extended Namibian and South African families had been meeting here for decades, and Ai-Ais had become a gathering place for many generations of nostalgic outdoors enthusiasts.

“OK already, so you did your homework,” I said to Jules. “Now please can we go and watch rugby at the bar? Time-out for travel hacks.”

“Who’s playing?” she wanted to know.

“So you didn’t do all the homework, did you? South Africa, the Springboks, the amaBokoBoko, are playing the Wallabies from Australia in the Tri-Nations this afternoon. Kick-off is in five minutes.”

We settled ourselves downstairs on the veranda with a TV set in the distance, a gaggle of eager South African tourists in the middle-distance and a table-full of Tafel Lagers right in front of us. There was a sun-glare on the TV screen and both Jules and I became distracted by a swarm of alcoholic Fish River bees that insisted we share our beer with them. I gather we won the game, however, because a distinctly un-Australian party soon broke out all over the place.

The fires were lit for the ritual of burning meat and the happy campers sat around outside their tents, sipping on fine Namibian beer and large tumblers of brandy and Coke.

A light breeze blew through the canyon, bringing with it the aroma of barbecue and snatches of campside conversation.

Three burly South African mates discussed their favourite Namibian fishing spots. One hardy British couple working on their overland vehicle regaled an awestruck Windhoek woman with dry reportage on their near-death experience at the hand of would-be kidnappers in Brazzaville, Congo. At another braai fire, mothers exchanged tips about how to keep dust out of the cooler boxes and what to do when the brats hit a sugar high on the back seat of the Land Rover. A huge family get-together turned frosty when someone swung a drunken punch at someone else, luckily hitting only fresh canyon air. The die-hard rugby fans swamped the bar area and watched the after-match presentations, and if Catherine Zeta-Jones had suddenly arrived, jumped on a table and dropped all her kit, she might have been ignored. Well, maybe.

And through all of this hullabaloo, a newly minted baby girl in her 4x4 all-terrain perambulator slept soundly, kissed by the cool breeze of the day’s end.

On a sunset walk down to the river, I was fascinated to discover Das Rollende Hotel, an overlanding double-trailer truck full of Germans. They slept in one trailer and spent their road-time in the other. This gargantuan Teutonic hotel on wheels rolls through all of Namibia, carrying a good proportion of the German travelling public with it in a jolly, Oktoberfest way.

The next morning we left for Hobas camp, because I needed the classic photograph of the Fish River Canyon. I had a feeling that a long walk in the mid-morning sun would be involved. I loudly dreaded the prospect of this experience, feeling liverish from too much beer and many ice creams consumed the day before. Who said victory was always sweet? Sometimes victory, especially of the rugby variety, should come with two headache tablets, the hair of the dog and three hours in a quiet, dark hideaway. Actually, let’s lose the hair of the dog. Ai-Ais, the “Lourdes of Africa”, had lured me into another dah-redful hangover.

In case you’re fit and interested, it’s a trek of 90 km down the canyon from Hiker’s Point to Ai-Ais, but that’s not the whole story. It’s four, maybe five, days of hardship, because you have to carry everything you need. There are no McDonald’s franchises down there. Make sure you have a comprehensive medical kit and the know-how to use it, because there are no chemist shops in the canyon. It’s hot as Hades by day and cold as a witch’s tit by night, in winter. You don’t even want to think about going there in high summer.

When it comes to such an extreme experience, I have to bow out. Something else just came up. I get bored walking long distances. I end up throwing stones at things that want to bite me. Also, I have ankles that turn easily. I don’t like snakes. I sleep very badly on rocks. And I get gout, just by thinking about getting gout. So please don’t ask me to accompany you down the Fish River Canyon. Good luck with that, however. But when you finally rock up at Ai-Ais, all blistery and in a bad mood, it’s Tafels on me at the bar.

“So I’m just telling you,” I told Jules. “I’m not walking a million miles to get this picture.”

“Fine. But we do need some exercise. Bum-lifts while driving aren’t enough,” she insisted. “Remember what your mate Ernest Hemingway once wrote.”

“What?”

“Travel broadens the mind. It also broadens the ass.”

“OK, but I’m just saying,” I said.

Well, it turned out that all you needed to do for the classic Fish River Canyon photograph was drive up to the vantage point, climb out with your camera, walk no more than four metres and snap away. My hangover disappeared in a cloud of bonhomie and I could face the day, armed with a fully filled diesel bakkie and a nearly limitless supply of digital memory in my cameras.

I looked down. More than 350 million years ago, a fault-line split open at this spot and that was the start of the geo-rot that was to become the Fish River Canyon. Like, at one stage back then, you had your Olduvai Potholes up in Kenya, and you know what happened to them. Over the millennia, the river scoured away at the rock as it roared through here and a Gondwanaland glacier added the finishing touches, cleaving its way through the billion-year-old formations. It’s been a very long time since the Fish River had such an All-Mighty effect on the land. Now a restless river of air sculpts the rocks down there.

We proceeded to another lookout point and came across a bizarre city of rocky cairns. On the lip of the canyon, people had amused themselves (and others, like us) by building little castles, mini-Stonehenges, pyramids, pagodas and bridges into a veritable rock concert. Later, the woman with the tickets at the Hobas Camp entrance said the cairns had been put there by tourists “having a bit of fun”.

“It’s when they have a pap wiel (flat tyre),” said a tour guide, riffling through an old postcard display on the front desk. “That’s when the guy runs around with the jack and the spare and his wife plays with the stones.”

My old friend, the veteran off-road adventure photojournalist Geoff Dalglish, later told me the stones had been put there by travellers “to bless those who follow”. It’s my preferred explanation for the origin of Cairnsville, Namibia.

On our way back to Ai-Ais, we detoured to a quirky establishment that smacked of the Bagdad Café with a touch of stock car thrown in for fun. About 2 km from the Canon Roadhouse, the signs began: Hungry? Thirsty? Sleepy? We looked out for Grumpy, Doc and Sneezy, but they had gone to far greener pastures.

An old Ford truck from Kaiser Bill’s days, filled with rampant cactus, stood near the front gate. Another nearby wreck had been turned into a pot plant and farm implements adorned the walls of this diner in the desert. Bacon and eggs were dancing jigs in the Art Deco halls of my fevered brain.

While we waited for our brunch, we scoured the little curio shop. An Italian girl wandered in and asked no one in particular if horses ever got rabies. She pronounced it “rabia”, however, and all of us within earshot thought she was asking if there were Arab horses about. We said yes, we thought so, and she began to throw a frothie right there in the shop. Pulled off her fleece top to reveal a shapely body with the distinct outline of horse-teeth embedded in her armpit. When one of us (it must have been Jules, the boys were too busy gawking) finally twigged, the girl was reassured about the rabies thing and we heard the full story later, over said English breakfast.

It turns out she’d had a Hollywood fantasy about riding bareback into the desert on one of the normally gentle and restrained resort horses. A bit of manhandling allegedly took place and the steed dispatched her girlish dreams post haste.

The mental image of a rabid horse rampaging through the desert sands with gnashing teeth made calm brunching impossible. We urged the girl to visit a hospital in Keetmanshoop to have the bite checked out. She just sat in the shade waiting, as I once did after a fierce cat attack in Namaqualand, for the madness to set in.

Chapter 8: Ai-Ais to Lüderitz

Crazy Chewy Nama Radio

“South West Africa does not welcome Alfons Schanderl,” said the Universe in a stage whisper to a young German soldier on Saturday 19 November 1904.

Alfons, a proud Upper Bavarian in search of his own African destiny, was on the Gertrude Woermann II that night. His own dream looked about to be wrecked as the massive troopship ran aground, between Cape Cross and Swakopmund. (Today, it’s the site of some prime coastal real estate, a fishing haven for wealthy Namibians wanting to escape the tourist floods further south.)

A motor launch was lowered into the Atlantic and dispatched to Swakop. Up in the first class dining room, someone with a great temperament and a flair for the occasion began to tinkle away at the piano. Drinks were served, and possibly some tasty little wursts and squares of brot. Private Alfons Schanderl may have heard snatches of song filtering down to where he worked with his comrades, settling the nervous horses in their makeshift boxes.

Unlike the victims in dozens of shipwreck stories told of the Skeleton Coast, everyone survived the wreck of the Gertrude. Most of the cargo, however, went to the bottom of the ocean.

“And the horses?” asked Jules, who was driving the bakkie as I read to her from Sven-Eric Kanzler’s Expelled from a beloved Country, a rather sad and angry account of two brothers who lost their hearts to this land and were later kicked out of it.

“The horses. Let me see.” I thumbed through the small but gripping book. “Oh yes, here it is. The horses were hoisted up on pulley blocks, gently set down on the deck of the Gertrude, then transferred to landing rafts and then, obviously, to shore. It says here the waves were dancing at the time. Bloody hell. Anyway, they seem to have been saved. The soldiers saddled them up and rode them down to Swakop.”

I could see Jules relaxing immediately.

“Oh well, that’s OK then.”

Alfons became a rather nifty signaller with his old-time heliograph. He and his fellow signallers used to sit on the tops of hills and talk to each other with a series of mirror-flashes.

Three years of fighting “the nimble Nama” in the southern regions of Namibia, mainly from a distance of hilltops, gave Alfons a deep love of the land. He had his eye on a spot near the Fish River Canyon, where Jules and I happened to be driving on our Dry Lands journey.

A long story (buy the book) cut short: Alfons persuaded one of his brothers, Stephan, to come out and join him, all the while struggling with German red tape for the right to own a patch of very arid land he called Karios. Out of nothing, they established a fruitful farm and built a house in the architectural style characteristic of their German home town of Margerethenberg.

But their happiness was short-lived. In 1915, with the German military defeats came General Jan Smuts and his boys from South Africa. Alfons picked up an Iron Cross Second Class and the German Army equivalent of a Purple Heart for wounds sustained in action during this period.

After the war, the brothers returned the farm to its original flourishing state. In fact, they probably worked too hard and were too successful, because a local South African military magistrate suddenly arranged for them to be deported for being “politically suspect”.

“And then?” the horse-loving bakkie driver wanted to know.

“The brothers packed themselves off to Argentina, continued to fight for their farm at long distance and were finally granted permission to return six years later.”

“So did they?”

“Yes, but just to have a look. They couldn’t live under the new South African rule, so they returned to Argentina.”

And just then we pulled in to Cañon Lodge, the former home of Alfons and Stephan. The original farmhouse, built by the Schanderls, now formed an integral part of the lodge. Tourists were sitting at tables in the grounds, writing postcards home and relishing the morning sun. We walked past the lodge kitchen, and caught the melodious sound of cooks softly singing Amazing Grace. We stood at the window and waited for more. They laughed and launched into a click-filled Nama song, followed by an old Afrikaans hymn called As jy net Glo (If you just Believe).

All the while, the singing staff took practised steps around each other, rolling the frikkadels (meatballs), peeling potatoes and cutting up vegetables for salad. Obviously the tourists had heard this kitchen choir before, because they took no notice of the little desert concert. We left the lodge area, knowing why the Schanderl brothers had fought so hard to keep this piece of dust. There’s a spirit here that goes way beyond the building.

The next day we left the Fish River Canyon and headed for Keetmanshoop. Low, wet clouds rolled in towards us. The early morning light diffused into a pink haze over the rocky hills. Soon we were in a cloud that sometimes lifted a metre or so off the ground, allowing a brief glimpse of sage-green milk bushes, stubby tussocks of bushman grass and the occasional drought-tortured quiver tree. I stopped to photograph some startlingly beautiful Nguni cows.

“You’d look great on my study floor,” I remarked in passing to a particularly handsome matriarch. She lowered her horns at me threateningly and took a couple of steps forward. No one was going to separate her from that lovely patchy pelt today. I quickly jumped back into the Isuzu and drove off into the milk-pink morning.

We bade the dirt road a temporary farewell and swerved onto the freshly tarred B1 highway, arriving in the dozing village of Grünau shortly afterwards. Because we hungered for some local contact, Jules and I ventured into the township, where we struck up a conversation with the Christiaan family. They were Namas, descendants of the leader Hendrik Witbooi, who led a highly effective guerrilla war against the Germans for six years at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A week before, on prime time television, a German politician had publicly apologised to the Nama people and asked for forgiveness. The German colonial wars had been particularly harsh in these parts.

“That’s a start,” said Jims Six Christiaan, his specs resting on top of his eyebrows. “Maybe there will be some compensation.”

His little boy, Vaughn Christiaan, sat on his lap. Relatives Thomas and Klaas, both with crumpled faces, stood within earshot, curious about the strangers from the land of mine dumps, gangsters and glitz. I asked what they did for a living.

“There’s a bit of piece work from the mines, but generally we sit around until the farmers arrive from South Africa,” said Jims Six. “Then we pick grapes in the vineyards along the Gariep River.”

Where had they come from, to create this township in a sea of sand and rock?

“Kicked out of the towns, expelled from the farms,” said Jims Six. “It’s like living in a cage.” Even in this desolate vastness, people were still being moved about like listless puppets. Land reform in Namibia was not a five-minute conversation. With a population of 1,8 million, it sounds like there should be a piece of heaven for everyone. But most of the land was not arable, so the age-old tussle for a tiny spot of good ground continued. And somewhere in the process, the Namas of Grünau ended up here on a blasted heath with few prospects.

On the northern outskirts of Grünau, we met a group of gypsy carvers who lived on the open road.

Thomas Kasinda, a doughty Kavango from the north, tried to flog us something made out of ironwood. He and his fellow carvers moved around the country, setting up rough roadside shops made of sticks and black plastic sheets.

“And where do you live?” we asked.

“Right here, behind the stalls,” said Thomas, with joy in his voice as he saw Jules reaching for a kiaat bowl like it had called her name.

Back in the bakkie, I removed the Buena Vista Social Club tape and switched over to our favourite station, Radio Damara-Nama, 106.5 FM. It was playing Nama bubblegum ballads and indigenous rock, of which there seemed to be no shortage, given the terrain.

“The Nama seem to be great lovers of a Hammond organ,” I told Jules, because I know about such things.

Just for the hell of it, on the long drive north, we station-hopped and found, to our very brief delight, a whole programme on German polkas. On yet another, there was an Afrikaans discussion on the joys of tango dancing. Other stations welcomed the spring arrival of tourists to their country.

This was the time of year when hundreds of thousands of foreigners in an assortment of vehicles coursed around Namibia. South African boys on fishing trips, their trucks pumped up and growling. Foreign tourists in soft-shell cars. All-girl expeditions in lacy khaki. Everyone welcome in the Land of Sand. This country is so big and empty (its entire permanent population could fit into a few suburbs of Soweto) that it sustains each person’s individual road-trip fantasies, embracing its visitors in soft lemon grass, tan dunes and curved mountains.

“The landscape drinks you in,” said Jules. Damn straight. But the Christiaans of Grünau were in my thoughts as I turned the knob back to Radio Damara-Nama and escaped into a singsong world. When you’re on a tourist itinerary and your tyres are humming across the blacktop, Namibia is a fine place to be.

When you’re scratching a living out of an ancient desert and the next man wants your space, Namibia is another story. And so it has always been with this place, from the time of its First People.

On crossing the Guigatsis River, we heard our horoscope on 92.9 FM: “Today, Geminis, who thrive on mental challenges, will have much dynamic energy on the move. There will have to be some crisis control, you may be irritated but you should practise what you preach.”

“Well. Why don’t we just park somewhere and sit this day out?” I suggested.

“Now for Pisces,” the droning voice continued. “Beware of your colleagues, even now they are busy plotting against you …”

We crossed the dry riverbeds of Löwen, Guruchab and Warmbakkies, names that reflected the Germanic Afrikaans Nama soul of the region. A secretary bird flew over the bakkie, trailing long, snake-kicking legs and gazing down imperiously at us.

On NBC, the national broadcaster, Eric Clapton and his old band Cream were playing Sunshine of your Love as we pulled into the town of Keetmanshoop and filled up with diesel at the Lafenis Lodge, “where the modern meets the old Wild West”.

We checked into the Canyon Motel, an architectural throwback to the 1970s that was clean and functional inside. No traveller needs more.

I have discovered that there are many histories of Keetmanshoop, but the one I like best comes from my travel guru, Lawrence Green, in particular his records from Lords of the Last Frontier.

Meet Gideon Visagie, a runaway from dubious deeds performed in the Cape Colony. Visagie was the first white settler here, arriving “some time before the end of the eighteenth century”. He found a rich source of water, and kept its whereabouts to himself.

Some years later, Dutch explorers began to arrive here in droves and it all became too busy for Visagie. So he placed rocks over the source of the fountain in the hope that the Dutchmen would dry up and blow away. But then along came Tseib the Nama chief, on an extended hunting trip that had driven him crazy with thirst. His dogs suddenly disappeared for hours one day and returned with wet black mud on their snouts. Tseib followed them back to Visagie’s waterhole and the game was on.

The Nama chief liked the fountain so much that he moved his tribe there, and named the place Swartmodder (black mud). Seventy years later, the Nama residents of Swartmodder asked the Rhenish Mission Society for a preacher and they sent along a worthy called Johan Schröder. He renamed the place after a wealthy patron, Johan Keetman, who never actually came out and saw the town for himself.

An hour before sunset, we drove out to the quiver tree forest near Keetmanshoop, which lay on a farm owned by Coenie and Ingrid Nolte. We rushed to where the trees stood in the soft afternoon light, in a blaze of bronzed leaves among the lemon grass and black ironstones. A posse of German tourists arrived and we were suddenly in Das Kokerwald. The quiver trees can take on all extremes of weather – they’re frost-proof and they thrive on summer heat.

We drove on to the Giant’s Playground at sunset, and encountered a confusing world of jumbled boulders, one balanced precariously on the other. Jules gave me a case of the highway blues by disappearing for a quick meditation and mislaying the car keys somewhere in the rock formations with the light fading fast.

She prayed to St Anthony (I gather he’s the patron of lost car keys or something) and we soon found them. We headed off to Uschi’s Kafeestube for monster steaks and a milkshake for shock.

The next day, we had some serious trainspotter luck. The Union Limited Steam Train Tours, which only visits the country three times a year, was building up a healthy head of steam over at the railway station before heading back to South Africa with its load of tourists. They’d traversed Namibia in the old loco and were currently the rage of Keetmanshoop. Kids were running up and down the platform, thrilled to be near the old steam train.

The train operator, Michael Esterhuyse, stood proudly on the platform, talking routes with his friend, ticket clerk Nico Jooste. Passengers and locals gawked at each other in utter amazement, just as they do in outback towns all over the world when a steam locomotive passes through. Townies look on with suspicion (don’t break the taps) and the tourists behave as if they own this wondrous, wheeled ship that takes them effortlessly through dry spaces.

Jules tried to engage the railmen in conversation, asking about the giant steel machine puffing away right there on the platform. They were reticent, as railmen usually are around “civilians”. Then she said, in a slightly aggrieved tone:

“I only ask because my granddaddy used to drive the old trains.”

My wife was instantly adopted as a member of the Railway Gang and they could not tell her enough. Two 19D steam locomotives coupled together, they said, each weighing 300 tonnes and built in the early 1930s. I had to break up this club before it got totally out of hand.

“Jules!” I called from the revved-up bakkie. “Places to go, wild horses to see …”

Chapter 9: Lüderitz

God Rest Ye Merry Buchters

There was the Naiams, the Schnepfen, the Gurib, old Dik Willem in the distance and Norah Jones on the tape, her soft denim voice floating over the stony landscape on the road between Keetmanshoop and Lüderitz, or The Bucht, as I now like to call what must be the most eye-catching coastal village in the world.

The first three were completely dry rivers, the fourth was a mountain and Norah Jones, well, she was just in a musical class of her own. When you travel long distances, you tend to fall deeply in love with certain musicians who just fit into the landscape outside and the happy or sometimes purely reflective mood inside your vehicle.

And there, on the bridge over the fast-flowing Fish River, was our old friend Das Rollende Hotel, the huge two-stage bus that was carting countless German tourists about Namibia.

“How’d you like to park that sucker?” I remarked to Jules as we passed the Rollende Hotellers hanging dangerously over the bridge railing, looking longingly at all that wondrous water in the midday heat.

I had better plots in mind. My deep information (which usually comes from the fantastically detailed travel notes of Lawrence Green) told me that the nearby village of Aus sold lots of cold beer and had a very Swiss thing going for it. Out here in the desert? Why not? Hang on to your hat, the southern Namib has strange offerings, like horses that nibble at nothing in the sun, railway tracks that meander off drunkenly into “barchan mad” dunescapes and aged unicorns (it’s true) that run like the wind. So a little bit of Namibian Swissness is par for the course.

I’d seen this phenomenon before, in a village in Argentina called Bariloche, where they sold horrendous faux Swiss chocolates, held tasteless cheese fondues and put you up overnight in wooden A-frames built in the Yodelstrasse fashion. Zurich with a thick black moustache and a gaucho glower. So yes, Aus, Bariloche, whatever: bring it on. Travel writing is at its best when matters are at their weirdest.

“Lawrence speaks of a ‘mountain village with the faint atmosphere of Switzerland’,” I assured Jules, who still thinks my Mr Green is the Purple Prose Monster. Doesn’t trust a word he writes. My job is to keep rising to his defence, and this occasion was no exception.

“Can’t see it,” was all she said, as we pulled off the main road into what resembled the movie set of The Guns of San Sebastian, rather than somewhere you’d find a medium-sized copper cowbell.

We drove around the dusty streets of Aus in search of the legendary Bahnhofs Hotel, once described by Green as an “Alpine inn”. We found Version III of the hotel (its predecessors burnt down, perhaps in the course of overzealous cheese fondues) and it declared “we are tourist friendly” in a sign on the stoep. That was fine by us. We just wanted to drink some beer anyway.

In the faintly decadent atmosphere of nearly-lunchtime, when you’ve ordered your third lager and your eyes wander through the heat-haze and settle on a dozing donkey and the barman sits quietly in the inner coolth of the hotel while you enjoy the shady stoep outside and Radio Zebra plays a polka, it’s all a bit of a shock to hear another car arrive from nowhere, park itself next to yours and disgorge two townies wearing shades and grins.

The Grillenbergers arrived in a gentle cloud of Namib dust, fresh from Llandudno Beach, Cape Town, but originally from Athol, Jo’burg. They say southern Africans are all interconnected in some way. The term “small world, isn’t it?” was specially devised for us. Living down here at the southern tip of Africa ensures that you’ll always know someone who knows someone. Who once may have played a round of tennis with someone else.

And so it was with the cheerful Joan Grillenberger, who knew our home suburb of Wendywood (I shudder to say its name, I wish someone would rename it Eastwood or Little Alex or Upper Spottiswoode or something, anything) and Shirley Cohen, the local Run/Walk For Life instructor. So there we sat in the middle of a dry, almost-deserted nowhere between the sea and a sandy place, gabbling on about “good old Shirl” and what a brick of a fitness instructor she’d been and how about another cold Tafel? So normal, yet so very, very out there.

Karl Grillenberger had been born here more than 50 years before, in the Roman Catholic Mission church clinic. He grew up on a nearby farm, went to high school in Lüderitz and ended up a successful man in Cape Town. He had come back on a Memory Lane trip.

“Nothing’s changed,” said Karl, gazing out at the main street.

“Everyone seems so poor,” said his Joan, who was still in two minds about this grand Namibian odyssey. “But somehow they look quite happy.”

“That’s the point,” said Karl, “There are no rich people living around here to make them feel poor.” I had a long think about that one.

Just outside Aus the vegetation changed, the landscape opening up towards dark mountains and drifting sands. A short distance further, at Garub, we came across a score of wild horses grazing on sand and stone at the roadside.

Although some sported battle limps and bore signs of a hard life, these legendary wild horses of the Namib were well muscled and alert. A half-grown colt was shadowed by its indulgent black dam. Two chestnuts nuzzled one another in secret discourse.

A Pajero packed with South African trippers came screaming over the horizon. You could smell brake pads burning as they narrowly avoided colliding with a brace of stallions. The driver honked his horn impatiently as they crossed, then fired up first gear and blasted his way west, to Lüderitz.

“Maybe they’ve been here before,” I said in their defence. “Maybe they’re used to seeing the horses.”

“Or maybe they wouldn’t know a special sight if it came up and bit them on the butt,” said my wife. “Did you notice the plates?”

“Yeah, they’re from Gauteng, SA. Just like us.”

Lots of things prepare you for the faraway experience of Lüderitz. There’s Aus, there are the wild horses of the Namib, there’s even an old one-horned gemsbok rooting around near the ghost town of Kolmanskop – your very own unicorn, if you have a romantic heart.

Then there’s the wind, a dragon of a south-wester that could whip you off your feet if you were a little light on them to begin with. That wind has also been bringing diamonds in from the sea for millions of years.

On that first day, every time I lifted my Canon digital camera, the wind became inquisitive and then angry, trying to blow it out of my hands. I had to take the images Photo-Shopping that evening to find some sharp focus somewhere. Imagine having camera shake without the prerequisite hangover.

The wind was howling like the blazes as we reached an abandoned building at a railway siding called Grasplatz, where one August Stauch lived in the early 1900s. His job, which he never really excelled at, was to keep the sand off the rails. Instead he and a worker (and that’s almost always the case: the trusty handlanger finds the first diamond, gets a few shillings for his troubles and is shunted off the pages of history) launched the most bizarre diamond rush ever.

As you drive through the crescent-shaped barchan dunes to the coast, you encounter a place that looks like a set from Toys, that gaudy Noddy-like movie starring Robin Williams. On a base of pastel desert, the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) houses are blue and red and white up there on the Diamantberg, where the Gothic old Felsenkirche looms over the town.

We arrived at The Nest, the finest hotel in Lüderitz, where we were given a film-star suite with the waves literally lapping at the patio base. The ebullient Ulf Grunewald, manager and part-owner, had organised a ridiculously low rack rate for us and, after a fortnight of roughing it in sand and rock, we sank with gratitude into the delights of the Cormorant Suite.

Normally we don’t stay fancy. We just dress too badly for the other guests.

But in this case, on a special “impoverished journo” discount rate, we were only too happy to flop over in The Nest and begin doing weeks of washing.

“Not bad for a pair of skanky desert rats,” said Jules, as we tipped half the Kalahari and a chunk of the Namib from our boots out into the Atlantic Ocean.

A brief rundown on Lüderitz:

In 1883 a German merchant called Adolf Lüderitz sent Heinrich Vogelsang down to these parts to establish a trading relationship with the local tribes. By then a sailor called David Redford had already settled in what was known as Angra Pequena with his wife and, subsequently, eight children. Redford and his family collected shark oil, fish and sealskins for trade in the markets in Cape Town.

Vogelsang bought the bay from the local chief for £100 and 200 rifles with accessories. A year later, it was declared a German Protectorate. An initially spurned Redford was given a life annuity for having been there in the first place, and Angra Pequena was renamed Lüderitz.

Thus, from this little coastal spot on the Atlantic seaboard began the German occupation of what is today called Namibia. For more than 30 years, the German flag flew over the South West, with disastrous results for the indigenous tribes. And when the South African government took over after World War I, they pursued the German policies with a matched vigour.

Back in Lüderitz, however, no one noticed that they were literally walking on a vast bed of super-grade diamonds until 1907, when Mr Stauch’s labourer made a spectacular find near Kolmanskop. This led to a crazy, colourful, champagne-swilling, caviar-consuming era in which vast mansions were built into the rocks of the Diamantberg and men lay on the moonlit sands of the Namib, stuffing the glinting precious stones into their pockets and, sometimes, their mouths.

Usually, however, water was really more precious than anything. It was desalinated or imported until 1969, when the massive Koichab Pan, an underground reservoir, was tapped. It is pure and lovely, this fossil water. But one day it, too, will run out and the Buchters (bay people) will make another plan.

The diamonds of Kolmanskop may be all gone now, but the Sperrgebiet (forbidden area) still protects those that remain on either side of the town.

Writers and travellers such as John Brown (The Thirsty Land ) had warned me about the bars of Lüderitz:

“There are the usual people in the saloons, drinking Cape brandy with Pilsener chasers. Little side-shows are staged by the customers, such as mongoose v. snake and tarantula v. scorpion bouts, with good money changing hands. There are bums, gamblers and poor whites, all with interesting stories to tell, but it seems best to keep on the move.”

Alas, try as we might, we didn’t see any of those. But we did meet Marion Schelkle, who ran Lüderitz Tours & Safaris from her office in the mid-town area. Marion was a third generation Buchter and grew up running barefoot in a tiny town that seemed to be caught in time and was becoming rustier by the year.

In the 1970s, Lüderitz had reached its low point. There were fewer than 6 000 residents left, with half the shops standing empty.

“The new boom began with the town’s centenary in 1983,” said Marion. “Everyone who’d ever been to Lüderitz came to see it breathe one last time. Then UNTAG [United Nations officials] arrived in 1989 to oversee the elections and gave the local economy a massive boost.”

After independence, investments flowed in: fishing plants, a revived diamond mining operation, gas mining, hydro-electric schemes and a whole new form of moneyspinner: tourism.

What about this wind, we asked. Do you ever get used to it? She welcomed the challenge with a combative look in her eye:

“Firstly, there are far windier places in the world. Secondly, we arrange our activities around it. The tours to Kolmanskop are in the mornings, when there is less wind. The wind comes up in the afternoon and wipes out the tourist footprints of the morning. The next day it looks like an untouched ghost town again.

“When Mozambique was hit by floods in 1999, the wind stopped blowing in Lüderitz for 19 days straight. We cried for the wind. It not only keeps the temperatures down, it pumps oxygen into the sea. The crayfish were walking out of the ocean in their millions.

“As for getting used to it, my father used to say it’s only the first 30 years that are the hardest …”

It was Heroes’ Day in Namibia and the air in Lüderitz was dead still. Hardly a breeze in the streets. We took the Diaz Cross loop drive and photographed flocks of flamingos dancing in the mud, teasing breakfast out of the black stuff with their bony toes. From a distance it looked like the professional section of Mrs Murgatroyd’s Long-legged Dance Classes.

We returned at lunchtime to find Lüderitz in a dozy idyll, wind-free and peaceful. Out at Shark Island, we saw a rather startled-looking likeness of Adolf Lüderitz (who, strangely, embarked on an expedition one day and never returned) on a brass plaque. A century ago, more than 1 000 interned Nama men, women and children died here as the result of conditions in the German concentration camp, which earned it the name of Death Island. Now it was a campground with the best sea views in southern Africa.

After four days in Lüderitz, I was sold on the place. I tried to put my finger on the source of this fondness. Was it the colours, the architecture, the flamingo flocks or the fishing boats parked out at sea, glinting in the morning sun? It certainly wasn’t the wind. Maybe it was all the merry Buchters we’d met. A positive bunch of folk who braced themselves against the breeze, went out and just did the job.

Chapter 10: Kolmanskop

Beer & Skittles

Kolmanskop was literally blowing away when we arrived for a tour of the ghost town in the dunes. Hot on our heels was Das Rollende Hotel, the tourist road train that trundles around Namibia with its large complement of sleep-in German visitors. Their countrymen of yore used to live out here in sandblasted isolation, fanatically tending little patches of garden (soil and seeds imported from Cape Town), brewing fine beer and playing skittles of an evening. Meanwhile the Namib winds howled their outrage at the intrusion, flinging high-speed sand at the army of humans pecking away at diamonds in the desert.

Ironically, nothing except for the actual diamond mining came easy in these parts. Even being a tourist was no small thing on a day like this. Groups of foreigners clutched onto flapping clothes and squinted in the glare of the sun. Lining up behind German and English guides, we found ourselves in a small cluster of South Africans being led by Ute Manns, a doughty Buchter lady who switched easily from German to English to Afrikaans.

We ducked in from the wind to the shelter of the bowling alley, with its long wooden lanes and heavyweight skittles, which is still being used by NamDeb employees working the nearby Elizabeth Bay diamond mine.

“Kolmanskop was named after James Colman, a transport rider who was caught here in a sandstorm in 1905,” said Ute. “His wagon was stuck in the sand and his oxen ran away.” So Colman didn’t really discover anything (people already knew about the winds, so you can’t count that), win a battle or save any souls. He just got stuck on a hill and Voila! Everlasting fame.

Let’s just rest a while here for an author’s aside. While I respect the right of others to love a diamond, to kill, cheat and rob for a diamond, I have to say I’m not a great fan myself. Give me a plain old quartz crystal or a piece of finely crafted silver and that’s my lot. And even then, I won’t fight you for them. I just don’t get diamonds, and I don’t see why civil wars have to be fought over baubles. If you steal my water, expect a squawk and a tussle. If you steal my crops or my citizens, I’ll shout. But help yourself to my diamonds if that’s what drives your motor. It’s not like the world is running out of them. It’s not like you can eat them. And don’t tell me you need them to cut things in your workshop. I know that industrial diamonds can actually be made these days. Truth is, I’d rather pick a feather out of an ostrich and wear it in my hat than hang about the place festooned with diamonds.

In The Last Empire – De Beers, Diamonds and the World, author Stefan Kanfer has a lot to say about all the diamond stocks in the world. During the Depression era of the 1930s, when the last thing on everyone’s mind was buying or wearing a diamond, the mining operations in Kimberley continued as if there were still a frantic demand out there. The safes and drawers of De Beers were overflowing.

“Matters grew so dire that De Beers used butter churns to store the jewels,” says Kanfer. “Sorters went through the motions of separating and grading the stones every day, then mixed them up at night in order to give themselves something to do the next morning.”

I might not love a diamond, but a diamond legend, well, that’s another story. My interest in visiting Kolmanskop was not really fuelled by the diamond rush that took place here nearly a century ago, but by the way people managed to live in the desert, where everything had to be almost nailed down, where water was non-existent and where the catering promised to be dodgy, at best.

And yet this place was famous for its parties and dance hall extravaganzas, and was replete with hookers of note, dandy soldiers, champagne-prescribing doctors and caviar-guzzling citizens. Desert cowboys used to drop in and shoot up the chandeliers, then wander out into the wind and disappear for months at a time.

It all began back in April of 1908, when a railway labourer called Zacharias Lewala found an interesting stone. Old Zach had worked in the diamond fields of Kimberley in his youth, so he had a fair idea of what an uncut diamond looked like.

He took the stone along to his boss, August Stauch, the Bahnmeister of Grasplatz Siding near the town of Aus. Stauch’s job seemed mainly to consist of watching the barchan dunes of the Namib dance a merry jig over the railway tracks and hide them. But he must have had an inkling of what lay under the sand, because he advised his labourers to bring him all the “pretty stones” they came across.

August Stauch took the stone from Zacharias Lewala and made a deep scratch on the glass of his wristwatch. He had the stone professionally tested in Swakopmund and was suddenly a major player in the diamond business, buying up mining claims and paying no attention to sand on the tracks.

By 20 June of that year, the offices of the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft in Lüderitz had heard of the discovery. Diamonds were now being found all over the place, literally at the feet of the townsfolk.

In April 2005, my hometown of Jo’burg experienced a particularly severe hailstorm. It came upon us like a grey ghost from the east, and huge stones bucketed down for an hour, slicing up gardens into manageable salad portions, shattering windows and adding decades onto the lives of nervous household cats. And then it swept off towards Botswana, leaving a magical trail of glittering water-diamonds all over our yards.

And that must be how the Buchters of Lüderitz felt, once Stauch & Co had shaken the scales from their eyes. Diamonds lay everywhere, and it was a doddle to mine them. You simply bent down and picked them up, preferably on a full-moon night when it was cool and the cheesy light reflected off the carbonised stones.

At one of his claims, later to be named Idatal (Valley of Ida) in honour of his wife, August Stauch instructed his servants to search the area for diamonds.

“Ein Märchen, ein Märchen (A fairy tale, a fairy tale)!” exclaimed his partner, one Professor Scheibe, as they came upon diamonds lying like dropped fruit on the sands. The servants eventually ran out of hands for all the diamonds, and began stuffing them into their mouths.

The German Kaiser’s secretary came out to see the much-vaunted “diamond town”, and was amazed at the serene sight of people hunting for diamonds by lying on their stomachs in the sand.

Of course, the Lüderitz-Kolmanskop area turned frenetic.

“ Beer halls, hotels and shops sprang up in the feverish, reckless atmosphere of this new El Dorado,” writes Lawrence Green in his journal. “Flaxen barmaids arrived. Over all floated the German Eagle. Within a few years, the little group of huts had become the well-built town you see today. When there was a water shortage, people washed in imported soda water.”

But, as they say around here, Mr Green may have been prone to exaggeration. In fact, there was a factory that supplied free ice – half a block a day to each household – lemonade and soda water. More than 1 000 tonnes of water were shipped in from Cape Town each month.

“When the ship was delayed, they made their coffee from soda water,” said Ute our guide. “They could buy more than their allotted 20 litres of water, but it was the same price as imported champagne.” So my friend and mentor Lawrence Green had not been too far off the mark.

The factory used imported ammonia gas and electricity to cool seawater down and freeze fresh water in moulds. The butcher built his cold room next to the ice factory, and thus had access to chilled pipes. Fans blew the cold air onto the carcasses. Next door was a bakery, which supplied each household with fresh hot rolls each morning.

But the rush was short-lived. Shortly after the initial finds in 1908, the German government decreed the diamond-bearing deserts a Sperrgebiet (forbidden area) and if you were caught rooting about in there you could end up in jail for a very long spell.

In 1917, the German government was forced to sell its diamond areas to Ernest Oppenheimer’s company, Consolidated Diamond Mines, for nine million pounds. CDM later morphed into the modern-day NamDeb.

Conservation and controlled ecotourism gained a foothold in the Sperrgebiet in 2004, I was pleased to hear. The area between Oranjemund and Lüderitz, stretching as far eastwards as Aus, had been set aside as an environmentally protected zone. While mining operations still continue, efforts are being made to preserve what’s left of the unique and fragile Namib ecosystem of the area.

So, let’s go back on this tour with Ute. She took us to the shopkeeper’s house and showed us the ingenious freezer where the block of ice was placed. As it dripped down, the water cooled the vegetables and other perishables, then gathered in a pan at the bottom, where it was used for washing.

“And even though the water was so expensive,” said Ute, “the miners cultivated extravagant gardens, many of them supplying places like Oranjemund with cut flowers.”

The shopkeeper was very wealthy, because the miners often paid for their groceries with diamonds. In her house stood an interesting looking hat stand, and Jules asked her about it.

“That came from the first brothel in nearby Lüderitz,” she said. “In those days, any transport rider who escaped being killed or kidnapped by Namas between Keetmanshoop and Lüderitz was received like a hero in the brothel. His tired feet were washed in imported champagne, and he was offered the pick of the girls.”

The Lüderitz brothel madame was also very wealthy, it was said. She too was paid in diamonds. She hoarded her diamonds under false floorboards in her dog’s kennel. One day the Schutztruppe arrived, randy and remorseless. There was an argument about payment. The soldiers were never as good value as the miners, so she threw them out. In revenge, they almost shook her bungalow to pieces, and were going to roll it down the Diamantberg when she relented and let them in.

Kolmanskop had a very large hospital, which could handle more than 200 patients. It had the first X-ray plant in southern Africa, and two most eccentric doctors. A Dr Kraenzle used to give every patient French champagne and caviar sandwiches in the belief that this was the ultimate distraction from pain. The other medico, Dr V Lossow, used to eat a freshly chopped onion every morning, whistling a strange tune as he chewed it. It gave him such an immense feeling of well-being that he prescribed the same treatment (including the Pythonesque singing ritual) to all his patients.

But you could be a strange doctor, a whoring colonial soldier or a grower of exotic flowers in the desert out here. This was Kolmanskop, where more than a million carats of diamonds were retrieved by leopard-crawling fortune-seekers in the sands in less than two years. Wads of money were thrown away at the horse races and men drank champagne out of women’s shoes every night (a habit I personally do not recommend or support).

TV Bulpin tells of the wonderful gardens of Kolmanskop, and the social whimsies such as training a tame ostrich to haul a children’s sleigh through the sand. He also notes that the cultural standard of life in the town was so high that when the recreation hall (Der Kasino) was built, an expert was brought out from Germany to advise about the acoustics, which are said to be so superb that choirs love singing in the building to this day. They staged fancy dances, masked balls, operettas and plays in the Kasino, and the Buchters of Lüderitz, perhaps a little jaded by the bawdy goings-on up on the Diamantberg, used to flock to the desert for a night out in Kolmanskop. Life here was tough, colourful, interesting and, on a medical diet of champagne and caviar, more than a little toxic.

But Kolmanskop had its sadder side as well. In 1928 there was a mine workers’ uprising, and more than 100 labourers decided to simply walk through the desert to Oranjemund. Years later, eight skeletons, fragments of clothing, a pocket knife and a purse containing coins and some banknotes were found by police along the desolate coast south of Lüderitz.

“They carried little food or water,” said Lawrence Green. “Day after day they left their dead along the trail. Some of them went mad and threw themselves into the sea. Altogether sixty-five perished.”

“Sometimes the bones of those who died in the desert are uncovered by the winds,” added Ute.

After 1939, mining operations at Kolmanskop started winding down until 1956, when the inhabitants were transferred. The structures were looted by anyone looking for building materials. The fact that many houses still stand is miraculous, especially in the light of all biblical advice concerning building on sand. The Namib desert came in through the front door of all the houses formerly belonging to senior staff, blew open the windows and set up home for the rest of time. The mine manager’s house has been renovated and tours (special permits required) to the ghost town have been operating since 1980.

We spoke with Ute about diamond smuggling.

“One of the most successful smugglers in recent years was a woman with a glass eye and a patch, working out of Oranjemund,” she said. “For some reason, no one thought to search behind her patch. She must have taken out many socketsful of diamonds in her time.

“Anyone leaving Kolmanskop has to be given a strong dose of castor oil, to make sure all diamonds stay behind,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye. We laughed a little nervously.

Jules and I took a walk through the old mansions.

“Hmm,” she said, ever the amateur decorator, “a bit of a fixer-upper, this. A renovator’s dream.” And as we strolled through the buildings, leaving deep footprints in the sand, a slightly angry Namib wind followed in our wake, wiping clean our tracks, turning Kolmanskop back into an untouched ghost town for the next day’s shift of pioneer-tourists …

Chapter 11: Wild Namib Horses

Breakfast with Champions

Over the years, I’ve come to love an early morning with a respectable autofocus camera and a fast horse in my viewfinder. Sometime in the 1990s, I visited a polo estate on the fringes of South Africa’s very own Riviera, Plettenberg Bay. The “moonlight on buttocks” factor, as British travel agents like to describe a romantic getaway, was particularly high at Kurland Estate. But the retired racehorses that made up their polo stock were the highlight for me.

One morning at Kurland I woke up to a Japanese pre-dawn mist, grabbed my gear and ventured out into the paddock. The horses, at first behaving like a gaggle of high society snobs, moved away from me, my Canons and my tripod. I just ignored them, fiddling with switches and settings and working out where the sun would rise through this craggy mountain haze. Then they nonchalantly began to drift closer, and pretty soon they were hogging the wide-angle lens and misting it up with their grassy breath. One particularly friendly fellow, a dark chestnut sans blaze, kept nosing me in the back. The shoot turned into a brief hug-fest with the chestnut, until the grooms arrived and the day’s business began.

On another morning, a world away in Mongolia, I emerged in a daze from a night spent lying on my back outside the tent, watching the biggest bandstand of starry sky I’d ever clapped eyes on. Through the valley below rode three little Mongolian boys on their long-maned horses, catching the dawn nicely and breaking into a friendly race that turned into a frenetic gallop and ended up in laughter and gasps of ice-cold breath.

This was the very breed of steed that took Genghis Khan and his Golden Horde through Eastern Europe, and then across the dreaded Gobi Desert to get at the Chinese in the kingdom of Xi Xia. In the Gobi crossing, Genghis made his warriors stand naked in 200 km/h winds and drink their horses’ blood for supper. Watching those three little boys and their ponies, descendants of the Golden Horde, was like seeing the young Zulu kids of Rorke’s Drift at play and remembering their glorious ancestors.

And so it was that, on a morning in September 2004, Jules and I huddled in a wooden hide at the Garub waterhole between Lüderitz and Keetmanshoop and watched the legendary wild horses of the Namib – a handsome, athletic bunch – come to drink. I set up the cameras and Jules broke out the travelling breakfast of fruit and health bars. Sometimes, on the road, I feel that a shot of good Russian vodka would get my day in focus but I always choose to fall hungrily on a humble breakfast bar instead. The vodka, unfortunately, taketh the focus away as fast as it giveth the very same.

First light arrived and lit the desert in rich caramel tones. To the west, a rolling bank of low-lying mist retreated before the sun. Ten minutes later, the landscape turned to yellow sand plains rimmed by purple and black jagged mountains. Salvador Dali should have come here. He would have loved the flinty icebergs floating in ochre seas. As we sat in the hide, the only sound was the insistent wind running through the sparse silver strands of bushman grass – the ultimate desert comb-over. And of course, there was the ubiquitous crunch of teeth on breakfast bar.

Because the horses only drink every 30 hours in summer and every 72 hours in cold weather, they might not have come to the waterhole that day. But we got lucky.

They began appearing in single file from the west, the east and the mountain range in the north, all converging on the waterhole. A large troop of 17 arrived in orderly fashion, led by a powerful stallion in a golden palomino coat. His mares and children, including one newborn fuzzy colt with blonde streaks mixed into his dark mane, lowered their heads to the water and drank as he watched, completely aware of our presence.

As each troop approached, it diffidently stood off a little before coming forward, as if observing some ancient dry lands protocol. The horses snorted and nickered to each other, ears pricked forward, sharing the previous night’s news. They drank their fill and stood in one another’s shade, heads down and eyes half-closed, perhaps waiting to enter a far-off world of dreams where the grass grew like Christmas. Some mouthed the dung of others.

The wind had given many of the horses magnificent, flowing mane-dreadlocks. The young ones indulged in horseplay, chewing their friends’ manes and nuzzling their withers, rolling their eyes in mock outrage. Soon there were more than 40 desert horses before us, totally involved in their post-dawn rituals. We were in the very midst of a personal “breakfast Bruegel” of wild and legendary Namib horses.

By 2004, about 140 horses were living in the ancient Namib, completely independent of humans except, of course, for the man-made waterhole they used each day. Scattered over 40 000 hectares of the Namib Naukluft National Park, how they came to exist here as the world’s only desert-living wild horses is still anybody’s guess. But, as with most mysteries, there is much speculation.

Where did these marvellous mounts come from? The University of Kentucky says they’re mostly Shagya Arabians from Hungary, crossbred by German colonial forces in South West.

To explore one of the proposed possible origins, you have to drive more than 150 km north-east to Duwisib Castle, which was built by Hansheinrich von Wolf in 1908. An aristocrat, artillery officer and lover of raucous parties, Baron von Wolf (with his American-born wife Jayta) bought the property and built a castle on it. And when you travel through Namibia, you’ll soon get used to these “schlosses” that pop up from time to time. But Duwisib is still one of the most remarkable.

More than 20 ox wagons packed to the rims with furniture, building materials and fancy goods came from Lüderitz in the west. Master stonemasons and carpenters arrived from Europe, wells were discovered and sunk and a massive forge was built, which produced everything from horseshoes to the ornate wrought-iron latticework for the castle’s windows.

All who write about Namibia seem to have theories about Baron von Wolf. Lawrence Green, perhaps in a post-World War II anti-German moment, paints the baron as being “drunk and eccentric, with a weakness for cards”. On the other side, Harald Nestroy, who was appointed German Ambassador to Namibia in 1998, has mostly favourable things to say about him in his written history of Duwisib, and clearly dislikes the tone that Green takes concerning Hansheinrich von Wolf.

What amazed me, in reading about the Von Wolf clan at Duwisib, is how they managed to transport delicacies such as French cognac, German beer, “Russian caviar, ham, pastries and confectionery” all this way into the desert while Jules and I struggled to keep two-minute noodles, breakfast bars and rusks from joining the cosmic soup in the grub box at the back of our bakkie.

Everyone agrees, however, that the baron was a colourful man, and that it is probably true that one night, with Jayta on an extended overseas visit, he drove his carriage 80 km to the town of Maltahöhe. Once there, he stormed into the hotel bar, pulled out his revolver and emptied it at the drinks display, maybe knocking out an overhead light in the process. He then politely paid for the damage and earned his reputation in history as “the daredevil baron”.

There is also the legend of Jayta von Wolf’s cooking, which bears a brief mention. One day she took her new ladies’ shotgun out on a solo hunt and brought down a bird. Proudly, she roasted it and dished it up to her husband when he came back from a country trip, which may or may not have involved some six-gun practice in a frontier drinking establishment. It turns out that the “roasted bird” was in fact a crow and the baron was less than pleased.

Be that as it may, just before the beginning of World War I, Baron von Wolf started a horse breeding station at Schloss Duwisib. He doted on his horses, spending an inordinate amount of time and attention on their stabling. But, after he had left Duwisib and was killed in action at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the fate of his horses was never recorded. Could their descendants be sloping about the Namib today?

For the other theory, you have to read parts of Deneys Reitz’s Trekking On, where he joins Generals Botha and Smuts in German South West (now Namibia) at the start of World War I. Allied to England, Smuts and Co are fighting the German colonists and find themselves in a particularly challenging situation at Aus, where Jules and I recently had some very cold beers on a hot day.

The Germans are well dug in; their position is almost impregnable. The South Africans, despite their vastly superior numbers, are at a disadvantage, restricted to the wide-open fields of the Namib with no element of surprise on their side.

While the South African generals discuss strategy, their troops camp in their thousands at the nearby Garub waterhole, with the cavalry horses picketed in long lines.

The Germans, determined to dilute the strength of any attack, fly over the South African encampment and drop crude bombs made of gunpowder, nails and horseshoes. They specifically target the horses to scatter them and succeed, with dramatic results. Dozens, maybe hundreds of horses, flee in terror.

Deneys Reitz also recounts how the Germans used land mines to deter the South Africans:

“I made early acquaintance with one of these mines, and it cost me the life of my horse Bismarck. I was coming from the railhead one morning, and overtook an infantry company plodding along. I rode chatting to the officer at their head when suddenly there was a roar in the midst of the soldiers and a column of smoke and dust shot a mile high, whilst fragments of metal went whizzing in all directions. When the air cleared, two men lay dead and a dozen wounded, and many others were temporarily blinded by the spurting sand.

“My horse, stung by flying grit and pebbles, reared and plunged, and when I dismounted to help the injured, he gave a snort of terror, and wrenching free, headed straight for the waterless desert that lay westward for a hundred miles or more.”

Jules later spoke to Telané Greyling, a young woman doing her doctorate on a management plan for the horses through a South African university.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that the horses would have wandered this far south from Duwisib,” she said. “I’m almost certain they came from a combination of German Schutztruppe and South African cavalry.”

When the area became part of the Namib Naukluft National Park in 1986, a solar powered pump was installed at the water source by the government. Underground water was pumped up for the horses, and a hide was added so that their drinking sessions could become tourist photo opportunities.

In summer, when the plains grass is abundant, their survival seems effortless. But in winter they move slowly and their heads are always down as they search for Eragrostis grass. Sometimes they seem to be nibbling at nothing but gravel, and their energy levels are at a dangerous low.

These horses have been through several drought-induced genetic bottlenecks. In 1992, they were suffering so badly from hunger that the Ministry of Environment and Tourism sold off 100 horses to eager buyers all over the African subcontinent. They supplied the remaining 80 with fodder. Telané Greyling and a friend bought 15 of them and brought them back to a riding school in South Africa.

“We found they have a very passive disposition. That’s part of their survival strategy: they have learnt not to stress. If a domestic horse were dehydrated the way these horses are on a regular basis, they would die within two days, of stress, not dehydration. But the desert horses have adapted to being dehydrated regularly and to having sparse food. They’re philosophical. They accept their conditions.”

The horses have also adapted to the heat. During the middle of the day, when temperatures can easily rise to above 40˚C, the horses turn their backs to the sun so that it shines only down the middle of their spines.

Their harsh world means that only the very fittest survive. Foal mortality is high, in some areas as high as 90%, because the horses often have to move 40 km between grazing and water, and their stallion pushes them mercilessly. A foal with the slightest weakness or defect will become hyena food sooner rather than later.

The horses have become so distinctive that experts have discovered a unique variation of blood type. Called the Q Factor, it is found in no other horse on Earth. It’s a kind of mutation.

Telané has noticed that although the groups are small, one family might, mostly at the instigation of the mares, join another group. But the two stallions totally ignore each other, and service only their own mares.

“The bachelor males can be loners, or pair up with one or two others,” she said. “Then there are the bachelors I call the Outsiders. Sometimes a bachelor will persistently hang around a group so long that the stallion tires of chasing him, and he’s grudgingly accepted into the group. But he’s never as charismatic as the stallion is and the mares don’t often take up with him.”

Piet Swiegers, a long-time neighbour at Klein Aus Vista, begged us to tell the world not to “go offroad, looking for them”.

“They’re wild horses. Treat them with respect.”

In fact, no bundu bashing was required to get prime seats out there in the Garub waterhole hide. It was better than a soap opera. In fact, it was one of the finest free shows in Africa.

Chapter 12: The Namib Naukluft

Under a Gibbous Moon

Sometimes you just have to love a word purely for the sound it makes, sliding out of your mouth: head-standing beetle; fairy circle; shepherd’s tree; sycamore fig; dusky sunbird; solifuge; camelthorn; ant lion; barking gecko; wedge-snouted desert lizard; striped mouse. And my personal favourite: Jennifer Lopez.

Next, you have to sit down in the shade and allow those very words to conjure up images in your mind. Have a drink, let the pictures really sink in, and then drive out here, to the Namib Naukluft National Park, to see them all in action. Well, you may not catch sight of the shapely Ms Lopez, but she was here once. Some of her charisma remains, perhaps in one of those sinuous dunes out at Sossusvlei.

The day had been a bit of a trek, really. Nearly 500 km of southern Namibia, from Lüderitz to the Sossusvlei Lodge at Sesriem. Lots of dirt road, dust and detours as we sped from the wild horses at Garub to the Duwisib Castle near Maltahöhe into the NamibRand Reserve and over moonscapes to this place.

For years, I’d wanted just one night at this particular lodge, which stands at the entrance to the park. Its units were a strange combination of tent and blockhouse. The central building and watchtower rose like a desert Impressionist’s citadel into the star-studded sky, where the celestial celebrations were reaching some form of climax (they were definitely having God’s Oscars up there). And here we were, Jules passed out on the bed inside, exhausted from the drive, and me on the porch with a cold Tafel in my grubby hands.

Barking geckos began having their way with the night. A coolth settled in over the Namib and washed away the intense heat of the day. I felt a streak of luck running through my bones, and rose to wake my wife.

“Jules,” I whispered into her face as she slept, “whaddabout some cards?”

I thought maybe I’d catch her groggy and, for once, beat her at gin rummy. So far, this trip had not yielded any winnings for me. Fish River Freddie was still waiting for his day in the rummy sun. Gamely, Jules surfaced and within the hour I was back on the porch, sipping a little morosely at my lager.

But not for long, because a gibbous moon rose over the lodge watchtower and I embarked on some rather ambitious night photography. Springbok ventured out of the moon shadows down to the waterhole in front of the lodge, looking like Namib ghosts on spindly legs.

“What, exactly, is a gibbous moon?” I asked Jules.

“It’s gibbous when it’s nearly full.” Not only lucky at cards, my wife, but smart with the facts as well. I slipped out to the bakkie, hunted down my Concise Oxford Dictionary and looked it up. There it was.

“’gibbous (g-) a. Convex, protuberant; (of moon or planet) having bright part greater than semi-circle and less than circle; humped, hunchbacked.”

(Author’s aside: And then there’s “gibbosity”, which, according to my Microsoft Spell Check buddy, is a totally bogus word.)

With that small matter cleared up, we hit the sack and rose before dawn so we could catch fresh morning light on the dunes of Sossusvlei.

The gate to the park opened at 6 am and we joined a queue of vehicles containing what sounded like the happy half of western Europe. Assertive Germans, excitable Italians, demure French and us, with our tickets and Sossusvlei Breakfast Specials (which, for the record, consisted of two mint ice creams). It sounds very wicked and weird, but being out there on Planet Dune was an off-world experience. And if there is no gravity, can there really be muesli? If you don’t make eye contact with yoghurt (especially the Fruits of the Forest variety), who’s to say it really exists?

So picture this. In the distance are higgledy-piggledy mountains, towering red dunes and a hot air balloon rising up into the sky. You’re in a diesel bakkie that is hoarsely crying out for a new air filter. The dust of a long trip has crept into its lungs and it now sounds like Darth Vader in crisis. Your right hand is totally occupied with a fast-melting ice cream and suddenly the road has turned malignant, throwing up evil, wheel-wrenching potholes all over the place.

That was 2004. They may well have repaired what we like to call The Ola Hell Run between Sesriem and Sossusvlei by now. Back then, however, our convoy looked like one of those drunk-driving controlled experiments you see on TV, with cars weaving wildly across the road to avoid the potholes.

And then it all went away, and we found ourselves in a Zen garden of sand: a plume of ostrich grass on a wind-combed red dune; the sensuous curve of a star dune, slipface lit red, flipside in shadow. Designed and sculpted by wind.

Along the road, people began pulling over to take photographs, unable to resist the contrast of trees, grass and dunes. At one spot, you could look through the frame of a dead tree and focus on a rising dune in the background. It was a Namib Kodak Moment, with point-and-shooters from all over the world lining up to get the shot.

Dune 45 is the most-photographed heap of sand in the world. This morning, a group of cheery Italians were climbing its flanks. Those who had already toiled up and giant-strided down the slipface were happily resting on the protruding roots of ancient camelthorn trees, shaking the sand out of their boots.

At the 2x4 Sossusvlei parking area we paid our N$80 for the 5-km shuttle ride through heavy sand. Our beloved Isuzu waited wheezing in the shade. We passed people who had chosen to walk into the vlei without headgear or water supplies. One couple, cheerfully stressed, looked ready for a cocktail party. He had on his pressed chinos and blazer. She was fully decked out in embassy frock and high heels.

“Remember the white water tuxedo types?” Jules reminded me. Some years previously, on a visit to the Zimbabwe side of the Victoria Falls, a river guide had told us this legend. Two Japanese tourists arrived at the morning white-water briefing one day, kitted out in evening dress. They donned lifejackets and took to the hectic rapids of the Zambezi, falling out of their rubber ducks at regular intervals, raising not a peep in complaint. When asked about their formal outfits later, they replied:

“We booked for the sunset cruise. They told us to come early for a good seat.”

Our shuttle into Sossusvlei was filled with burly, sing-along members of a German amateur photographic club, equipped with huge cameras and howitzers for lenses. Jules leant over and mopped up my drooling mouth. I was dying to grab me a Dieter or a Hans-Pieter, take him out behind a dune and mug him for all his “stuff”. But that’s no way to promote tourism to southern Africa, so I slumped back in my seat, feeling like a bit like an entry-level photographer.

From the drop-off point, we walked more than a kilometre over the dunescapes to the Dead Vlei, where Jennifer Lopez once played the part of, well, Jennifer Lopez, in a dreamy action movie. The title? Oh puh-leaze.

We stood at the lip of the Dead Vlei and looked down at the creamy floor of the pan, the stylised tree-skeletons and the ochre sand walls that surrounded it. Above the vlei, more Italians were climbing the highest dune in the neighbourhood and then sliding down its sides, playing in the world’s largest sandpit. At lunchtime, in the blaze of the day. No mad dogs or Englishmen in sight.

Like the last two soldiers of the Lost Patrol, Jules and I trudged through the sinking sands back to Sossusvlei and ate our breakfast bars in the shade of a camelthorn tree, with chirrupy sparrows, hopeful titbabblers and passing tractrac chats hitting on us for crumbs.

“I’m feeling a little gibbous,” I informed my wife, who blinked at me. “Maybe a beer back at the lodge will sort me out.”

On our previous visit to the area, we’d met a British couple in the middle of a windstorm at the Sesriem filling station. He, a frail, bespectacled 80-year-old (he nearly took off in the vicious updraft on his way to the Gents) and she, maternal, cooing and ten years younger, were on a road trip through the country. They were driving in a decidedly non-macho soft-shell Japanese vehicle around Namibia as if on an afternoon jaunt through the meadows of genteel England. We bumped into them later, on a game drive in the north, and he said:

“Yemm, good trip. Stayed over in Schwartzburg and had a fine time looking for the Southern Scrop. Great country, Nibia …” I finally worked out he wasn’t really speaking Gibbous, he was just describing Swakopmund, the Southern Cross and Namibia through dusty false teeth. It didn’t diminish my deep respect for this octogenarian who was madly and happily overlanding in a big wild country with a wife and a roadmap full of strange-sounding names. Owning a muscle car doesn’t make you a real adventurer. Hitting the road with National Health choppers does.

On that same trip we discovered the joys of the cuddle puddle on our porch at Sossusvlei Wilderness Camp. It was full moon (just in case you were asking) and the gravel plains down below were sporting magnificent hair extensions of lemon-coloured bushman grass.

That was where our guide, Isaiah Iiyambo, showed us the real stars of the Sossusvlei dunes: the little fellows that live beneath the sand. Like the head-stander beetle who goes fog-basking before first light. He’ll lurch up the highest dune, right to the crest, to catch the densest fog. Then he’ll lift his butt to the elements, in a kind of intimate moon salute. The fog hits his back and collectively turns into a drop of water, which then slides down into his waiting mouth. Which sorts him out for a good few days. Fog-basking.

That day, we’d been chased up a black stony hill by an apparently vicious yet doe-eyed ostrich. Breathless, we finally made it back to the lodge and recounted our near-death experience to the girl at the front desk.

“Oh, that would be Christine,” she laughed. “Christine gets lonely for human company sometimes. She’s totally harmless. A bit of scratching on the back of her head would have turned her all wobbly.”

Christine, we discovered, could do no wrong. A rich Italian guest had recently demanded a cooked ostrich egg for her birthday dinner. There was only Christine around, and no male in sight. And yet, wonder of wonders, she went out back to the car park and obligingly laid an egg behind one of the game drive vehicles. This incredible feat not only won her permanent mention in the Namib Book of Crazy Stuff, but she was also voted Wilderness Safaris Employee of the Month.

Down the road was the NamibRand Reserve and in it the Wolwedans Dunes Lodge, where the manager at the time was Herman Cloete, something of a desert poet:

“Here in the windy house of silence I can lose myself,

Here in this great crucible of dreams,

This vast and visible in-between,

Is the birthplace of peace.”

Herman used to sit out in the desert at sunset, penning his special homemade haikus to the land that enveloped him. The NamibRand is a collection of former karakul farms: Die Duine (The Dunes), Stellarine (Of The Stars), Wolwedans (Wolf Dance), Jagkop (Hunters’ Hill), Aandstêr (Evening Star) and Kwessiegat (Conflict Springs), where two brothers once fought an epic battle over a waterhole. When the anti-fur campaign helped to crash the karakul market in the 1980s, a Windhoek businessman bought up the farms and formed this now famous reserve.

During the first day or so at Wolwedans, you’re entranced by the grassy savannahs and mountain ranges, dunes and rocky valleys that change colour from hour to hour into the amber evening. Then your focus narrows onto the minutiae of the reserve: camelthorn trees with roots that plunge more than 50 metres into the ground, the beetles, the tsamma melons and the mate-for-life steenbok.

“Fairy circles?” I asked at dinner. I had noticed bald, round patches in the grasslands that day. I’d heard them called fairy circles.

“Yeah, that’s what they are. And you can have one named after you, for a small consideration,” someone told me.

“Who made them?” I wasn’t letting go of this one.

“Aliens,” said a French girl with conviction. “The afterburn of their craft as they fly off.”

“Harvester ants,” said the more practical German stockbroker.

“It’s a mystery,” said the Swiss chemist, and we left it at that.

Back to September 2004, and we were chortling over all these happy memories as we drove off to Solitaire to pick up some supplies. We also remembered Moose, aka Percy Cross, who had a face like thunder when we first met him.

On a drive through to Swakopmund one day, we’d stopped off for beer. His restaurant was packed with tourists, happily munching their lunch.

“Good business,” I mentioned to Moose.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he replied tersely. “Until you realise they’re sitting there eating their packed lunches from the bus. All I’ve sold them is a couple of strudels and some coffees.”

But here at Solitaire in those days it was impolite to turn anyone away. Of course, as the tourist tracks bit deeper and deeper, being hard-assed just came more naturally. Still, few pleasures in life matched a visit with Moose in the middle of nowhere and a slice of his fresh, homemade apple crumble.

Someone once caught Moose in talkative mode and asked him why he’d settled out here, so far from things. He said he liked the barking geckos and the stars.

“It’s like Nature switches on a Christmas tree here every night,” he said. He also mentioned “The Bathing Ghost of Solitaire” who splashed around in his house at night and the Japanese tourist who had decided to walk 200 km to the next town. Well, after you’ve done the Zambezi River in your tuxedo, it’s the Next Big Thing to do. Not so?

Chapter 13: Namib Naukluft – Kuiseb Canyon

Henno’s Place

Three large birds flew overhead and landed not ten metres away.

“Rüppell’s korhaan,” whispered Jules, excitedly. “Try taking a photograph – you don’t see them every day.”

“Forget it,” I whispered back. “The minute I lift this camera, they’ll be off. You know about me and birds.”

We slowly advanced on the avian trio. I had my camera at half-port, wondering what evil deeds I had done in this life to make these blighters come down and taunt me so. I’m not famous, in any language, for taking great bird photographs. I’m far too impatient, under-lensed, ignorant of bird habits, lazy, not innovative enough, over-fond of whisky or something. In fact, until this 2004 Dry Lands journey to Namibia, no one would have mistaken me for a photographic St Francis. And yet there I was, preparing to have my heart broken once more by a wild bird flapping away into the distant mountains.

The korhaans advanced on us with purpose.

“All right,” I sighed, “Here goes.” And began burning up some digital camera space. They simply ignored me and waddled past to a little waterhole in front of our accommodation at the Namib Naukluft Lodge. Drank their fill and came walking back up to us again, with an expectant glint in their beady eyes.

Then they began to sing to us for their supper, in a rather throaty, nightclub fashion. Their sound was a 60-Lucky Strikes, late-night blues thing, but still pleasing to the ear. I filled the memory card with, well, memories of these rare Rüppell’s korhaans that were suddenly giving me great credibility as a bird paparazzo. As long as I never revealed the following, rather humbling, facts:

“Ah, that would be August, Sophie and their daughter, Petronella,” the lodge’s staff later told us. “They are habituated. If you keep very still, they’ll take bread from your hand. And if you don’t have any bread, they’ll shout.”

So it was on the wave of a faintly embarrassed bird-buzz that Jules and I wandered into the lodge boma for supper that night. A pleasant evening beckoned: clear skies above, warmish weather and the bonhomie of a German amateur photography school at the next long table. We walked into a steaming, roasting, frying, sizzling blitz of meat.

Within minutes, someone wearing a ridiculously tall, white chef’s hat had heaped our dinner plates with goat chops, boerewors, pork spare ribs and kudu steaks, leaving space for only one slice of cucumber. Jules and I grabbed a beer each and set to. Forgotten were the weeks of breakfast bars, two-minute noodles, beetroot in a box and the other spartan self-catering delights we’d indulged in. Here in medium-to-well Meatland we fell on the cutlets and sausages like timber wolves. And paid the price later, with protein dreams that turned into nightmares with a cast of thousands, as though directed by Bladerunner Ridley Scott himself.

At dawn, I said to Jules that perhaps we needed a very long walk to shake off the meat hangover.

“Mm. Maybe a long sleep first,” she mumbled, and disappeared under the duvet for another hour or so. I went off for some quality time with August, Sophie and their daughter, Petronella. Having just had a drink down at their waterhole, they thought that maybe I could rustle up some bread in the kitchen for them, even if it meant waking a chef up at this early hour. I demurred and asked if I could take some more photographs of them. They told me to piss off. And then I, too, woke up properly.

We had our long walk, Jules, me and about 50 kg of prime, barely digested Namibian braai meat. One of the lodge staff, Deon van der Berg, drove in front of us in his vehicle to a little track off the C19 highway and showed us the two-hour trail. Then he left us to our own peregrinations.

I knew there must be dassies about, culture-starved little hyraxes in need of a verse or two of Neil Young’s Helpless. So I obliged, yodelling across the canyon at unseen rock rabbits, singing and burping for accompaniment, while Jules looked on, suddenly bemused (perhaps shocked, although she still won’t admit it) at her choice of marriage partner. It was only when I broke into a bit of Jackson Browne (from the Running on Empty album, a true classic) that she begged me, on behalf of herself and everything that breathed in the canyon, to please stop. All right, then.

It was a wonderful, wonderful walk. Down the hard, stony canyon past Kanniedood (cannot die) trees (Commiphora saxicola). And rocks whitened by centuries of viscous dassie wee, granite-domed hills, sparrow weaver nests, zebra hoof tracks on the narrow paths, old animal bones in dry river beds and magnificent views over the petrified red dunes to the east.

Millions of years ago, these dunes held their shapes long enough to turn into red sandstone, and they were still frozen in the shapes of breaking waves, or so it seemed from a distance and with a dollop of imagination. Every now and then we came across the smell of cheap perfume, but it was only the flowering of the Ngquni bush.

We returned at mid-morning and the lodge manager, Chris Baas (his surname is the Afrikaans word for “boss” and he sometimes has trouble getting officials to believe this is his real family name), welcomed us back.

“And didn’t you just love the absolute silence of that canyon?” he enquired.

“Yes, yes,” I mumbled, remembering the Neil Young concert I’d given the dassies that morning. It was a kind of touristy, meat-hangover, Hawaiian-shirt thing to do, I admit. I have never again broken out in song to dassies, invisible or not.

We missed lunch and slept instead. Later that afternoon, Jules and I joined Chris for coffee and kuchen (cake) at the outdoor braai area near the korhaan hole. He was making a warthog potjie stew.

“The secret is never to use warthog fat,” he said, stirring the contents of a huge black pot. “It’s as rancid and inedible as zebra fat or horse fat.” And then he casually mentioned that most salami is made from horse meat. Jules blanched in horror, and hasn’t had a slice of the stuff since.

Chris Baas hailed from the Damaraland area up north, which was still on our itinerary. Even though Moose from Solitaire loved the starscapes down here, Chris said the Damara skies were even brighter.

“When I take my leave every two months, I don’t head for city lights,” he said. “I head for the skylights of Damaraland.”

As we chatted and sipped coffee, Chris occasionally added bits and pieces to his potjie, done in layered style, which was how the German amateur photographers preferred it. First in was the bacon, followed by the warthog pieces, water, carrots, dill, parsley and marrows.

Deon, however, was waiting to drive us around the farm, so we left Chris wielding an enormous wooden spoon like an assegai as he showed Chef Lebeus Shimonga the finer points of venison-stewing.

For my money, there’s not an antelope to beat the oryx (also called the gemsbok or Oryx gazella). He’s a stately fellow, standing out like a Royal Guardsman in the deep brown tones of a dune or prairie. So when Deon took us to a herd of 30 oryx in the early evening light, with the Naukluft Mountains turning mauve in the background, we had to take a moment.

This was just before the mating season, and a certain hierarchy was being established. Half-serious jousting was the order of the day, and scimitar horns caught the dying sun as they flashed this way and that, like long spears held aloft by knights in a tilt contest. Someone wise once told us that if you could teach the oryx how to pad up, he’d be the greatest cricketer on earth.

“He’s able to bat stones away with his horns, no matter how fast they come at him,” the sage person said. And we’ve never heard that statement challenged.

The oryx relishes these dry, hot lands.

On a hot day, you’ll find him on the crest of a sand dune catching the coolest breeze around. He’ll hang around in shade by day and feed by night, when the plants give up their moisture. His brain temperature is cooled by a network of blood vessels situated beneath the brain. He pants fast, cooling blood in his nasal sinuses. And besides all that, he looks simply majestic – even in the middle of a killer drought.

Before coming to work on the 17 000-hectare reserve, Deon van der Berg worked as a mechanic in the northern mining town of Tsumeb. We asked him if he had a sweetheart.

“No,” he replied, and then added into the patch of silence:

“But I do have a bakkie and a horse.”

He took us up to Marble Mountain for sundowners. It was a long, fine-grained, wind-cut ridge of white and pink marble. This was also where the lodge’s water came from, so sweet that it was bottled and sold on the open market.

The full moon rose like a silver coin over the rusty Naukluft Mountains. Among the dunelands to the west, the sunset had left a cloud with a neon-gold fringe. We toasted the moonrise with a lager and then drove back in the dark to our tender potjie supper.

As we dropped off our camera gear, a stunningly elegant Japanese model walked in, surrounded by photographic staff and guides. They’d been doing a nude magazine shoot in the dunes of Sossusvlei, one of the amateur German photographers confided in us.

“But very tasteful,” he added.

In my earlier, more coltish globetrotting days, I used to think Japanese tourists hung about in shy gaggles on trainer-wheel travels. That may have been the case back then, but it seemed to have changed. Now they white-watered in tuxedos, hiked 200 km into deserts and lay naked (tastefully, it must be added) on sand dunes in the middle of the day. Respect. I even heard about some of them riding their off-road motorbikes through the Nullarbor Desert of Australia. Double respect.

The next day we said goodbye to lodge staff and korhaan clan and swung by Solitaire once again to pump some air into a suspect tyre. Moose couldn’t get the air pump to register the tyre pressure so we said goodbye, see you one day soon, and headed off into Henno’s World.

During World War II, South West-based geologists Henno Martin and Hermann Korn avoided internment by escaping with their dog Otto into the depths of the Kuiseb Canyon for nearly three years. I’d read Henno’s classic account called The Sheltering Desert and was deeply impressed by their day-to-day survival techniques. Back at the Namib Naukluft Lodge, Chris Baas had given us precise instructions on how to get to their first hideout in the canyon.

As we took the winding road into the heart of the canyon, Jules spotted a lone Hartmann’s mountain zebra on a rocky ridge gazing down at us. We passed an old truck that had rolled off a low bridge, crested the canyon and looked down over spectacularly stark views. I wouldn’t have survived a week out here. Not without a Woolworths. Or, at least, a Solitaire and a Moose.

We found the unmarked road leading to a car park. Following a sign, we walked nearly 2 km on a narrow mountain pass to the legendary shelter, Carp Cliff. The rock formations all around us were conglomerates, studded with river pebbles like fruitcakes stuffed with raisins. It must have been a perfect environment for two people so fascinated by geology.

“This is where they prepared their suppers,” Jules indicated an old ring of rocks around what looked like the remains of an ancient fire. We both eased ourselves onto a rock and talked about this amazing story.

In most of the chapters of The Sheltering Desert, Henno seems obsessed with the search for food, adequate shelter and water. But when you put yourself in their place, you realise that nothing else really matters when you’re out here.

You exult with Henno, his buddy and his dog as, nearly starving, they come across a wild steer, shoot it and begin the laborious process of butchering such a large animal.

“For weeks, all they ate was red meat,” said Jules. And then we both remembered our recent protein overdose and shuddered. Just, I suppose, as Henno and Hermann shuddered after a while at the sight of yet another Texas-sized steak (Otto the dog, obviously, chomped bravely on).

Then they both have a sugar craving of note, and out here there’s no rushing off to an all-night convenience store for Mars Bars. So they give themselves each a tiny block of their precious chocolate and go in search of bees and, ultimately, honey.

Henno and Hermann also made a net of sorts and went carp fishing at a nearby pool, thus avoiding the prospect of yet another mouthful of red meat. Up there, they somehow established a garden that yielded radishes and “mangelwurzel tops”.

“I imagine mangelwurzel to be some kind of German turnip,” said Jules and I left it at that.

They set up a radio and listened to the war broadcasts at night. This month it was one-love to Germany, the next the Allies scored on the rebound, and so on. It must have all sounded quite silly to the two canyon refugees as they watched the shooting stars go back and forth in the night skies. And chewed another strip of biltong.

“Speaking of which, don’t you think it’s time we headed for Swakop?” urged my wife. We had almost no clean clothes left, the bakkie needed a new air filter and my cameras had to be checked in for medical treatment because they had a bad case of dust on the sensors.

On into the desert we drove, towards Swakopmund. The earth levelled out into flat ochre-monotony. Yet there, in the distance, we saw an oryx, looking ready for a fight.

On what we liked to call Kudu FM, they were playing some Crowded House, Simple Minds and Spandau Ballet. I fiddled with the knob and found Dolly Parton singing Jolene on Radio Strudel (the German service). I switched over to NBC, the national broadcaster, to find we’d just missed our weekly horoscope – Gemini. At a pinch, however, sensible travellers happily listen to someone else’s horoscopes:

“Those born under Leo,” the voice intoned, “are advised to connect with their inner selves, and avoid quarrelling with their partners over money.”

“Let’s go back to Dolly,” Jules begged, and who was I to refuse her?

Chapter 14: Swakopmund

Black Forest Cake Walk

I’ve never managed to arrive fresh as a daisy in Swakopmund. I’m either chugging in from the south-east with a mouthful of Kuiseb Canyon dust or coming in from the Skeleton Coast in the north, cold and shivering. One day I’ll be a devil and fly in directly from Windhoek, clean-shaven, with pressed chinos.

On this day in the spring of 2004, Jules and I pitched up in Swakop with a “sugar Jones” that only a Black Forest cake from the Café Anton would appease. We’d been in the Naukluft sand too long, living on prime Namibian meat and not enough sweet stuff. Besides, we’d heard about the legendary cake, and it seemed a good enough reason to drive through the desert to find it in this most German of all Namibian towns.

Luckily for us, we were booked into the Hotel Schweizerhaus right above Café Anton. In fact, the reception desk of the hotel was less than two metres from lots of Black Forest cake – and the fresh, strong coffee that makes a morning in Swakopmund so unforgettable.

Equally ecstatic about our brief stay in civilisation was our bakkie, which had contracted a severe respiratory condition and urgently needed an air filter. Then there was our filthy washing, which was developing a life of its own. My cameras were showing signs of imminent breakdown. All nuts and bolts were suspect and dust had crept in everywhere, making spotty pictures that looked like a severe case of photo-acne. I, personally, needed a break from two-minute noodles. So, all in all, the bright lights of Swakop shining through the coastal fog were very welcome to us travellers and our ailing accoutrements.

First stop, after a wash and a lightning sugar-strike on the Black Forest cake, was Foto Behrens, where the owner, Henning, set to work on my equipment. The friendly Henning (who wore a leather waistcoat I rather admired) had been in this situation before. It seemed that he was the first stop for many woebegone tourists whose equipment had experienced a touch too much of the great Namibian outdoors. He tightened a few screws, blew some photo-air onto the quivering digital sensors and recommended some “Adobe Photoshop for the spots when you get home”.

Henning also gave us great advice for the rest of our journey. He told us where to buy special gifts for the Himbas of the Kaokoveld, where good trading tobacco was to be had and how to get to the Moon Landscape outside town. I hardly noticed spending more than a grand on blank CDs, lens filters and a miracle cleaning pen. Henning was a traveller’s sanctuary indeed, and the cleaning pen really came in handy along the road.

We got ourselves an official permit to drive out to the Moon Landscape and then discovered that we were also supposed to have picked one up to visit Henno’s place in the Kuiseb Canyon. Just so that we were street-legal, we bought one of those as well. Which confused us for a moment since we’d already been out to Carp Cliff in the Kuiseb. In retrospect, it was a good idea. Or was it? Oh well. It did make us feel better at the time.

We drove to the impressive Moon Landscape, but I kept my eyes out for something else. Nearly a decade before, a guide called Jan van Wyk had brought me somewhere around here to see a poignant still life in the dunes that consisted of white horse bones and rotted leather halters. The bones lay in long, half-moon shapes in the lee of the dunes, the shifting sands of the Namib hiding a jawbone here, a bleached ribcage there.

“In 1914,” Jan explained, “the rinderpest swept through Swakopmund, which was then a German-held settlement. It struck the Kaiser’s cavalry badly. One afternoon, the German horsemen all rode into the desert. They formed semicircles here in the sand and dismounted, holding their horses and drawing their revolvers.

“At a given command, each man shot his horse. But look here, you can see something went wrong. Some of the horses broke away and tried to escape. They had to be pursued and killed. The riders trudged back to Swakopmund. Can you imagine how sad they were?”

This time, I couldn’t find the spot. My sketchy Swakop records show that the rinderpest swept through here in 1897. But I told Jules the story anyhow. We were just about to go into post-cake depression when she suggested we watch the sunset, beer in hand, from the deck of our favourite bar, The Tug. Good plot.

“And you know, I’ve never seen that green flash over the ocean.”

“What green flash?” I wanted to know.

“As the sun vanishes, there’s an emerald moment.”

“Oh yeah? Let’s have two more Tafels and see.”

And it happened, right before us, on the far western horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. And Jules whooped with delight, causing a number of drinkers to turn their heads and stare.

The next day a mist cocoon had wrapped itself firmly around Swakopmund. Jules decided to have her hair cut, and soon struck up a conversation with the Damara and Owambo women in the salon.

“Tell us about Johannesburg,” they asked her. Were there rich people? Were there factories? Were South Africans Christians? Did we only eat fish? Did we all have to drive 4x4s? And so on.

In the meantime, I was drinking some more of that powerful Swakop coffee back at the Café Anton and missing my friend, Mr Einstein. The last time I swung through Swakop I stayed at Sam’s Giardino, a guesthouse run by Sam Egger and his Swiss Mountain Dog, Mr Einstein. Sam had promoted the genial Mr Einstein to the position of marketing manager at the guest house and even printed a business card in his name. Nothing wrong with that. If you’d ever met Mr Einstein, you’d know what I mean.

Mr Einstein had a little girlfriend next door called Minka, a very pretty collie-cross. Sam approved of the relationship.

“Dogs must have other dogs in their lives,” he said.

One morning, Sam and I called Mr Einstein out of his Emmenthalercoloured kennel and off we went on a guided tour of Swakopmund, right up to the old Martin Luther steam engine at the edge of town.

“I get my best ideas while walking with Mr Einstein,” Sam told me. And it was on just such a walk that he came up with the timeless slogan for his guesthouse:

“Hospitality – with love.”

Another good idea of Sam’s (thanks, Mr Einstein) was to stock excellent single malt whisky and fine cigars. I was just about to revisit Sam’s Giardino for that very reason when I realised it was barely 10 am and a little early to be getting funky in Swakopmund. So I decided to buy a pair of kudu veldskoene instead.

With me newly shod and Jules freshly shorn, we strolled amid the craft vendors outside our hotel. I bought her an exotic Kugelschreiber Pen Stachelschweinborsten im Makalani Halter. Which is basically a Bic pen encased in a porcupine quill and set in vegetable ivory. It was here that we’d met Lizette Mubanga the last time around.

Lizette had painted a piece in the style of Tanzanian artist Edward Said Tingatinga, and I now wish I’d bought it from her. It was a gory, high-gloss depiction of an elephant upending a man, with villagers fleeing in terror.

“I saw this thing happen, with my very own eyes, up near Etosha,” the smiling young artist assured us.

We continued to the Swakopmund Museum, which is very well put together with indigenous art, Dorsland miniatures, stuffed wildlife and a uranium exhibit. We did a serious dive into their bookshop and went for lunch at the Swakopmund Brauhaus, where I attemped in vain to conquer Mount Eisbein.

This veritable Kilimanjaro of crispy pork knuckle stood before me like a delicious challenge. Hungry as I was, I could only reach its base camp before quitting with a burp and an apologetic rub of my tummy. And then the waitress said, with a hint of derision:

“We serve German portions here.” OK then.

I spent the afternoon running off my lunch on the dunes outside Swakopmund, trying to photograph a bunch of adrenaline junkies on sandboards and quad-bikes. The sandboard instructor, Beth Sarro from San Francisco, had a dog called Jazz. Jazz liked to chase the sandboarders and, when he tired, he moved into someone’s shade and dug a hole down to the cool sand before collapsing in a panting, grinning heap. Ah, the hounds of Swakopmund.

It was only after we’d returned to town and stuck our noses in a Bradt Guide to Namibia that we discovered something daring called “dune thunderball”. A levy of N$200 secured you three rides down a dune in a huge transparent ball. Hmm. That’s a tick for next time.

You can’t escape Swakop’s coffee aromas in the morning – and you can’t miss the beer fumes at sunset. Jules and I wandered over to the Hansa Brewery for a drink with Wilfrid the brew meister. He held a Bachelor of Science degree in beer-making (only in Germany), a qualification I’ve often laid informal claim to. Over an hour, we watched 13 000 bottles of our favourite Namibian beer come off the production line, and then we repaired to The Tug to try to drink them all.

The soft light of a new morning brought a flock of talkative budgies to our porch at the Schweizerhaus. The fog had lifted, and it was time to photograph Swakopmund’s extraordinary architecture. It’s only when you’ve schlepped a good few thousand kays across a desert to get here that you fully appreciate how strange and special these very Germanic buildings are.

Sandy filigrees, large Atlas figures looming like gargoyles, bay windows – even the prison on Moses Garoeb Street is a national monument. The famous “Atlas House” (real name: Haus Hohenzollern) was once a bit of a gambling den but it’s now used for residential and office purposes.

Once the shops opened, we lurched off towards Walvis Bay to have the bakkie looked at. While the Pupkewitz Delta people pored over it, we ate toasted sandwiches at Rootman’s Home Industries nearby and watched the locals come in and buy vetkoek for breakfast.

With the bakkie now breathing like a young dragon with its new air filter, we drove to the waterfront to photograph flamingos. I had my eyes firmly fixed on the pink ladies in the middle distance as I descended a rocky bank. Unfortunately, the last stretch of bank was slick with oil and I landed heavily, cutting my fingers in various places. The flamingos nonchalantly walked away from the scene of the accident.

To take my mind off the nagging pain and the uncooperative flamingos, Jules took me back to Swakop to visit the Kristall Galerie. She knows I like to see things like the world’s biggest glass-fibre crayfish, the world’s biggest glass-fibre pineapple and the world’s biggest postbox. I saw, at the gallery, the largest known crystal cluster in the world. I have to say that it beat the postbox and the pineapple hands down. The crayfish is still right up there.

This amazing 14-tonne cluster is more than 500 million years old and crowns a great display of Namibian crystals and gemstones. If you want to talk in terms of “My Precious”, I think they leave the average diamond in the dirt, so to speak.

On the same shopping spree, we went to the Bargain Corner, a busy downtown shop advertising poop scoops and furniture. They sold crystals, calculators, carvings, warthog-tusk bottle-openers, Jehovah’s Witness Watchtowers, calabashes, crested teaspoons, Herero dolls and second-hand mincers. Once inside, it was almost impossible to dislodge the magpies visiting from Jo’burg. An hour later, we stumbled out and went next door for biltong and Brie.

Then it was time for a photo session with a Black Forest cake at the Café Anton, where the owner, Heidi Snyman, welcomed us. Since the mid-1960s, the Café Anton has been the Black Forest beacon for hundreds of kilometres around: a fresh one is made every day. It is at least as famous as the famous Smithfield Omelette in South Africa, or the famous Two Tables Prawn Surprise in Zanzibar. At least.

That night, full of cake and good intentions, we took our enormous bag of laundry to Joy World Laundromat. The experience took me back to a dodgy laundrette in Putney, London, where, in the company of housewives and chars, I listened to a range of voices from Cockney to Caribbean, all gossiping amid the monster washers and driers. And yes, there was powder, dispensed into a polystyrene cup.

Here at the Joy World, however, they’d turned the experience into a tourist attraction, with video games, a bar, snooker tables, vending machines and a huge noticeboard announcing fêtes, special trips, discount adventures and such. The people with us were locals, hotel workers and backpackers. The security guard doubled as a laundry expert, checking on our whirling T-shirts, jeans and underwear from time to time. I needed a sock-herd, because mine had swopped partners and wandered across the room like woolly zombies in search of a Big Night Out.

While the rest of Swakop’s upmarket tourism sector was sitting down to a seafood platter accompanied by good Cape wine, we were cheerfully chewing on breakfast bars while reading Henno Martin in Joy World.

That night back at the Schweizerhaus, Jules read to me from the hotel’s in-room Gideon Bible.

“Just a little warning, my sweet,” I said. “Frightening your travel partner with extracts from the Gideon is the first sign of insanity on the road.”

The next morning, on the way north to Cape Cross, Jules bought an industrial-sized bag of tobacco called Skaaplek at a bulk supply emporium on the business side of town. It chased all the travel funk right out of the Isuzu and turned it into a cute little tobacco shop.

Then I remembered: we needed coffee mugs. I dashed inside, where locals were chatting in Afrikaans over commercial-catering quantities of purchases on trolleys. They took one look at my two little coffee mugs, smiled, and immediately addressed me in English. From then on, the mugs were called “The English Cups” …

Chapter 15: Mondesa Township, Swakopmund

“I am an Afrikaner”

One day in Swakopmund, we travelled beyond the Black Forest Curtain to a township called Mondesa, where 11 000 people lived in sand and fog.

Our guide was the amiable Beetle (aka Wilfred Gertze), who worked for the Hata ≠Angu (“Let’s get to know each other”) Cultural Tours company. He picked us up at the Schweizerhaus, where we were ensconced in a gaudy world of budgies in the trees, a Babel of foreign accents in the nearby craft market and the sweet aromas of the morning’s fresh pastries and cappuccinos on the double.

In his blue minibus, Beetle drove us out to another world, the “backstage” area of Swakopmund that so few tourists ever see. Accompanying us was Vivian, a young Dutch tour guide on holiday. Vivian, who came from Amsterdam, was feeling a little claustrophobic after spending too much time in Swakop.

“To me, Namibia means open spaces,” she said. “I’m missing my tour groups and our tents under the stars out in the desert. All these people in Swakop, they fluster me.”

Beetle, who’s a plumber for this area out of the tourist season, gave us a quick historical rundown on his neighbourhood:

“Mondesa was created in the 1960s by the South African apartheid government, who moved all the black people out of town. They also separated the different tribes within the township, and gave them different privileges. The Damara, with generally paler skin than the other blacks, had the biggest houses. Then came the Hereros, who must have won the South African government’s respect for the way they stood up to the German colonialists. At the bottom of the pile were the Owambos.” Ironically, the Owambos are the majority tribe of modern-day Namibia.

“It was a stupid time,” said Beetle as he drove through the sandy streets, where the wind was just starting to pick up. “Now we all live as one, and there is more peace. People mix with whomever they choose.”

He parked outside the Back of the Moon shebeen, and we took a walk down the street, trailing a small, instant fan club of laughing children who were very keen on being photographed.

The front yards of the houses were swept clean, and their porches displayed pot plants and various flea market adornments. There was very little litter about. Most of the homes were painted pink, yellow, purple and blue.

“After independence in 1990,” said Beetle, “people were given the houses. They were allowed to own and eventually sell them.”

Just as in Soweto, Alexandra and various other South African townships, many houses had shacks at the back, which were rented out for about N$200 a month.

“Some of the shacks don’t have electricity,” said Beetle. “They use candles or paraffin lamps and Primus stoves. This is often dangerous. Recently, two men died in a shack fire out here. There is a fire station over in Swakopmund, but the fire has usually done the damage by the time the volunteers arrive.

“In the DRC [Democratic Resettlement Community], a kind of waiting area containing another 4 000 people hoping eventually to find space in Mondesa] there is a fire truck. They had a fire in the DRC some time ago, but the battery of the truck had gone flat. Now, the guys take the truck out regularly to keep its battery charged.”

It was a custom among the residents of the township to put up a white flag outside a house where a soon-to-be-married person lived. They would leave it fluttering there long after the wedding, until there was nothing left of it. If there were a death in the family, a black flag with a white cross would be displayed outside the house and removed after two weeks.

We walked past the Club Funky Inn, one of the many drinking establishments of Mondesa. A midday patron staggered about on the other side of the road, too busy concentrating on staying upright to worry about the arrival of curious outsiders.

Beetle took us to his home, a shack in the back yard of his late parents’ house, where his brothers and sisters lived. We found his girlfriend and two sisters braiding one another’s hair and watching a quiz show on national TV. Beetle’s spot was a two-roomed space, consisting of a kitchen (with microwave) and a bedroom filled with a double bed. His bedroom walls were covered in photographs of himself and various tour groups. Why didn’t he live in the house with the rest of his family, we wanted to know.

“My girlfriend and I live together but we’re not married yet,” he smiled. “It would be frowned on for us to stay in the big house.”

The residents of Mondesa seemed to have a coherent moral code. There was little crime in the township itself.

“That’s because we all know each other out here,” said Beetle. “Of course, in Swakopmund, where people don’t know us, that’s where the housebreakings and robberies happen.”

Which is the case with just about every town in southern Africa, where you have an affluent, formerly “whites-only” business and residential area existing next to a relatively poor labour dormitory called a township. Most people in countries like Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe live in the townships (although you won’t see them in the publicity brochures), where life is a lot more marginal than in the suburbs.

“Our biggest problems here stem from alcohol abuse,” said Beetle. “Booze is cheaper in Mondesa than in Swakopmund. Truckers coming in from the east bring drugs like dagga (marijuana) and Mandrax, but nothing harder than that.”

We asked about tourist safety in Mondesa.

“When the company started running cultural tours into the township, the operators were worried their clients might be in danger,” said Beetle. “But in four years, there have been no incidents. Even if you walked around here on your own, you’d be OK. The people like seeing tourists in their township.”

Beetle took us to meet an extraordinary Herero woman called Naftaline Mauha, who wore a voluminous, leopard-print bustle and a traditional “horns of the cow” headdress. Jules and I had first seen these unusually formal outfits in the Botswana frontier town of Maun, gateway to the Okavango Delta. You’d expect desert-dwellers to wear something lighter.

“Well,” smiled Naftaline, “we didn’t always wear these outfits. We used to dress like this.” And she pointed at a little doll, skimpily dressed in ochred animal skins.

“The Himba,” said Jules.

“The Hereros and the Himba, we are one and the same,” said Naftaline. “When we lived in the country, it was fine to dress in skins. But there were always problems when we came to town back in the old colonial days. So we began dressing like the missionaries’ wives, with eight layers of skirts, and they approved.”

The Herero people, said Naftaline, wanted to preserve something of their own culture. Their cattle were central to their lives, so they devised a cowhorn-shaped headdress. The women, in their generous dresses, were also encouraged to walk slowly when in public.

“With the grace of a cow,” said Naftaline.

I have my own thoughts about the missionaries and the Hereros. Having met the Hereros’ clan-counterparts in a more natural state up in the Kaokoveld, I know that under those tent-like dresses are probably some of the most athletic forms in the country. I can just picture a missionary’s wife, probably super-sized according to the European custom of the day, going into shock as a troop of long-limbed ladies walked into the village clad only in skins, exposing breasts and other parts that might attract the wandering eye of the pastor. I can envisage her scheming furiously, preparing to encourage the fashion crime of the century by insisting that these great bodies be wrapped in yards and yards of hot material. With bustles.

Naftaline’s people came from across the Kunene River in Angola, migrating south in search of better grazing. Some stayed in the Kaokoveld and are known today as OvaHimba. The rest of the Herero nation moved into central Namibia and south as far as the Swakop River.

The warrior-chief most revered by the Hereros was Samuel Maherero. He led them in battles against the Nama, who were headed up by Hendrik Witbooi. These were the two giants of the 1870s, and the central parts of the country were often the hectic scenes of cattle raids, ambushes and abductions between the two nations.

Samuel Maherero sided with the new German occupiers in the 1890s against Witbooi, but in 1904 he declared war on the colonialists, massacring more than 120 farmers, traders and their families. Germany laid on men and machine guns, bringing the Hereros to their knees by the end of the year. The most notorious German in this part of the world was General von Trotha, who took six divisions of his soldiers into the east and chased the Hereros into the deserts of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) after the decisive Battle of the Waterberg. Which is why our first Herero encounter was not in Namibia, but in Maun, Botswana.

The Hereros lost all their lands to the Germans and were forbidden to keep cattle. All they could do was work for the whites on their farms or in the towns. After 1920, however, the South African government (now with a mandate to rule South West Africa) set aside special Herero areas, allowing them to return to their pastoral way of life.

Although she dressed like a missionary’s wife from a century before, Naftaline was deeply involved in current issues. Working as an AIDS counsellor, she travelled around the township giving home-based care to the sick, supplying clothing to struggling families and bandages to those with open wounds.

“The government is starting to administer anti-retroviral treatments,” she said. “But only in certain areas like Windhoek and Walvis Bay. People have to travel far each day for the treatment.”

Naftaline was also involved in an OVC (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) project, to which we made a small contribution before leaving her and heading into the DRC.

This sprawling settlement in the dunes was the “reception area” where people applied for formal housing and then waited their turn. Pit latrines, “smart” cards for water and a N$5 taxi ride to town – it was a hard life out in the desert. The only officially supplied electricity came in the form of streetlights, and a soup kitchen visited on Saturdays.

We stopped over at the house of Ernst and Elsie Taniseb. Ernst was an “opportunist artist”, the only breed of creative person that could really survive out here in a world of sand, wind and dramatically reduced circumstances. We wandered around his amazingly higgledy-piggledy dwelling, full of objects he’d discovered and initiative he’d shown.

“About 70% of this house is recycled materials,” he said, lurching a little to the left.

“Where does it all come from?” asked Jules.

“From the DRC Hardware Store,” Ernst laughed, with a touch of bitterness. “That’s the local rubbish dump.”

Plants were happily growing in old tyres. The fence and walls of the house were made from scraps of wood, with the occasional strong plank for support. There was an old generator under cover.

“Whenever I’ve collected enough money for a bit of petrol, we run the generator and watch some TV,” he said. Ernst painted T-shirts and sold crystals for a living. But he was probably the most environmentally aware man we’d met in Namibia so far, and his pride and joy was the “grey water” flush toilet he’d recently built for the women in the family.

The Taniseb house sported images of Jesus, reggae stars Lucky Dube and Bob Marley, and a glaze-eyed trophy of a red hartebeest that Ernst had found out at the “hardware store”. He took out his battered old guitar and began playing as the mist rolled in over the DRC, and I went out to where Elsie and her mother, Francisca, were sewing a duvet cover. Mother Francisca was a fine-boned lady in large spectacles. I asked her whether she preferred me to address her in English or Afrikaans.

“Meneer, I am an Afrikaner,” she announced proudly, and continued sewing. Who said Afrikaans was dead? There’s a whole bunch of Damaras and Namas out there in the wilds of Namibia who would disagree wholeheartedly.

Our next stop was the home of Stanley Witbooi, descendant of Hendrik Witbooi. Hendrik’s nemesis back in the 1890s was a German officer called Curt von Francois, who was never a very good guerrilla fighter. On 12 April 1893 Von Francois and his troops attacked the Witbooi encampment at a place called Hoornkrans, killing mostly women and children. He made off with a number of Witbooi’s Nama followers, whom he planned to enslave. And so Hendrik Witbooi wrote to him, on 24 July of that year:

“[I]f you intend to go on fighting me, I beg you again, dear Friend, to send me two cases of Martini-Henry cartridges so that I can fight back. So far I have not attacked, for you have stopped my supply of arms and then attacked me. Therefore give me arms, as is customary among great and courteous nations, so that you may conquer an armed enemy: only thus can your great nation claim an honest victory.”

Our host, Hendrik’s descendant Stanley, was born “with the caul” and, in the Nama tradition, was raised to be a healer. He showed us bottle after bottle of seeds, pieces of bark, roots and even seal oil. He took out an old brass cigarette lighter, which worked with flint and dried grass.

“This belonged to Hendrik,” he said. Stanley told us about Nama “bush tucker (food)”, traditional medicines and how sticking to the “old culture” gave you long life.

“We had a Nama woman around here who died recently, at the age of 126,” he said. “She would still be alive if only she hadn’t smoked so much.”

We returned to the Back of the Moon where, over a couple of Tafel Lagers, Beetle whipped my ass in a friendly game of pool while someone played a CD of Angolan love songs and our little fan club of kids gathered meekly at the threshold of the bar. Then we all washed our hands and sat down for an Owambo-style supper. We ate millet pancakes, wild spinach, soft beans and the finest, crispiest mopane worms this side of the Limpopo River. It was a good day to remember.

Chapter 16: Cape Cross

Belly Safari

With two cameras slung about my neck and a greedy eye on the lichen fields north of Swakopmund, you couldn’t blame me for what happened next.

The exquisite otherworld of the fabled lichen fields had been sensibly fenced off to prevent visiting 4x4 heroes from driving onto them and making almost indelible tracks that would remain there for many years to come. I know. I saw them in 2004 – the same tracks I’d seen a decade earlier.

I parked our bakkie at the roadside and clambered over the barrier to find myself a metre of lichen to photograph up close and personal with a 105-mm macro lens. Only to be snared on a cable coated with a thick layer of black, tarry grease that rapidly adhered to all parts of me. I looked across at Jules and laughed, because she, too, had turned into a tar baby. Shit, and we were due to check in to a smart lodge shortly. What would they think?

“Well, we’re here now,” I told my wife. “And we’re already dirty. We may as well stay and make the best of it.”

Which we did. In the billowing mist, the orange Teloschistes capensis – a fluffy, strange and rare kind of lichen that can grow as high as ten cm, which makes it a giant among its peers – was as bright as a cartoon lawn. And there was even some good news lurking in those dreaded old 4x4 tracks: the Teloschistes had begun to colonise the hollows left by the tyres of some crazed brandy-drinker of the 1960s, using their slight depressions for protection against the elements.

“They’re probably getting a lot more moisture down there,” said a jubilant Jules. “They’re living on fog drops.”

Down in Lichen World, I saw a tiny fishmoth wiggle its way out of sight. A beauteous black-and-white beetle acted like a little Damara drama queen by sprinting across an open space and diving into the nearest clump of lichen as if pursued by something fast and very fierce.

Lichen is an astounding substance, and we’ve found no better place to appreciate it than Namibia. It is an “extremophile”, living in the most desperately inhospitable environment, enduring for millennia until favourable conditions allow it a brief window to grow or reproduce. Talk about lean patches in your sex life. The noble lichen has to be respected just for that. When a clump of lichen sidles up to you and says, “I haven’t had sex for centuries,” you’d better believe him.

We photographed some of the long-suffering lichen and then returned to the vehicle by contorting ourselves to crawl under the greasy cable. Driving north on the Salt Road, we came upon a peculiar settlement in the middle of the coastal sands. There was no sign to identify this place, but it looked like a deserted weekend-fisherman’s paradise. Intrigued, we drove around past prefab houses eccentrically painted in Fanta Grape, Cream Soda, Chocolate Brick and Chez Guava.

One house was built out of three shipping containers. Another sported a European Union flag. A sign saying Bennie se Rooi Lorrie lay in the sand, alongside a lot of empty beer bottles. We later found out this place is called Wlotzkasbaken and is a much-coveted holiday resort. Plots are handed down from father to son; don’t even try buying something here. All right, then. We won’t.

On the road north, a long cloud stretching from across the ocean arched over us like a wave about to break. Within an hour, we were chugging along in thick mist, the constant companion of the Skeleton Coast. Flocks of seagulls flew across the grey dunes from the sea with mussels firmly clasped in their beaks. Hovering briefly about six metres above the road, they’d drop their cargo on the hardened surface in the hope that the mussel shells would crack open on impact. The lucky ones then swooped down and devoured the contents.

We explored the town of Hentie’s Bay, named after Major Hentie van der Merwe, who was the founder of recreational fishing in the area in 1929. Afrikaners who liked to fish, it seemed, also liked to make a pun. Their holiday homes carried names like Verrweg, El Retro, Nog ’n Skof, Ja Môre and Hollidy Ien. The roads were, obviously, named after fish: Kabeljou, Kolstert, Klipvis and Galjoen.

The town icon seemed to be a large dead tree from which hung a rope noose. The inscription beneath it read: “The Gallows. Erected in 1978 to keep the town and beach clean, initiated by Frank Atkinson and Willie Cilliers, who respectively settled here in 1969 and 1971 as the first two residents of Hentie’s Bay.”

One could just imagine old Frank and Willie getting the moer-in with the fishing holidaymakers and their gillies who trashed the place at weekends with beer bottles and fish innards and such, leaving it all for the locals to clean up on Monday mornings.

We finally arrived at the elegant Cape Cross Lodge in the early afternoon, grubby as kindergarten children. Jules also bore the evidence on her blouse of an encounter with a rebellious nutty chocolate ice cream purchased in Hentie’s. The front-of-house manager, a young man called Juan who obviously never judged a girl by her confectionery stains, treated us like visiting royalty and showed us to our room, named Hartlaub’s Gull.

It was strange to encounter such regal accommodation in the middle of a desolate place like Cape Cross, known more for its guano, its raucous seals, its Portuguese cross and its remoteness than anything else. I went out onto the balcony to see the Atlantic in her gunmetal grey mood and spotted a sleek jackal loping up from the beach to drink at a little pond in front of the lodge.

The fur seals (eared seals, if you will) of Cape Cross are world famous, mainly because you can probably hear them barking all the way across the ocean in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve seen them many times, and they always remind me of an overcrowded council flat in crisis. The Cape Cross seal colony is an ever-changing scene of glistening fat bodies in all shades of brown, stretching, hauling themselves over the sand, arching their backs like overweight yogis, bellowing and orking at one another, squabbling and biting, pups yelling for their mothers in unnervingly human voices. I had my Lawrence Green library to hand as we settled in for the late afternoon at the colony, observing this barking Bruegel.

In On Wings of Fire, the wonderfully colourful Green interviewed an employee of the sealing station, August Hasselund. He not only clubbed them for a living, but was also a bit of a seal-herd. He told Green:

“Eh vurk mit der yong seals – tich dem dricks for der circus.”

And it emerged that the seals of Cape Cross were, according to Green’s sources, highly prized for their intelligence and poise and that they made especially fine circus animals. They were, said Hasselund, even better than Californian sea lions in this regard, although the latter had been taught to say “I want my mama” on certain notable occasions. And this was something no Cape Cross seal had been able to manage thus far.

According to Hasselund, a good circus seal should possess thick whiskers with a downward curve, and their noses should not be pointed. Where would they then be expected to balance that rubber ball?

Seals with short attention spans would not do. They were known as snoozers and were weeded out soon enough. No one likes a narcoleptic circus performer. You needed barkers. They were the winners. Always on the go, ready to dart about at the slightest command, eyes bright and whiskers trembling.

“Eh loff der seals an’ der seals loff me,” Hasselund declared to Lawrence Green.

Mr Green made a literary meal of this frontier spot in Namibia and loved to take photographs of the seals of Cape Cross. In So Few are Free, he notes:

“There is only one way, I found, to photograph the seals at close quarters. I had to set my camera, race towards the colony so that they could not pick up the scent, leap over the rocks and take my picture without a second’s delay. They all came sliding past me in a panic-stricken cavalcade. This method, however, is not without danger. A large bull weighs up to eight hundred pounds, and some will attack and maul a man. They will grip a man’s arm, worry him like a terrier with a rat, roll on him and crush him. They know what they are doing on the rocks, those seals, while a man can find no foothold. Men killed by seals have a little cemetery of their own on the shore at Cape Cross.”

Well. That other travel writer, TV Bulpin, says there is no record of the Cape Cross seals having attacked a human being. So we contacted the good folk at Cape Cross Lodge and asked them to check for us. There was indeed a cemetery, but it carried no evidence of seal-on-man violence. Another one of those Namibian mysteries.

Some advice for seal-snappers: take a long lens, stay behind the wall, focus in on the action and have a good time. There’s no need to test the power of a bull seal’s teeth on your arm or his terrier-like tendencies.

Believe it or not, Cape Cross is not famous foremost for its fur seals, but for the fact that this is where the white man officially first put his foot down in southern Africa. Some might say this is where all the trouble began. Be that as it may, the Portuguese trader-explorer Diogo Cão arrived here in 1486 and put up a cross in honour of his king, João I, father of Henry the Navigator.

That stone cross loomed over the noisy seals and the occasional porky jackal and little else for more than 150 years, until the arrival of Captain Messum, who had nothing on his mind but the smelly treasures of sea-bird guano. Messum landed at Cape Cross and went inland, encountering an impressive mountain that glowed gold with the evening light. He tried to name it Mount Messum, but nobody backed him on this particular ego-trip; to this day, it is still called the Brandberg (Burning Mountain).

Which is where my photographer friend Les Bush, a locally famous guide named Jan van Wyk and I found ourselves in the late winter of 1995. Jan had come armed for tourists, with everything in the Land Rover that one could possibly wish for. To his delight, we did not need the tents, the tables, the feasts or the portable toilets he had on offer. We slept in the open in canvas packs, cooked our own meals and fed Jan the occasional beer on the drive. After two days of this life, he said he felt like he was the tourist, not the guide.

We arrived at the Brandberg, this stand-alone mountain in the desert. Up there, it has its own ecosystem, separate from the dry, intense harshness below. Forests, springs and attendant life forms all flourish on the Brandberg.

“They even built an airstrip on top of the mountain,” said Jan. “But the winds up there are quite rough. One day a pilot in a light plane flipped right over and broke both his legs. He still managed to crawl down the mountain and get help.” This place is not for wimps.

Because we needed to be at a specific spot for evening photographs of the Brandberg, Jan had to forsake his normal luxury campsite and set up something cruder for us on the side of a hill nearby.

Within an hour of wolfing down something basic for supper, Les and I were snoring away, leaving Jan at the fireside with his pinotage. By 4 am, though, we were both up and smoking, listening to Namibian nature chattering away all around us. A jackal trotted by in search of an insomniac rabbit. The valley below was full-moon silver.

“I can’t believe it,” chuckled Les.

“Can’t believe what?”

“That someone’s paying me to be here.”

Ten years on, I told Jules this story as we prepared for a belly safari in a nearby ring of mountains that was finally named after the guano-hunting Captain, the Messum Crater.

To be honest, I’d been a tad disrespectful of the venerable Welwitschia mirabilis in years gone by. The appeal of this grotty old plant with its tatty long leaves, burnt at the edges, with no salt in its snap beans, simply escaped me. Now I was out to give it another chance, in the world’s largest Welwitschia nursery, this collection of honed volcanic rocks, tyre-biters to the last.

First we lay down in a bejeweled miniature wonderland of lichen. Some were bright orange, others were faded green, patterned in concentric circles. Some resembled small lacy ferns, spread over pebbles like dark and portentous tea leaves. Others rose up politely like petite forests. Then there were the brown crusties, turning the earth strangely crystalline underneath.

While we worked, Jules looked for something appropriate on the radio. To our amazement, out here in the old Messum Crater, we picked up no fewer than eight radio stations. Utterly spoilt for choice, we finally decided on delicious silence.

Hours later we tore ourselves from this spot and drove to where whole families of Welwitschia stood like gnarled old warriors across the plains of rocks. I began a photo session with one female specimen, who was probably no more than a seedling at the time the Greeks were getting snippy over the abduction of Helen of Troy.

My love affair with this specimen was conducted through a camera lens, when I began to notice its finer detail and the bug life it supported. Each plant, its leaves cut to ribbons by centuries of wind, was its own planet. You could photograph a respectable Welwitschia mirabilis from 100 different angles and never come up with the same image. It lives out here on nearly nothing, baffles botanists and counts human lives in dog-years. We are probably nothing to a Welwitschia but a temporary hitch in history, and as ugly as sin, to boot …

Chapter 17: Skeleton Coast

Tobacco Road

A British journalist once said:

“If Hell has a coat of arms, it probably looks like the entrance to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast Park.” And I guess he could be right, if you regard that image of skull and crossbones from a certain angle.

But for others, the Big Jolly Roger on the gate at Ugab River represents the entrance to an almost mythical world of shipwrecks and shaggy dune hyenas. The stuff of the old stories you tell in a seaside shanty at night, while the storms batter at the door, in the midst of hundreds of kilometres of deserted beach assaulted by a furious Atlantic Ocean. It also means a jolly good drink-up in a far-off place. Combine that with the prospect of a fish or two, and you can understand why boys generally like to come here.

We presented our accommodation permit for Terrace Bay and went through the regulation photo session at the grinning gates. On the radio we caught snatches of a BBC report on a Russian hostage crisis and then, mercifully, it faded into the crackle of static. We left the world of current affairs, slapped on some Van Morrison and drove into the mystic, so to speak.

Pretty soon we came to a wreck on the beach. If you ever find yourself in these parts looking for shipwrecks, don’t pass this one by. It’s a respectable wreck by anyone’s standards. The weathered wooden frame still exists, tucked into the sand with its rusting old winch. The timbers arch into the sky like an old hobo’s stubby teeth and, if you go in close, there are great textures to be photographed in the discoloured wood and nails.

Judging by the legends of the Skeleton Coast, you might think you’re going to run into a wreck every few minutes in your drive towards Terrace Bay. Fact is, these vessels disintegrate rapidly out here. The ocean minces them up quite efficiently. Back in the sixties, you would have found a lot more evidence of wrecks. But the true stories remain, faithfully chronicled by Skeleton Coast legends such as Amy Schoeman, who, with her family, has been running world-class flying safaris to the area for longer than anyone else.

As with the sands around Lüderitz, most of the Skeleton Coast is a controlled area, with a lot of it being simply forbidden. And when you call a place a Sperrgebiet, everyone’s going to believe there are diamonds lying all over the show. And so it is with the Skeleton Coast. In centuries gone by some illegal diamond hunters tried approaching the coast from the sea. One guy lashed two small boats together, made a platform of sorts, and managed to get his Baby Austin onto the beach. He was going to scoop up the treasure (imagined or real) and simply drive out of there. But maybe someone had a case of loose lips in a Swakop bar the previous week and “told”, because the dreaded camel cops were lying in wait for him on the other side of a sand dune.

Back in the 1880s, an unidentified German man was said to have loaded provisions onto his four donkeys and walked the 1 600 km from Swakopmund to the Kunene and back. Many have died on the coast, either from failed prospecting enterprises or after being shipwrecked.

In her classic book simply entitled Skeleton Coast, Amy Schoeman records that in 1975 approximately 200 Portuguese refugees from Angola crossed the Kunene in more than 60 vehicles on pontoons. They entered the Skeleton Coast area and spelt the word “help” in stones on a sandy incline.

Luckily for this group, a South African Air Force plane was out searching for a rumoured boatload of war orphans that had gone missing on the way from Angola to Walvis Bay. They found this ragtag group of refugees and an overland rescue was initiated.

Just more than a decade later, a Nigerian stowaway was discovered near the mouth of the Kunene. He (and three others, who were subsequently lost at sea) had been found on board a Pakistani ship and put to sea in a dinghy near the Skeleton Coast.

Perhaps the most famous shipwreck story from the Skeleton Coast is that of the Dunedin Star, which hit a shoal just south of the Kunene mouth on 29 November 1942. The captain ran her aground and sent out distress messages. Four boats of various kinds went to her rescue. More than 100 passengers and crew were on board.

The ship’s lifeboat was used to ferry 42 people onto the beach, but after a couple of trips it broke down, leaving the rest on board. They were the first to be rescued by one of the ships. But no one could land and pick up those on the shore, because the sea had turned too rough. So an overland rescue convoy was sent from Windhoek.

Then followed a series of unfortunate events, the culmination of which was that one of the rescue vessels, a tug called Sir Charles Elliott, ran aground. And then one of the Lockheed Ventura bombers sent to drop supplies to the beached survivors became bogged down in loose sand. Meanwhile the overland convoy had suffered no fewer than 34 flat tyres en route. And since they only had one single hand pump (and no radio) between them, they set no records reaching the survivors either.

All in all, it took a mammoth effort and 26 agonising days before the rescue attempts were completed. These days, with a decent set of charts and the wonder of GPS navigation, only an utter fool of a sailor would end up in the jaws of the Skeleton Coast.

So we made a photo-meal out of our first wreck (the South West Sea, deceased in 1976), had a snack and continued.

Our next stop was at the Huab River Lagoon, where its white-breasted cormorants lined up for photographs along the turquoise waters. Close by was an old oil rig, collapsed in the sand. It was one of the many originally unsightly reminders of mining attempts along the Skeleton Coast. Back then, people were less environmentally aware and when their enterprises crashed they simply vanished, leaving all their industrial crap behind. But now the cormorants had taken over this oil rig for a breeding platform and it looked visually sexy, in a brooding, post-Armageddon industrial sense.

Perhaps this is what South Africa’s Vaal Triangle will turn into in 1 000 years: one big breeding centre for birds, nesting and laying eggs in the rafters of giant corporations who lost their souls polluting the ground and the air for shareholder profits. Don’t get me started. Let’s get back on the Skeleton Coast track. It was time to show off some deeply hidden knowledge to my wife, who is normally the storehouse of facts.

“Ah, the home of the oil beetle,” I said, as we left the rig.

“What?”

“I once read in a Geoffrey Jenkins novel that these little white beetles you find out here – there’s one, look – show you where the oil is.” That’ll give her pause for thought.

“Wrong.”

“What?”

“Mary Seely, a desert ecologist who has far more credibility in these matters than your Mr Jenkins, states specifically that the tenebrionid beetle does not indicate the presence of oil.” I had a brief sulk at that. Then just north of Springbokwasser we both fell under the spell of soft light, dramatic sand dune-shapes and a couple of beers.

The wind was picking up, and I remembered spending a night out here in the Torra Bay area with photographer Les Bush and guide Jan van Wyk ten years before. We’d been veering west from an unnerving stopover in the frontier Himba town of Opuwo and heading for a night’s luxury in Palmwag, near the crossroads of Damaraland and the Kaokoveld. Jan, for one, was looking forward to a night in the bar and a good sleep under the covers without having to put up with our insomnia and noisy 4 am smoke-breaks.

“I want wrecks,” said Les.

“No wrecks here,” smiled Jan. “For that, we have to drive to the coast, to Torra Bay.”

“Well, then, let’s do it.”

Jan protested. There would be nowhere for us to sleep. The weather was foul. There was an acute shortage of beer. And so on. I threw my lot in with Les and our guide was defeated. He drove us across the mountain range towards the Skeleton Coast. To make matters worse, I had found a ZZ Top tape in the glove compartment and Jan (a self-confessed musical no-go zone) was now exposed to Texas rock at top volume. We fed him our share of the beers to keep him calm.

We found a wreck, photographed it and drove to Torra Bay, where we pitched camp right next to an ablution block on the beach, which was understandably deserted on account of the foul weather on the way. No matter. Les and I climbed into our canvas bedrolls, sheltered by the Land Rover. Jan preferred to set up his bedroom on top of the vehicle, in the teeth of a vicious wind that seemed to blow all the way from the taverns of Cape Town.

“There’s space with us, Jan. Come down, Jan.”

“No thanks, boys. You’re a couple of chattering monkeys in the morning. I’ll take my chances up here.” It took a few days for Jan to forgive us.

Now, ten years on, Jules and I arrived at the outskirts of Terrace Bay. We were welcomed by more heavy machinery, gaunt black metal ghosts silhouetted in the grey mist. And a very large, weather-beaten sign bearing the Jolly Roger. It was like the Bates Motel for fishermen.

“I can’t believe there’s accommodation here,” said Jules, a spoonful of disappointment and a cup of panic in her voice. The drive had been rather like a moon landing. And when you’re suddenly on the moon, it’s nice to know there’s catering. Up here in Terrace Bay, the prospect of a bed and a warm meal suddenly vanished.

“Look what it says here in the guidebook,” I pointed out, helpful as always. “The President and his crew like to come out here for their holidays. In all of glorious Namibia, this is the place where Sam Nujoma likes to spend his spare time the most. If it’s good for him, it will surely be good for us.”

“Me, I don’t know so much,” she said, eyeing the prefab buildings and the sad little children’s playground in the gloom, where a murder of crows sat hunched on the hobby horse.

“That’s because you’re a girl,” I said, playing my grump card. “This is far-out. This is romantic. This is the Skeleton Coast.”

“This is The Last Resort,” she countered.

I entered a cavernous reception area and interrupted two guys playing pool by asking if we could check in. It was like finding the last two survivors on Earth after a nuclear strike and having them ignore you. Unless you were the President of Namibia or his crew, you didn’t seem to have much clout with the staff at Terrace Bay. Someone showed himself at a desk and coldly gave us the key to Prefab Hut Number 12. What was I gonna do: walk out in a huff and go sleep in the dunes?

While I was signing in, Jules read the Visitors Book. She found some rave reviews about the home cooking and a heart-warming entry by a man from Nelspruit, South Africa.

“I came all the way up here with my dad. He taught me how to fish using red bait and sardines. We didn’t catch anything, but we had a wonderful time.”

Prefab Hut Number 12, when we finally opened the door, had a criminally stained carpet and an inescapable fug of warm, stale urine. It did my cause no good. I was just preparing to rave to Jules about how Terrace Bay resembled the Isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, where George Orwell wrote 1984, when she turned and ran out gagging.

I didn’t relish disturbing the pool players at Reception, so I thought we might use our stash of industrial smoking weed called Skaaplek as a stink-repellent. It worked like a charm, and within the hour Prefab Hut Number 12 could have passed for a little tobacconist shop. My wife was still not a happy chap, however. The intensely grey, unfriendly mood of the place had depressed her.

But not as much as the two Germans who arrived shortly after us. Even though there were more than 20 prefab huts available, the pool players at Reception gave the German couple the room right next to ours. We could hear them whispering in utter shock as they opened their front door and encountered a similar pissy reek. These two, however, had no Skaaplek tobacco to save their day. They went out to their hired car and just sat. I could see the girl’s shoulder heaving as she cried. Terrace Bay is a tough room to play.

Suppertime. We walked up to the restaurant past the crows and had a few Tafel Lagers at the bar, watching a cricket game on TV with the staff. Then a guy in a nightwatchman’s coat and a balaclava announced that supper was ready. That’s where we met the German couple, over the kind of supper you just want to rush through and forget. Our new friends could not wait to leave this place in the morning.

“You’re staying for two nights?” the girl asked in amazement. “I feel sorry for you.”

But the next day we got the hang of the place. Some of the staff seemed to warm to us, the room smelled dandy and the coastal stormlight shone through the clouds. Terrace Bay is good for fishermen, outlaws from suburbia and those who fancy a brightly coloured pebble beach that roars and shivers with each incoming wave.

The Germans moved out and two fishermen took their room right next to us. We bitched at Reception. I said we were writers wanting space to finish our book. They raised an eyebrow as if to say So what? I had to almost arm-wrestle the guy at Reception for the key to far-off Prefab Hut Number 18 but I eventually succeeded.

Jules worked on her road journal and a half-jack of Old Brown Sherry while I drank some skanky brandy I’d bought at the Terrace Bay shop. Soon, with the weather closing in, the room warm and rosy booze-glows on our faces, we went Into Retreat. And woke up the next day, in the words of Africa explorer Mungo Park, “attacked by a smart fever”. But it felt entirely appropriate to be leaving the Skeleton Coast feeling like a bit of a wreck. We took our Skaaplek and ran away in the general direction of Mother Earth …

Chapter 18: Kaokoveld

Frontier Town

At the Palmwag disease control gate, two shifty sorts approached and began a rather lengthy visual inspection of the contents of our bakkie. They weren’t in uniform, but they behaved like off-duty cops, so I just sat back and smiled at them. One fellow wore aviator reflector specs. I was itching to rip them off and look him square in the eyes. Where the hell was the gate guard? He seemed to hang back, taking more than a very long time to write the vehicle registration number in his Visitors Book. Jules had to calm me down. I kept smiling, but there wasn’t much joy on those tight little lips of mine. It had been a watchful, tiring drive from the Skeleton Coast and there was still an awful lot of gravel travel ahead of us that day.

“Where are you going?” Mr Reflectors wanted to know, in a brusque manner. I gestured towards the north.

“I want a lift.” The bakkie was packed to the gills, but even if it were empty I would have demurred. I come from Johannesburg, goddammit. Have some respect. I know my gangsters.

“On the other hand,” said the ever-reasonable Jules, “maybe he’s just not much of a people person.”

“I can relate to that,” I replied. Finally we were allowed through.

At the filling station a few hundred metres further on, there was a two-vehicle convoy of Cape Town 4x4s. One of the drivers came over and warned us to keep our windows closed.

“We just saw a guy reach in and grab stuff while we were filling up with diesel,” he said. I had to multi-task right there: I had to deal with sharing road stories with the Capetonians, topping up with fuel, keeping an eye out for petty pilferers and gazing in wonder at three magnificent camels chewing grass not 50 metres away. These camels were international celebrities, we would discover later.

We paid the attendant and drove on into an eternity of mopane forests to Fort Sesfontein lurking in the Hoanib Valley. This is the legendary place of the “six springs” that has nurtured locals and travellers for centuries. This is where the colonial Germans built a fort (surprise, surprise).

Fort Sesfontein was abandoned by the time World War I came around and has now been renovated into a very attractive lodge. We weren’t staying over, but that didn’t stop us from having a drink and a discussion on animal husbandry with the helpful barman.

“And it’s very difficult to graze cattle in this drought,” he said, stirring Jules’s G&T. “The goats, of course, are easy. They’ll eat anything, even kitchen peelings.” A brief but enthralling demonstration on how to remove plastic bags from a goat’s stomach ensued. I had another Tafel Lager. The lodge guests were all out looking for desert-adapted elephant, and I briefly wished we could stay and join them. But the call of the Himba was too strong to resist.

We were prepared for this experience. I had been here before on a trip with Jan van Wyk and somewhere up near Opuwo we stopped off briefly to look at a Himba village. A baby’s burns took precedence over a cultural visit, however. The little girl had fallen into a pot of hot porridge the day before and her mother was distraught. So Jan hauled out the first aid box and did what he could do. And that’s all I remembered about the Himba.

This time, back in Swakopmund, we’d bought conch shells and necklaces for the women and the ubiquitous bag of Skaaplek tobacco for the men. I was reluctant to let go of the tobacco (a) because of the smoker’s ever-present fear of running out of smokeables in a far-off place and (b) because the Skaaplek made the bakkie smell so fine. It was like driving around in a pleasant ashtray, if such things can exist. Having since quit the evil weed, I can’t believe I ever had such fond feelings for Skaaplek. But there you go …

Some photographers go to extraordinary lengths to get ready for their Himba shoot. We’d just brought the gifts, fully charged digital cameras and the hope that our guide would expose us to a worthwhile experience. I must admit to suffering from cultural cringe when it comes to playing tourist or photographer with First People or exotic tribes.

I was once in Camp Coorong, South Australia, where I gained an insight into the Ngarrindjeri tribe of Aboriginals. Camp Coorong was visited by more than 3 000 Australian schoolchildren every year, most of them white.

“The white kids who come here are shocked to learn what their ancestors did to our ancestors,” said Tom Trevorrow, a part-Cornish, mostly-Ngarrindjeri man at the camp. “Only in the past 20 years has Aboriginal history been taught in schools around the country. Up until 1992, Aboriginals were part of Terra Nullius, either plants or animals, definitely not humans.

“We no longer want to be called The Walkabout People.”

Another time, Jules and I visited members of the !Xun and Khwe tribes living out at Schmidtsdrift near Kimberley, in a dust-blown tent town a year before they were moved to a farm called Platfontein nearer the city. These families originated from northeast Namibia and across the Kunene in Angola. They’d all had ties of sorts with the South African Defence Force during the war years from the early 1970s to 1990, when they were shipped south for fear of Swapo reprisals after the country’s independence.

From 1990 until the early 2000s, the former soldiers and their families lived the lives of shadow people, lost between two cultures. Depression, alcohol abuse, deadly winters under canvas, broiling summers, isolation, separation from civil society – these were the details of their “bitter handshake” from apartheid South Africa.

But we found something to celebrate in the fields of sorrow out at Schmidtsdrift. The artists in this community had been carefully encouraged to produce works that went far beyond copies of old Bushman paintings. They were turning out San art with modern-day influences in a dreamtime mix of elephants, eland, men with briefcases, armoured cars, all on textiles, clay, oils and linocuts. Was it ultimately a success? Only time, as they say, will tell. Did they still want to be called The Bow & Arrow People? Some did, others did not.

And that’s my point. Who wants to wear a loincloth and hang about a cultural village and take the tourist dollar? Who doesn’t? And on the other hand, who wants to forsake the so-called old ways and go on a Nike-takkie shopping spree? Maybe buy that colour TV? The consumer force of the West is strong in this world.

I remember going deep into the jungles of Kalimantan, Indonesia, to where the Dayak head-hunters used to lurk, and coming across a riverside community at 3 am, when everyone should have been asleep and dreaming about the next head-lopping. Instead, I found a 24-hour logging camp that was flogging its timber to the Japanese market for a pittance and watching Dallas re-runs on satellite TV. And all the young folk I met there had plans to leave the bush and live in the city – any city, under any conditions. As long as they could wear the right labels.

So what would we encounter here? Well, for a start, it didn’t look too marvellous on the drive from Sesfontein to the Himba headquarters of Opuwo.

“It’s a bit of a cultural strip-mall,” commented Jules, adding, “No pun intended.”

She had me there for a while, until I saw the long-limbed, athletically naked young Himba girls twirling around dangerously close to the road, their clay braids swaying and their braceletted arms beckoning for us to stop. We were not going to just fall into a Himba village, hand out breakfast bars and take pictures. We were going to pay for a proper, guided experience. But I must admit, some of the girls looked good enough to eat with a camera. I kept my eyes on the road, right up to the outskirts of Opuwo.

Now there’s a frontier town for you. Quite correctly called Opuwo, which means “The End” in OvaHimba. Old memories conjured up Jim Morrison and The Doors singing that very song as we drove into a place twice as exotic as the inter-galactic alien bar scene from Star Wars. It was a heady mix of dark looks, OvaHimba women sitting in ochred splendour in the shade of the bottle shops, Portuguese traders from up north, unshaven men of mystery and the occasional busload of nervous overland tourists. It was a rough and ready settlement where most folk just juiced up and moved on. I half-expected to see Jabba the Hutt come waltzing down the main road of Opuwo. Or a poor man’s Humphrey Bogart lounging at a roadside bar.

We were booked into a tented camp outside town. It was set alongside a dry riverbed and covered in sand.

“Welcome to the dirtiest, dustiest topless bar in the world,” said Bob, someone we met at the camp. Bob had to be protected from himself, and Bob was not his real name. But who cared, out here in Opuwo?

“So you’re journalists, hey? Well, let me tell you something. I grew up with the desert elephants of Damaraland. In fact, I’m an honorary Himba. Getaway magazine once paid me N$10 000 to go up and touch one of the elephants for a cover photograph. I said I’m just going to walk out there, touch them and turn around and come back, but only once that ten grand is in my bank account. And you’d better be ready with your cameras, I told them. A copy of the magazine? I’ve just run out of them.

“I’m dyslexic, but I’ve written three books on my life so far, working on the fourth. You want to drive up to Epupa Falls? Well, for people like you I’d say it’s about a five-hour drive. Of course, I used to be a rally driver, so I would personally only take two hours to get up there.

“I’m also a five-star chef and a musician. You’ve heard of Sun City? Well, I performed there with Michael Jackson and Tina Turner.”

I was, by now, exhausted from the drive. So I escaped from Bob and went off to unpack the bakkie. A year later, Jules would telephone the people at Getaway and they’d deny any knowledge of having paid anyone a cent to go out and put his hand on a desert-adapted elephant anywhere in the world. At any time.

But hey, this was Opuwo. Take it all with a pinch of salt. Or sand. You can be what you like up here. And believe me, the longer you stay in Opuwo, the more you like it. We later spent a night in a lodge in the centre of town, surrounded by six thumping discos that hammered on until the early hours. But we didn’t care. This was Opuwo, where they have a special way of doing things. Looking back on our notes, I was thrilled to remember Bob and his very weird ways. It added spice to the story.

One afternoon we met Matirepo Tjiraso (Marty), a pleasant Himba man who would be our guide to a selected village. He drove us south through Opuwo in his minibus.

“This town gives me a headache,” he said. “I love going home to the kraal. There, it’s peaceful. I need nothing. If I need meat, I slaughter a goat. If I need milk, there are cows. In town, you need to pay money for everything, and you struggle to pay it. I watch the people in the streets of Opuwo, they just walk up and then they walk down again. In the country, there is always something that must be done.”

Marty warned us that we would probably not see Himba men in the village. The drought had forced them to take the village cattle deep into the mountains for grazing.

We arrived at a village called Oatotati, which means “area with many small mopane” in Himba.

It was hairdressing time. Women sat in the shade working on one another’s braids. The beauty of a Himba cultural experience, I thought, was that you see the people in their natural state. They don’t suddenly run behind a hut and swop their jeans and running shoes for loincloths just to please a tourist. In that way, they share a lot with the Masai from Tanzania-Kenya.

The headman was in the hills and his wives were off at a funeral so the village granny was in charge. She was a feisty soul, naked to the waist and covered in ochre.

“Morro,” we greeted the granny and the girls, as we had been instructed to do. We were introduced and I was allowed to photograph them.

We learnt about the Himba habits, their holy fire system, the naming of children, how many cattle had to be killed at a headman’s funeral, how much a dowry amounted to, the significance of their jewellery, how they concocted the butterfat ochre for their bodies and the many medicinal uses of the mopane leaf. And then the girls started to ask us questions.

Were Jules and I married? Did we have children? Why not? Where did we come from? How many days would it take to walk there? Thank God I could hide behind my cameras, because some of those questions were tough.

A baby bawled from inside the kitchen area. The headman’s niece sprang up like a gazelle and retrieved a small boy. She clamped him to her coppered breast and he subsided into contented silence.

Two pregnant women emerged from a hut and posed for us after putting on their special leather skirts. They were expecting babies “when the rains come”. The statuesque woman who had been plaiting the headman’s daughter’s hair gathered up her baby in a beautiful kaross and walked across a clearing with him in graceful, light strides.

In the distance, the senior wives were returning from the funeral in another village. We offered our gifts to one of them. She graciously accepted, peeping inside the packet and nodding with satisfaction before handing it to the granny. She wished us a safe trip. We wished them “good rains”. Marty brought out a crate of mealie meal, sugar, coffee and tea. The visit was over.

That night, at a barbecue, we spent a few hours with Namibian guides Uwe Mueseler and his son Larrigan, from Tsumeb. The conversation drifted many ways, from weird Namibian-English (Namlish) to fiercely defended views on Land Rovers vs Toyotas and the best camping spots in the north. We then went back to our tent and slept under the curled tail of Scorpio and the Clouds of Magellan, just up the road from the Milky Way …

Chapter 19: Khorixas–Kamanjab

Château Huab

When you’re travelling through Namibia, it pays to have a little botany under your belt. Some basic knowledge of the euphorbia tree would have saved the lives of 28 overland travellers many years ago, when they stopped off near the village of Uis for a break from their bus trip and a barbecue. They gathered wood from a euphorbia and made a fire. They tossed a sheep on the coals and then ate it. No one made it to second helpings.

In August 2000, Jules and I stood at the rough little burial ground just outside Uis, looking at the row of graves. There were no plaques or headstones. I’d heard the story some time ago from a Namibian. The travellers had ingested what the Bushmen used to call “wolf’s milk”, and just about the only animals equipped to safely chew on a euphorbia are black rhino and kudu.

We were en route to an old, abused farm north of Khorixas that had been given a new lease on life. There was a liquid supply crisis in the car, however. So we pulled over at the Houmoed General Dealer. A party of six German motorcyclists lay sprawled in the shade of the stoep in their heavy leathers (pay me what you like, you’d never get me to wear leather trousers travelling through Namibia), drinking lukewarm beer and making very small talk. With their shiny BMW bikes, their shades and their outfits, the group of young men and women appeared to be assembled for a rather macho fashion shoot. I looked around for the photographer, his assistants, the lights, the makeup girl and the catering truck. No. Just the models. How strange. Not even a cocaine dealer in sight.

We, on the other hand, were more sensibly attired in Hawaiian shirts, floppy hats and clamdiggers. We looked like such nebbish tourists that, even though we smiled and said hello in passing, not one of the Houmoed fashionistas even turned a head in our direction. We hastily purchased beer for me and bottled water for Jules and ran away.

Suzi van de Reep of Huab Lodge welcomed us like old friends. We’d come bearing love, hugs and greetings from lots of tourist-trade folk back in South Africa. The Van de Reeps, both Suzi and her husband Jan, might live in isolation up here, but they’re very well known and liked all over southern Africa.

Shows what a sense of humour, a smile and good e-mail habits can do for your social life.

While I was unpacking the gear, my wife started coming undone.

“Goodness,” she said. “I can feel my mind loosening up.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Suzi, on the other hand, did.

“That often happens to people when they arrive here. I think it’s got something to do with the ancient rocks in the river. They’re nearly two billion years old.”

The Huab Complex is one of the oldest geological formations on earth. The more venerable bits of Huab are made of gneiss, a rock that has basically been to Hell and back in terms of pressure and high temperature. The Huab Gneiss was part of the lowest bedrock of the African continent.

A fault in the formation allowed a river system to be formed and the slightly younger granite (200 million years its junior) to penetrate those faults. And when Gondwana started moving about oh, let’s say, 115 million years ago, the area around Huab was smothered under an enormous blanket of lava.

The Huab, like the other river courses of Namibia, is a very old gentleman of a river. Even after the lava flattened most things around here, it was still able to cut its course through the volcanic basalt. And then, about 65 million years ago, it started developing large meandering loops, cutting away into the mountain slopes of its banks. Up until about 10 000 years ago, the area around Huab was lush. Today, it’s another story.

Before 1992, the desert-adapted elephants wandering between the Namib and Damaraland were not animals to envy. They were hunted and chased and hounded out by both the commercial farmers and the local communities. Only in the relative security of the Skeleton Coast Park were they safe. The desert-adapted elephants were not the only wildlife in the area, but they became the local icons.

They wandered through farms that had been devastated by their owners. There were almost no animal stocks and the land was drastically eroded and not ideal for farming livestock or crops in the first place.

Now if only those hardened old hunter-crusty former farmers had twigged onto the real gold of farming – tourism – their lot in life would have been much richer.

In 1992 a bunch of these farms were amalgamated into the Huab Private Reserve. The river occasionally formed pools along its course and attracted game. Once hunting was banned on the purchased farms, the word went out that this was a safe zone and the animals slowly started wandering back.

The gravel travel had bruised Jules’s kidneys and Suzi politely asked if she could play mother and sort her out. After some reviving minerals and a lot of the delicious river water, my wife began to spark up.

“And you should also try out the hot springs,” said Suzi. Which we would, later, with less-than-romantic results for me.

We met Jan van de Reep at supper. That week, he was celebrating his thirty-fourth year in Africa. The lean, affable Jan had arrived in South Africa with just over 100 Dutch guilders, which he exchanged for R25. He was Dutch and working for a flower company just outside Jo’burg, so you’d think he’d be supremely happy.

“I wasn’t. This was not the real Africa I had come to see.”

So he ended up in the old South West Africa, worked on the mines and in the restaurants of Tsumeb and became involved in the flying safari business. He met Kenyan-born Suzi in 1981, sparks flew, lightning struck and he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

“And then we found this place,” she said.

“This place” turned out to be a piece of blasted wasteland called Monte Carlo. The previous owner had overgrazed it to the point where you’d have to look very hard to spot a blade of grass. He, his family and their mates shot everything that moved on the farm.

“We’re still finding tiny little oryx skulls lying around, with bullet holes in them,” said Jan. “Their horns, which start growing from birth, were the size of a fingernail.”

And when they met the farmer to discuss the purchase, he proudly boasted to them of the false floor he had fitted into his vehicle. It was used to smuggle the tusks of poached elephants to Cape Town.

“The police suspected him but they could never make a case,” said Jan. “He had a great support system around here, and people would warn him whenever the police were in the area.”

Jan and Suzi, however, had put those times behind them and were re-branding Monte Carlo into Huab Lodge. A slew of industry awards were followed by the establishment of a regular clientele, mainly from Europe. By day, it might be the open spaces and fresh air that the guests love, but by night it’s the Van de Reeps who have them in thrall.

At the table, Jan passed us the water.

“Have some Château de Pomp,” he said.

Then he rose and did the wine introduction. The Van de Reeps had made a hobby out of shopping for interesting Cape wines, mainly from the smaller, more specialised estates. Jan would present the wine and whatever legends he might have uncovered about its origin. And when he wanted to give you a refill, he’d say:

“May I take some air out of your glass?”

An elephant in Damaraland had recently killed an American tourist.

“And have tourist numbers dropped?” the old gent from Britain wanted to know.

“You’d think so,” said Suzi, “but actually, quite the opposite.” And this is a phenomenon that you find almost everywhere in Africa. People flock to sites where tourists have been turned into a snack by predators.

As we were mulling this over, a “Woolly Bum Huab Beetle” of no mean proportions dived straight into my merlot.

“It’s a swimmer,” said Jan.

Before dawn the next morning, after admiring Saturn, Jupiter and the moon through the lodge telescope, we went for a quiet, slow walk with Jan and the two old folks from Britain. I was sure the husband was the ancient worthy who had flapped past me back at the Sesriem filling station some time back. His wife was relatively alert, but he kept tottering into aardvark holes. The potential for disaster was enormous. I should, however, have been paying more heed to my own situation.

Huab Lodge is blessed with natural hot springs that rise from fissures in the rock going down 6 km. Fabulous for arthritis and such. Jan took us to Kanonkop, where the German soldiers once placed a cannon to ward off the Swartbooi Hottentots of Fransfontein, who were allegedly fond of other men’s cattle.

He showed us the Hoodia, and we discussed its weight-reducing powers.

“We had a neighbour in Damaraland, a Rhenish pastor, who loved to eat Hoodia sliced like a cucumber, dipped in vinegar and sugar,” said Jan.

We came upon another spring. Jan showed us where the trees had been cut down. “They did that so that they could take clear pot shots at the animals coming down to drink.”

The lead singer of the desert-adapted elephant band in these parts was a fellow called Doetab. Within hours of settling in at Huab Lodge, guests would be briefed on Doetab. We were very keen to see Doetab or a reasonable facsimile of Doetab – in fact, any elephant with dust on its back would do us just fine. We’d heard a lot about these huge, stately beasts that perform miracles of survival between here and the coast in their daily travels.

But, for the moment, we were more than happy with a family of double-banded sandgrouse, the dad creating a running diversion while the two kids lay prone in the twisted grass, the clear markings looking as if they had been embroidered into place.

We drove further, past a clan of baboons in a tree.

“Branch managers,” noted Jan.

Let’s say you’re a birder. Well, this is where you will spot the Damara rock runner, Carp’s black tit, Hartlaub’s francolin, Rüppell’s parrot, the Herero chat, the violet woodhoepoe and, believe it or not, the bare-cheeked babbler. These names crack me up. But then, I’m not a birder.

“What actually peeves me more than the shooting of elephant,” said Jan van de Reep as we continued, “is that they shot the aardwolf out. The farmers actually thought the aardwolf ate their sheep. They also shot the aardvark out because they dig holes in the ground and a hole can break a vehicle’s axle.

“You see all the termites around here? They’ve started eating the live grasses. Now your average aardwolf can polish off 200 000 termites in a night – that’s 750 g of pure protein. And seeing as how termites eat up more than 80% of your vegetation, I’d say it was a pretty good idea to keep an aardwolf or two around, wouldn’t you?”

At supper, we heard how tourists sometimes take a TV documentary too literally. You shouldn’t. There is so much edgy wildlife TV these days that one can actually say they’re a degree away from snuff movies. Photographers competing for that ultimate close-up, others taunting the poor animals while others creep about whispering confidentially in your viewer-ear while looking up a fruit bat’s nose; it’s all too much, really. And then people come out to Africa and expect to get within a metre of a slavering beast, just like on the telly.

“We had a Japanese guest once who’d seen a video of a desert-adapted elephant sliding down a sand dune on his bum,” said Jan. “The filmmaker, who had lived out there for 15 years, had only seen it once. But when the tourist could not experience this immediately, she was absolutely inconsolable. Couldn’t stop crying.”

We were leaving the next day, but not before trying out the hot springs. We dropped into the steaming waters and lay about like happy frogs for a while. The trouble began when I got out and made for the cold pond. I overbalanced on some stray algae and started doing a frenzied balance-cha-cha until finally falling back into the hot water. Leaving a toe snagged in between some slats, all cut up and bruised.

I hobbled back with the support of Jules and tried to get a rather preoccupied Suzi to play mother again. This time, however, her attention was riveted by happenings in the curio shop. Jan held aloft a long PVC pipe and was trying to lure a black-necked spitting cobra into it. Apparently the cobra had slid in for a quick browse and now needed to be somewhere else before a paying tourist saw it.

“Come with us and take some photographs of the release,” urged Jan, once he’d “piped” the cobra and then decanted him into a box.

“I don’t really do good snake,” I said, backing off.

Eventually, I went along and took some photos, but at a considerable distance. The snake just seemed to pour itself out of its confining box and sped off towards some hillside rocks. It was clearly furious and on a mission to kill a dassie or two in red-hot revenge.

PS: We never saw Doetab, but kept in e-mail contact with Suzi van de Reep. On 28 September 2000, she wrote:

“On Monday Doetab nearly got walked into by the girls coming to work. They did not recognise him because one of his tusks had broken off short. I phoned the vet and we went together to look for him. We drove slowly, with the vet on the roof wrapped in a bright blanket, Masai-style. Then we spotted Doetab’s great back just above a thick stand of salvador bush.”

They collared the elephant, took blood samples, patched up some minor wounds, gave him some antibiotics, and within minutes he was up and striding off through the salvador once more.

I wonder if Jan calls his vet “The Huab Doctor” …

Chapter 20: Opuwo – Khorixas

Damara & Damara

The thumping discothèques of Opuwo were just winding down and I’ll swear to this day that the morning star winked at us as we left town in a bit of a hurry. And in case you were concerned about the nature of our early departure from this frontier of Himba extremes, we had paid our extras bill at the Ohakane Lodge the night before and were cleared for take-off, so to speak.

“Watch out!” yelled Jules as I nearly steered the bakkie into a brace of drunken nightclubbers doing an unsteady soft-shoe lurch into the road. They swore at us and so we thought we’d just drive south and go look for some desert-adapted elephants.

We’ve all seen footage of these legends loping across vast swathes of sand dune in the soft light of a late afternoon. This is the power of the media to raise expectations. And if I hadn’t spoken to various experts along the way on this trip, I might also have been hoping for such a poignant sighting.

“The road is long, with many a winding turn,” and then the baby elly links his trunklet up to the tail of his mom, his mom links up with Aunty in front of her and so on, into a computer-generated sunset complete with endless elephants and an infinite number of dunes designed in the shape of Jennifer Lopez’s bum, with a platoon of head-standing beetles looking on in awe. That kind of visual. Or, perhaps, the sight of an elephant sand-boarding down a dune on his ass.

(Author’s aside: We South Africans are so funny about the elephants of the Kaokoveld. When we were Dorslanders up here in the late Victorian era, we hunted them remorselessly. And when we were soldiers up here in the late apartheid era, we shot them from helicopters. Now we want to shoot them with our cameras. Here’s a newsflash. The few that remain want very little to do with us.)

But we were a long way from a decent desert and, quite frankly, any elephant worth his salt would venture into such dryness only as a last resort.

Normally, I was told, they like to hang out in a riverbed, chewing on the noble Ana tree. If you’re going to find any water in this very dry region, you’d do best looking in the vicinity of a once-flowing river. Elephants are also expert at excavating; I’ve seen them do just that in the dry Shingwedzi River in the northern Kruger National Park back in South Africa. That’s why the famous Doetab hangs about the Huab. Think about it. Why would he choose the deep desert instead?

“OK, so I’ll settle for any dune elephant we can find,” I said to Jules as we took the Sesfontein road.

“That’s desert-adapted elephant,” she said. “Listen to me: they don’t love a dune.”

Life is a weird old thing. You go out on a mission for X and Destiny usually dishes you up a Y. The trick, I suppose, is to enjoy Y until X sneaks up on you. Or something like that. Destiny-adapted humans.

And so, when we came across a lovely Monteiro’s hornbill deep in the baobab boughs just before Joubert’s Pass, I was engrossed. And when two Damara dik-diks, little horned whippets, tussled playfully right in front of us on the road and then dived into thick bush and gazed back with Bambi eyes, it was all good. Then three kudu females lunged up a hill as we passed, pausing to look at us from a lofty spot, their huge ears pricked forward and pink against the rising sun.

But, on approaching Sesfontein, we encountered some fresh elephant dung on the road and that really set my motor revving. We drove slowly right up to the old fort and had an outrageously early lager with our new friend at the bar. He told us that a whole cluster of jumbo had passed sometime in the night. The lodge clients were out searching for them. Ah, maybe we would find our elephants to the south.

Down at the disease control gate near Palmwag, the camels stared at us, slowly grinding something sideways in their jaws. And so did the two shifty sorts we’d met coming in. I noticed that the other guy was wearing the aviator shades today. The one with eyes came up to me.

“Where are you going?”

I pointed somewhere south.

Then today’s Mr Shades approached.

“Well, I need a lift there.”

Once again, I had to say no. I was looking for desert-adapted elephants and I had no desire for a nervous journey. We were not hijacking-adapted.

“The Lonely Planet guide calls such types ‘an obnoxious gang of ne’er-do-wells’,” said Jules.

“To me, they’ll always be shifty sorts,” I replied, as we drove into Damaraland proper.

“Most of your mates are shifty sorts,” said my wife, who actually loves them all to tiny shreds.

“No, you’re wrong. They’re an obnoxious gang of ne’er-do-wells,” I replied. “But they’re my ne’er-do-wells. And, actually, some of them do quite well at times.”

And so it was in this mood of light marital banter that we came across evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit of the Damara. History indicates that the Damara people were chased about the country a lot by their more organised Nama and Herero counterparts. So they made the mountains and the semi-desert dry lands their home, learning to survive where few others would want to.

On the road south, the vegetation is gradually stripped down to sage-green euphorbia bushes and stones. You can pull over and pick up crystals, quartz and agates from the roadside that would amaze and delight anyone back home. In fact, you could just check those tyres of yours and take out whatever got caught in the rubber treads, and you’d probably have enough for a stone garden in the courtyard. I think the Damara must be the finest stone salesmen in the world.

For here you will encounter an unending array of signs that offer Namibian Stones for Sale. That’s like selling handfuls of sand in Sossusvlei. And if you stop at any of these stalls, people from the nearest village will come running, their faces wreathed in smiles. And you won’t be able to resist buying a klippie or three. They’ll tell you they’ve got their herdboys on the case all day, looking out for something special in the veld as they pass.

But that’s not the whole story of the stone business in Damaraland. These stones are also great tyre shredders, and as a result you’ll find many informal repair sheds on the road to Khorixas. Some sell beer as well. Not the coldest you’ll ever drink, but who cares? They’re patching up your tyres for a pittance, you’ve got a piece of shade and lots of time. As my friend Jan van de Reep from Huab Lodge would say:

“Why hurry? The snail and the racehorse celebrate Christmas on the same day.”

The official entrance to Damaraland, however, happens as you crest a rise and look down at a landscape that Ridley Scott would instantly admire and cast in his next epic badlands movie. At an abandoned tourism reception centre there was an old tyre on the side of the road painted as a Welcome sign.

The geology of the land became stranger and stranger as we approached a village called Vrede and saw a light-khaki sand formation twisted and eroded by the wind into the shape of the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter films.

We came to a giant meerkat (I think he was made of glass fibre) standing under a lodge sign. He looked like a tall man in a meerkat suit furtively looking over his shoulder as he peed into the dirt.

On the way out to the famous Twyfelfontein etchings, we saw a herd of springbok maybe 50-strong, the largest herd we’d seen, literally flying across the road in huge bounds. Once on the other side, they calmed down and busied themselves with scratching their ears, gazing vacantly out into the distance, nibbling grass and biting at the itchy parts of their shoulders. Once, there would have been vast herds up here, when the land was lush and the Bushman was boss.

There’s a spring on the eastern slope of the Twyfelfontein Valley, above which is a large terrace. Back in time, perhaps 10 000 years ago, a Bushman hunter would have gazed out over the plains from this terrace. He would have been able to see his prey from a long distance and, with his awesome array of talents and methods, it would not be long before the entire clan would sit down to the kind of slap-up meal any hunter-gatherer would crave.

They would have had superb shelter up here and no end of water supply and, if threatened, they might well have been able to defend the heights. So, once a man had had his fill, satisfied his wife and played with the kids, what was he to do with his time? Talk about stuff with his mates? Perhaps get into some serious wall painting, illustrate the story of hunts? Or do some rock etching, for a more permanent impression of the day’s events?

This Twyfelfontein spot was, like the Cederberg down south in the Western Cape, a great leisure option for Man of Old. This is probably one of those special African places where a man had the high ground, no end of food and water and time to spare for art. As we all know by now, there was no satellite TV back then. Oprah, the eight o’clock news, Law & Order and Saturday sport were far off. So they etched. And etched some more.

And I’m not sure what they did to escape reality in those days, but, looking at some of the etchings up there, I’d say there was a fair amount of hallucinogenics to be had.

Our guide was Dion So-/oabeb, a tall, good-looking young man with a degree in Rock Art Studies from what was then the Cape Technikon. We climbed up the mountain and saw our first set of etchings, extraordinarily beautiful on the tumbled Etjo sandstone.

They showed a variety of animals acutely observed and immediately recognisable: a hyena with humped shoulders, rhinos with long horns, kudu, lion, hippos and springbok. There was even an elephant.

Ten years previously, Les Bush and I had been clambering over these very rocks, chatting to our guide, whose life’s ambition was to move to Jo’burg and join the jobless throng. A call from below directed us to a family of desert-adapted elephants wandering off in the distance. It had been a brief, tantalising sighting but it had sustained me for a decade. I was secretly hoping they’d be back, so I kept looking wistfully down the valley.

But, as the saying goes: a watched elephant never boils into view.

At a certain rock the etchings, at least 6 000 years old, exaggerated the look of an animal: a giraffe’s chest might bulge out, a lion’s tail might be far longer than normal, the horns of a rhino might be abnormally stretched. This, said Dion, was because these animals had a spiritual significance.

“This is how they were seen in a trance.”

The dancing shaman would have put himself into a trance state (which entailed bleeding from the nose, sweating and perhaps frothing at the mouth – the same symptoms they would have observed from a dying eland) and would have entered a pantheon of wild animal visions. Each beast had a particular significance. Giraffes with their elongated necks would bring rain. Rhinos would guide energy through their horns. The elephant signified peace. A lion, with its sharp claws, was invoked to heal the sick.

On other rocks we found outlines of seals and a penguin, even the head of a cobra. There were also etchings showing circles with pecked-out dots in the middle. These, we were told, were focus circles, taking the shaman into the form of the required animal.

“I met a traditional healer in the Drakensberg,” said Dion. “As part of his training, he stayed underwater for five days. While I was there, he brought rain. And then he chased it away.”

I would have given anything to have once been part of such an ancient Bushman evening. In fact, I got far more out of Twyfelfontein this time round.

I was just moaning a little about not having seen a desert-adapted elephant on this trip.

“There they are!” Jules yelled. And there they indeed were, a number of them, facing us in the late afternoon. And the fact that they were built of clay and dung and stood immobile and life-sized outside a village craft shop made the moment even more special.

But not as special as what came next, when we saw a sign to the Petrified Forest and swerved in, to be met in the car park by one Barnabas, wiping sweat from his brow after a hectic bicycle race across the veld to reach us.

“Come in, friends! That will be N$10 each. Thank you. For you today, I have lovely petrified trees and even a couple of Welwitschias.”

We walked up a small hill and found a petrified sapling.

“What did you do to the forest?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing. It was always like this.” We’d been royally conned by young Barnabas, but in the sweetest possible way. And when he tried to sell us some of his Damara stone collection, how could we refuse? We gave him fruit, a few more dollars and then saw his eyes light up like Halloween at the sight of my Skaaplek, that bag of fabulous cab-odourising industrial tobacco lying on the back seat.

“Ten more stones,” I said. By now he was looking like Tolkien’s Gollum and the Skaaplek had become his Precious.

“Take what you want,” Barnabas slavered. “Only give me the tobacco.” Which we did. Our new Damara buddy climbed onto his bike, clutching at his marvellous sack of baccy and headed back to his homestead.

“We’ll be fighting over this tonight!”

Chapter 21: Otjiwarongo

Cats & Dogs

Serious country music ruled the airwaves over Otjiwarongo’s annual agricultural show as we booked into a B&B with fairground frontage. “From the discos of Opuwo to the showgrounds of Otjiwarongo,” I said. “Give me more.”

In between, we’d been listening intently to Namibia’s FM radio, which brings out the Brylcreem and bobby sox in a soul. It’s Fifties to the core, in its music playlist and the tone of its genteel talk shows. Art deco of the airwaves with essence of African outback:

“Last week Mrs Swart from Grootfontein wanted to swap her two retriever puppies for a baby’s pram,” said the record-spinner in her mellow porch-front voice. “Today, we found a Mrs Frankenfeld in Swakop who has a pram for her and wants to meet the puppies. Mrs Swart has agreed to bring them through next week.”

This was national radio, but it felt like a huge unseen comforting hand of communication stretched over a vast dry country of fewer than two million souls. Someone was going to drive 1 000 miles to swap a brace of puppies for a pram. Only in Namibia. Or maybe also in Coober Pedy, Australia. Just as much fun as Radio Nama from down south.

And then there was the Otjiwarongo Agricultural Show. The announcer, switching effortlessly between Afrikaans and English, was exhorting the public to come and look at the pragtige perde (beautiful horses). We walked over the road and into a happy multiracial throng, everyone smelling of well-grilled boerewors rolls.

A group of wobbly drum majorettes went through their paces, the crowd gasping sympathetically every time their nervous leader dropped her spinning baton.

In the exhibition ring, saddle horses cantered in a lather of excitement, their riders tense.

“Ry hom liefie (ride him lovey),” urged one of the husbands from the stands. And his wife promptly won first prize.

Jules had been here before, back in July 2000, and had been swept off to the local German Festival.

“Most of the town was in fancy dress,” she told me as we wandered about the show. “They wore brocaded-cloth Trojan helmets and battery-powered bow ties that flashed alarmingly into the night, like coded distress signals.”

For once, my wife had not been dressed for the occasion. She had also been lost among the Oktoberfest singing circles about her, but after a draught beer or three she caught the spirit of the thing. This time around, however, essential khaki was in vogue among the farming folk.

Big Beef with serious eyes peered short-sightedly from various enclosures. Over at the environmental tent, Nelson, who at 29 was one of the oldest Cape griffons in captivity, shuffled about his enclosure, fussing with the straw and apparently looking to build himself a nest. He was drawing attention to the fact that there were only 11 of his kind left in Namibia.

But the stars of the tent were the predator people.

Fifteen years before, when Laurie Marker left America to start up what would become the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), an exhibit championing predators at an agricultural show in Otjiwarongo would have been as unlikely as instant world peace.

In fact, these days Otjiwarongo markets itself as the Cheetah Capital of the World.

Namibia is home to 3 000 of the world’s 12 000 cheetahs, the largest single population in the world, with the highest concentration being around this little town in the north.

“If I were King around here,” I told Jules, “I’d have them stick up a 30-metre glass fibre cheetah at each entrance to Otjiwarongo. And light it up from the inside after dark.”

“Thank goodness you’re only passing through,” she remarked.

Years before, the farmers of Namibia had driven lions and hyenas (prime enemies of the cheetah) off their land. As a result, in central Namibia, cheetahs always prospered.

Well, not quite. During the 1980s, livestock farmers killed close to 7 000 of them. One farmer alone admitted to killing 17 cheetahs in a few months. Another 1 000 were exported live (there are at least 1 200 in captivity around the world).

At the time, Laurie Marker had a top job at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington DC. She made a number of trips to Namibia to study gene pool issues in wild and captive cheetahs.

It became her dream to release a captive-born cheetah, Khayam, into the freedom of the Namibian veld. Marker ended up living with veterinarian and farmer Arthur Bagot-Smith and his family for three months.

Khayam taught Marker and others that the 18 to 22 months that a cheetah spends teaching her cubs where and how to hunt, and how to avoid predators, were irreplaceable. Khayam would never have survived in the wild.

Bagot-Smith and Marker met in 1977 when he treated Khayam for an obstruction of the intestine.

“When I first met Laurie, she was very scientifically minded. I said to her, listen my girlie, you’ll never save the cheetah through a microscope eyepiece in the US. Too many cheetahs are being killed in Namibia. You have to come here and do something. She said ‘I’ll be back’.”

Laurie returned in 1990 for good, bought three farms outside Otjiwarongo and started transforming farmhouses and outhouses into offices and research centres.

The first lonely years at Eland’s Vreugde farm took jaw-cracking courage.

“The farmers thought I only cared about the cheetah, not people like them, and they put me through hell,” she said. “They’d invite me to come around for tea and to see the cheetahs they’d shot. Some told me how they rode down cheetahs on their horses until they were exhausted and beat them to death with their rifle butts. I had to just grit my teeth and be polite. You win them over one by one.”

But working with the farmers was crucial. At least 90% of Namibia’s cheetahs range free over farms. Namibia’s livestock farmers are the custodians of the last truly viable population of cheetahs, and their prey, in the world.

Just over 10 000 years ago, the cheetah as a species almost died out, probably reduced to a double handful of breeding individuals. As a result, the genetic pool is poor, and small populations make inbreeding a virtual certainty, which is another reason why Namibia’s comparatively large cheetah population is so important. If the fight for the cheetah’s survival is lost here, the future of the whole species will be threatened.

The increase in game farms around Otjiwarongo might have been thought a positive development, but game farms are surrounded by impenetrable game-proof fences.

Game farmers, the CCF found, are far less tolerant of cheetahs, because they often keep small numbers of exotic game species in camps that are not electrified against predators. A study carried out in 2002 revealed that five game farmers alone were responsible for the deaths of 92 cheetahs.

The livestock owners remained the cheetah’s last real hope. So Laurie set about finding a way to avoid conflict between the two.

She was already broadly familiar with the problems North American ranchers had with wolves and coyotes, and the success that had been achieved using dogs to guard the livestock. Eventually she settled on the most likely candidate – the Kangal, or Anatolian Shepherd. These dogs come from Turkey, where they have protected livestock from predators for over 6 000 years.

Anatolian Shepherds are rangy dogs, slightly taller and much more imposing than your average Labrador. Their coats are pale, so they reflect the sun, and their surface hair is hollow – excellent insulation against heat and cold. The dark markings over nose and eyes protect them against the sun.

As young puppies, they are put in with whatever creature they are going to protect, and grow up thinking they are part of the herd.

“A goat with a big bark,” as Marker put it.

Her hugely successful idea of using dogs to save big cats won her worldwide respect. In 2000 she was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Planet.

Jules had a run-in with one of those Anatolian Shepherds herself on that July 2000 trip. Her journal read:

“The sun was going down, turning a herd of goats into creatures of gold.

“There was even one standing straight up on its hind legs like a gerenuk (a type of gazelle), helping itself to the topmost leaves of a tasty shrub. Others were pottering about, playing king of the termite heaps, nibbling grass, lurking in a happy pre-dusk haze.

“I crept up and focused on the gerenuk goat while a friendly piebald one gently sampled my camera strap.

“Suddenly a blonde goat under a bush detached itself from the throng with a panic-inducing snarl, rushed at me, barked twice and stood firm in front of the flock, growling and throwing the piebald-strap-nibbler a withering look. I backed away without hesitation. These dogs usually just warn off jackals, cheetahs and leopards, but one or two of them have been known to cause serious damage to a persistent predator.”

Farmers who were losing 12 to 14 animals a year now reported zero losses. Two out of three farmers around Otjiwarongo no longer killed cheetahs.

“The dogs could be used to protect any herd – sheep, ostriches, even chickens,” said Marker.

“Cattle, however, are too big. They tend to step on the pups. For large livestock, we recommend donkeys.” They’re cheap, loyal, loud and lose their tempers spectacularly when predators threaten.

If bought commercially, each dog could cost up to N$5 000 (the same in South African rands), but the CCF had set up a breeding programme and the dogs went free to all farmers committed to training them and monitoring their progress.

Livestock farmer Hans Gunther Gartner recounted an incident where one of the donkeys protecting the cattle brayed a warning, and the Anatolian Shepherd recognised the alarm signal, came over and chased the cheetah away.

“Very intelligent, very sensitive dogs. If you punish him, he takes it very hard. You only need to show him once.”

Once his dog “took a poultry”, and he ran to punish it, Gartner told us.

“The dog quickly swallowed the bird, but when it saw how upset I was, it never touched another chicken. It’s very clever and wakey, that dog.”

Bagot-Smith was another fan of Anatolian Shepherds, especially of his own one, Amy.

“If she doesn’t come back at night, I know that she’s with a ewe that is lambing. She will lie next to the lamb, and not let anything near it. I never have to worry or keep a heavily pregnant ewe back. The dog takes care of it all.”

CCF put its money where its mouth was, running model livestock farms with cheetahs on them. Because they were farmers, they put their own advice to the test, and they hadn’t lost an animal to a predator yet.

Part of their strategy was to encourage farmers to allow common game like springbok, kudu and hartebeest (preferred cheetah food) on their properties. The cats will only take domestic animals if there is nothing else or if they’re very old, or very young. Domestic animals, like double-cheese burgers, are invariably too fatty for clean-living cheetahs.

Laurie had set up a powerful motivation tool, the Cheetah Country Beef Campaign. Interested farmers who practised cheetah-friendly livestock management were certified and paid a premium for their beef sold in the European Union to health-conscious and socially and environmentally aware consumers.

CCF general manager Dr Bruce Brewer set up another win-win project. Because of historical overgrazing and droughts, the grassy plains of central Namibia had become “bush encroached”, infested with impenetrable thorn thickets. In 2004, CCF piloted a job creation project in which the intruder bush was chopped down and compacted into logs for wood fuel. Every barbeque with Bushbloks fuel logs helped expand the cheetahs’ habitat.

But cheetah runs are by far the most photogenic innovation. “We’ve found that people will pay good money for the privilege of watching cheetahs race,” said CCF staffer Bonnie Schumann. One morning we attended such a demonstration and saw why they do, as Bonnie set up the lure, the same kind that greyhounds race after.

Being allowed into a cheetah enclosure was much like being given a backstage pass to a fashion show. The cheetahs were impossibly elegant, their shoulders rolling as they sauntered like catwalk models, lithe and taut-muscled.

As soon as they heard the whirr of the race mechanism, they raised their small neat heads, amber eyes wide, and began to trot with long loping strides over to the rag, which then sped away across the ground. They seemed to have a prearranged tag-team system where they would chase it one at a time, sprinting in the straights and cutting corners to pounce on it wherever they could. If they caught it, they would try to bear it off like a prize, and researcher Marianne de Jonge would have to jog over with a small piece of raw meat on a long stick to distract them.

We all stood clustered together, trying to get pictures of the cheetahs as they flew around the track. We heard murmured exclamations, electronic clicks and whirrs around us. At first, I snapped a passing tail, a blur, a bush and a tourist before I got anything near usable: cheetahs at full stretch (covering eight metres in a single stride); cheetahs with only one paw on the ground, the other legs bunched and practically coming past their ears; cheetahs pouncing triumphantly on the rag in a spurt of dust.

There were 28 cheetahs with CCF while we were there, almost all of them captured by farmers. In total, though, about 50 came through CCF each year. Some were immediately released onto other approved farms after a biomedical check. But all genetic material (blood, skin, etc) was archived for future use, like a frozen cheetah collection for generations to come.

No visit to CCF could be complete without paying homage to the noble Chewbaaka. He had been one of those innumerable sad cases, a tiny cub whose mother had been killed by a farmer who wanted the cubs for pets. Most of them died from malnutrition. But Chewie (given the name by a French researcher for his habit of muttering under his breath when irked) survived.

“He was nursed through the most horrendous first month,” said Marker.

It was nearly midday, and yet Chewie was the ultimate professional ambassador cheetah, coming out into the hot sunlight from the delicious shade where he’d been sleeping, even purring while being stroked before climbing his “play tree” and posing for pictures. What a gentleman …

Chapter 22: Etosha

Pyjama Party

Etosha National Park is the Main Event in any overlander’s journey through Namibia, so we were naturally very hyped-up to be a couple of hours’ drive from its southern entrance. But at a campsite some thousands of kilometres back, we’d heard about the museum in the town of Outjo and its very strange gemsbok trophy.

The story, according to my fireside companion, began with a German called Hubert Janson, who settled in the Kaokoveld village of Fransfontein, near Khorixas. Janson dabbled very successfully in the making of brandy and wine in this desiccated part of the world. He also grew fine vegetables and fruit, I was told.

But his love of hunting was legendary. One night there was a dinner party at the Janson household. A lion walked into the house. Janson’s guest picked up a rifle and wounded it. Hubert Janson calmly grabbed an assegai and killed it stone dead.

“Your fireside companion indeed,” said Jules. “The only fireside companions you’ve had lately have been me and that old Lawrence Green. Is this another one of his famous tales?”

“Yes, but wait,” I replied. “It gets better. Janson saw a very strange gemsbok one day. But because it was World War I time, the German farmers had had all their firearms confiscated. So it took him days to run it down with his lance.”

“What was strange about the gemsbok?” she wanted to know.

“We’re going to find out shortly.”

We arrived at the drowsy, attractive farming town of Outjo and I was immediately tempted to try out their Bäckerei and then maybe later make a little detour into the Dorsland Bottle Store. But the gemsbok legend beckoned, and so we continued to the museum.

What a jewel. With assistant curator Ellynda Haraes in helpful attendance, we located the “strange gemsbok” with its spiralling, freakish horn growths. This was the trophy donated by Mr Janson so long ago. It looked as fresh as this year’s daisy.

But that, as they say in telemarketing, was not all. The Outjo Museum had a wealth of pelts, a cast-iron labour bed with well-worn stirrups, a “zonkey” (zebra-donkey cross) hide, a “zorse” hide (zebra-horse), a toy wagon made from an animal jawbone, a two-goat milk cart (complete with two stuffed goats), soap made from lion fat, all manner of smoking pipes, a walking stick cunningly adapted to measure the height of horses, a photograph of a Boer riding an ox on a hunting expedition, a twisted piece of corrugated iron that was a reminder of the famous Outjo Tornado of 1980 and an old Marais Family Bible from Otjiwarongo.

Hours passed. Etosha was forgotten. The Outjo Museum rocks. Ripley’s people should know about this place.

Finally we were at Etosha, and it was the best time of the year to be visiting this world-famous park. It was springtime, well before the rains. All life was concentrated around waterholes. The vegetation was low and sparse after winter, yet the rich mineral content of the soil had been transferred to the grass and trees, showing up in the plump rumps of all the animals. The zebras had half-grown colts, and many of the springbok had calves just beginning to sprout sharp little horns.

A quick word of advice. It helps to have done some research on Etosha before you arrive. Essential reading is Origin and Meaning of Place Names in the Etosha National Park, Namibia by Berry, Rocher et al. Not the sexiest title around, but great information nevertheless. Many of the names of the places stem from the Bushman tribe called the Hei//om, or Heikun as the settlers of a century ago called them. Some sources say Hei//om means “tree sleeper”, referring to these people’s habits of finding night shelter in trees to escape the ever-watchful lions of Etosha. The origin, however, is still in dispute.

But in general, tree-sleeping is not such a bad idea, considering that there are records of humans having been hunted by lions around here. Back in 1950 four Owambos were eaten in Etosha by lions, the fifth having escaped by rapidly climbing up a thorn tree and watching his mates become dinner. He stayed there for quite a while before being rescued by a passing police patrol.

Our first waterhole was Ombika, shimmering in the white after-lunch sun, surrounded by zebras involved in a rather subdued pyjama party.

We continued to Okaukuejo, which means “the woman who has a child every year”, and is most famous for the nightly waterhole show right next to the camp. In fact, you can go there any time of day for a parade of wildlife. When we arrived, there must have been thousands of springbok filing back and forth, a moving mosaic of fawn, black and white. Every now and then a gemsbok would paddle out to the middle and stand in a trance, belly wet, bending its masked unicorn head every now and then to suck up water. The zebra and the kudu kept cautiously to the water’s edge while the tourists sat in their dozens, broiling in the sun and languidly writing postcards home, eating ice creams and looking up occasionally when a zebra brayed at a herdmate.

The camp’s name, according to the aforementioned book, possibly comes from a number of legends. A woman of royal blood and her entourage stayed at this fountain. A local highborn guy fancied her. The night he was to pounce, however, he discovered she was in the midst of her menstrual period. So to mark his frustration, he called the spring “the place of red water”.

“OK, so what has this got to do with having a child every year?” I asked the Wise One, who was reading to me.

“I’m not sure, but here’s another one,” she continued.

The second legend of Okaukuejo had to do with a villain who held a number of Hei//om girls as sex slaves around here. That still shed no light on the name, so we thought we’d drive off to the east to find more of God’s creatures.

We drove towards our night-stop of Halali Rest Camp, slowing down when we saw a handful of cars at Nebrownii waterhole, just 200 metres off the road, 6 km from Okaukuejo. The springbok were gathering in little groups in the dense shade of thorn trees, utterly indifferent to cars passing less than two metres away. We had to weave among indolent zebra to get near the waterhole. Once we were past them, we saw what had so entranced the other tourists.

Three massive elephants had converged on the waterhole, effortlessly putting dozens upon dozens of springbok, gemsbok and zebras to flight. They anointed their bodies in white mud, emerging like a trio of gargantuan ghosts from the past, from the days when the Dorsland Trekkers came through these parts and shot them like flies. They stood with their heads close in communion, paying scant attention to the gemsbok begging permission to approach the waterhole. One toss of their heads and the buck would scatter obediently before sidling closer to the water again, in that submissive way of thirsty minions.

We checked into Halali Rest Camp. They’d given us a sub-standard room with a broken sliding door and some other tatty bits and we had to wait a while before another was organised. But what the hell, we hadn’t come for the room service. So we went off for sundowners to the Moringa waterhole, just outside the camp.

As the daylight dropped away, a stroppy collared matriarch elephant with a suckling calf paced back and forth, head high, shaking her ears in anger at the unseemly attentions paid by a too-young bull towards one of the young females in her herd. He took one step too close and she let him have it with both trumpets and charged. He ran off to a bush 100 metres away and loitered there, nursing his injured dignity and trying to appear nonchalant before his audience of tourists. Mama led her baby to the area of cleanest water and they commenced hoovering it up. The defended virgin came and leaned gratefully against the matriarch. All you needed were a few bars of Bizet to complete the dramatic scene.

All threats gone, the baby jumbo delighted in role-playing Lord of the Waterhole and, with high, fluting trumpet, outstretched trunk and little ears flapping, charged a lone gemsbok. The gemsbok simply passed all this aggression on by chasing a jackal away from the waterside. The jackal probably went off and snapped at a passing sandgrouse or something. And so it goes.

The next morning we played a bit of Mr Ry Cooder to a few Burchell’s zebra out at Salvadora, which is also the name of a very useful toothbrush tree. Some of them didn’t appear partial to Chicken Skin Music at all. In fact, one whiffled his lips in disgust and left the scene, kicking petulantly at a couple of crows in passing. Two others stood there, mildly fascinated, their ears pricked forward. They seemed especially to like Cooder’s version of Good Night Irene, of which I too am rather fond.

On our way out to Namutoni the next day, the yellow-grassed plains were dappled with mobs of grazing springbok. A stately, silver bull elephant stood alone in the mopane bush, picking out delicious grass tussocks with his trunk and fastidiously kicking the sand off the roots before eating them.

Crossing the road, he suddenly turned to us.

“You. Stay where you are. Elephant crossing, right now.”

I took heed and activated the invisibility shield on the good ship Isuzu.

At Kalkheuwel, a large band of breeding elephant was clustered around the waterhole like one big Tupperware party. The elephants were making pigs of themselves with the waterhole, showering and spraying each other and generally behaving like an oil-rich nation. You could actually see the water level dropping after half an hour of this jamboree.

About 20 black-faced impala trooped slowly towards the waterhole, as self-effacing as a drift of autumn leaves. Or, alternatively, an oil-poor nation. They stood gazing at the elephants and the water wastage in polite consternation. After a short discussion among themselves, the impala turned and walked back through the mopane bush, their body language protesting in martyred tones.

Such is the magic of an Etosha waterhole. You get sucked into the soap opera of the moment. Who needs to drive around? All you do is pick a spot and park. There might be nothing on the programme when you arrive, but be patient. Soon, a yellow-billed kite will fly over on mouse patrol. A cautious kudu will pick its way through the bush. Some crows may begin bickering on a stump. Suddenly, a zebra waiting in the wings will shake his Trojan helmet mane and 500 of his kind will appear at the water’s edge.

By now, I was really looking forward to Fort Namutoni.

“What is this fort fetish?” asked Jules.

I’ve had it since I was small. I think it started with Fort Apache, USA. Then a fort in the Khyber Pass. Then it went on to Kitchener’s forts, built all over South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War.

“Those were blockhouses,” said Jules.

“Small forts,” I countered.

And now it was Namibia, and its wealth of German schlosses. And the most spectacular schloss of them all, Namutoni, lay ahead. I had asked for a room in the fort, even if it turned out to be the size of a prison cell. I wanted to sleep inside a fort, for the first time in my life.

“Beau Geste,” suggested Jules.

“Exactly,” I smiled.

We all live with postcard images in our head. For some, it’s the Eiffel Tower, meaning Paris and a funky honeymoon weekend and a snotty waiter somewhere on the Champs-Elysées. Others like Disneyland, the Mickey guy in particular. You might personally like the idea of the Serengeti, and the passing gnurk-gnurk of a million wildebeest on their migration up to the Mara.

Me, I have things like the French Quarter of New Orleans, Pella Cathedral and Fort Namutoni burned into my brain. Bourbon Street’s fate is unclear, but Pella never disappoints. I was hoping Namutoni wouldn’t, either. That magical fort in the desert, cream-coloured at dawn, those crenellated walls – a mirage of the mind. I’ve never loved a fort so much I wanted to enlist, but so far I haven’t missed a good French Foreign Legion movie, either.

My family tree indicates that a certain Charles Marais worked for a certain King Charlemagne in France, a long time ago. His main job was to lay siege to castles and fortresses. Once the king had moved off with his main forces to another possible conquest, my Uncle Charles would remain behind and starve the inhabitants of the fort in question to the point of surrender.

“So it must be something in the genes,” I told Jules, as we drove in and were suitably awed by Namutoni.

From small beginnings back in the late 1890s as a rinderpest checkpoint with fancy walls, Namutoni was rebuilt into a Rhinelander’s fantasy of a colonial fort. But first it had to have its very own siege, and that happened in late January 1904, when more than 500 Owambo soldiers threatened the lives of those within its crude walls, who numbered only seven.

It was the Kaiser’s birthday. The Owambos stormed Namutoni with spears and rifles. A furious little battle ensued, leaving many Owambos dead and wounded outside the fort. Night fell. The seven men slipped away under cover of darkness. They were found by a German patrol and escorted to the safety of Grootfontein.

At dawn, the Owambos attacked an empty fort, which they trashed anyhow, just to show that there were, in fact, some hard feelings. A year later, the fancy fort was built. Nothing much happened out here until 1915, when South African troops under General Coen Brits took Namutoni.

Some historians record that the South Africans found more than a million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 2 000 animals and 92 wagons in the fort. Lawrence Green says General Botha regretfully informed General Brits that he and his forces had to stay at Namutoni for longer than expected. Brits, rather famously, replied:

“I have captured ten thousand bottles of rum. My men have as much wild beast flesh as they can eat. We are content.”

Chapter 23: South West Afrikaners

Dorsland Trek

I first heard about the Dorsland Trek via the pages of a Herman Charles Bosman story called The Rooinek. South Africa’s favourite stoep-raconteur, Oom Schalk Lourens, accompanies his fellow Groot Maricans on a small Dorsland Trek of their own after the Anglo-Boer War. Even before the pitiful wagon train, beset by infighting and bad leadership, really bit into the Great Kalahari, children were dying and being swiftly buried along the wagon tracks. The women had stopped weeping; their hearts had hardened.

“I think that this is the saddest thing that ever happens in the world, when women pass through great suffering that makes them become as men,” Oom Schalk notes.

I was pondering on this story out at the Rietfontein waterhole in Etosha, watching a lone Wahlberg’s eagle perched uneasily on a Dorsland Trekker plaque, next to the gravestone of just such a Boer woman who died on the way.

Rietfontein had been good to the Dorsland Trekkers in many ways, and I understood why. There was abundant water. I saw more than 500 zebra come down to drink. The mares bickered, the colts carefully observing the protocol, shying away from those ladies with pinned-back ears, as one should always do. The lead stallions of each group paused in front of their families before proceeding, stopping every few metres to check for predators.

I imagined the guns of the Dorsland Trekkers waiting in bushes nearby. The men were skilled hunters, and shooting for the pot would have been a breeze out here.

All along our Dry Lands trip, even as far south as Keetmanshoop, Jules and I had encountered small reminders of the various Dorsland Treks, testaments to amazing endurance, obdurance, innovation, stupidity, hope and despair in equal measures. A well-preserved wagon here, a small green Trekker girl’s kappie (bonnet) there, a farm implement, a family Bible, a hunting knife and a gravestone – these were all signposts to the past.

You’d think that by 1875 the Boers had done enough trekking to last them an eternity. They’d been streaming up from the Cape and away from the stifling atmosphere of British colonial influence for decades, and the Transvaal looked to be their final stop. But President Thomas Burgers of the Transvaal Republic was not everyone’s cup of tea. His ways were seen to be too liberal. Add to that the fact that the British had googly eyes for the Transvaal and you get the feeling that there was much unease north of the Orange River. The more conservative elements of the Boer community looked to the west, greased up their whipstocks and checked their ammunition.

Many who write about the phenomenon that followed say it was all about a thing called trekgees (the spirit of trekking), that the Boers were just itching to leave their comparatively lucrative farms in the Transvaal and swap their comfortable lives for uncertainty on the road. They had, no doubt, heard all about the blonde plains of German West (as it was then), filled to the horizon with game for the taking.

You can just imagine the adventurers in the family returning to the family farms with stories of famous hunts in Ngamiland or the Kaokoveld, their eyes gleaming with memories of ivory and skin, lonely campfires and friendly tribesmen. There was a farmer up in the Ghanzi area of Ngamiland, Hendrik van Zyl, whose exploits alone must have ignited many Transvaalers’ passion for the open road. In one year, he shot an estimated 400 elephant. According to another account, Van Zyl and his cronies were said to have killed more than 100 elephant in a single day.

With each story a little embellishment was added, like Tabasco to a traveller’s meal, and by the time the anecdote was served across the Crocodile River, it usually had all the accompaniments of a fine old banquet. In those days, real men dressed in elephant skin and ostrich feathers and ate hippo foot for supper; some of them must have come across as utterly camp carnivores of the very worst kind.

The travel writer Jonathan Raban hunted down an interesting clipping from an 1893 edition of Atlantic Monthly for his book Bad Land, in which one EV Smalley talks of Europeans settling in the Dakotas:

“An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie states among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnish the largest contingent to the asylums. The reason is not far to seek. These people come from cheery little farm villages. Life in the fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome. Think for a moment how great the change must be from the white-walled, red-roofed village on a Norway fjord, with its church and schoolhouse, its fishing boats on the blue inlet, and its green mountain walls towering aloft to snowfields, to an isolated cabin on a Dakota prairie, and say if it is any wonder that so many Scandinavians lose their mental balance.”

Well, the Boers differ from the Scandinavians in that they actually relish the solitude of being out of sight of their neighbours. Living on top of one another was, in fact, the very thing that would most likely drive them mad. Not for them the bucolic little “village green” fantasy. They prized space above all else, and so when Gert Alberts and his 82-year-old adviser Johannes van der Merwe came up with a plan to lead a small group of runaway pioneers westwards, there was no shortage of takers.

Alberts took ten families across the Kalahari in ox wagons. Think about it. Most people would shrink from doing the trip in an air-conditioned SUV these days, even if you offered them fizzy flavoured water and as much fine Ghanzi biltong as they could eat.

Alberts and Co took 50 wagons and more than 1 400 cattle right past Lake Ngami, where they met the notorious Van Zyl and asked for access to his wells. He refused. Some might think him harsh, others would deem him sensible. A lot of oxen can cause havoc with a watering point out here in the desert.

A while later, Van Zyl grumpily agreed to let them have water, but by now the Dorslanders had the measure of their man. They just didn’t feel very welcome, so they pressed on to another Rietfontein, on the border with German West. The Alberts convoy was well planned, travelling in small groups so there was no ox-jam at the waterhole.

Michael Main, in his excellent book simply entitled Kalahari, says the dreaded Van Zyl stood up for those Dorslanders in a rather dubious way. Upon learning that one young trekker had been killed by Bushmen, he took the law into his own hands. Van Zyl invited the local Bushmen to a get-together, where there would be free Skaaplek and Cape Smoke brandy, and they inevitably arrived in large numbers. At a given moment in the proceedings, he had them tied up and dragged off to where the youngster had been killed. And there, he executed more than 30 Bushmen. For a man who once, allegedly, helped shoot a huge herd of elephants trapped in hardening mud, this was probably just another day’s work out in the desert.

The second convoy, led, according to Lawrence Green, by a hunter called Jan Greyling (others record that a man called Louwrens du Plessis was the boss), was a total disaster. Apparently, Alberts’s success inspired the rest of the disgruntled Boers back home, and they took to the desert like locusts on the fly. Nearly 500 people in 128 wagons were just too much of a load for the Kalahari ecosystem, marginal at best, to bear. Thousands of head of cattle went crazy out there in the desert, clogged up what scant waterholes were available and died in great numbers. The most prevalent historical image from that particular disaster is of cattle licking the shiny rims of the wagon wheels, mistaking the sun’s reflection for water – the strangest, saddest mirage on record.

And as they crossed the Kalahari, the parched travellers would drop off items like furniture and wakiste (wagon chests), even abandoning wagons in a bid to lighten their loads. Of course, the Bushmen who roamed these vast sands as if they were lords living on Easy Street had (except for those in the vicinity of the villainous Van Zyl) benefited hugely from the embattled Dorslanders. Suddenly, an ostrich egg filled with cool water from God knows where took on immense value, and the bartering was on. Your entire wagon for this egg. That kind of stuff.

So far, however, no one had died. Alberts, at Rietfontein, was contacted and he rescued a number of the Dorsland II cast. Others went back to the Transvaal, realising that old Burgers and the Brits were a doddle compared with the Kalahari sands. And the Rietfontein group moved up to the Okavango, where malaria began to strike them down. Pretty soon, the death toll reached 200.

Enter one Axel Eriksson, trader, collector of specimens, adventurer and soon-to-be philanthropist. Stunned by the misery of these downtrodden people before him, Axel wrote to the Cape newspapers of their plight:

“It is a bitter and heartrending story. It is hard to see them now, poor and sick, dying, in distress. Many have neither dog nor fowl left. Many children, driven by hunger, eat earth and die almost immediately. Here a few rave for food, there another frightens away the birds of prey from some putrid carcase [sic] that he may regale himself on what a hyena would disdain.”

These reports bred another great story. All of Cape Town was concerned for the Dorsland Trekkers (except, maybe, for some of Her Majesty’s colonial subjects who probably thought it served them right for creating such a fuss and running away) and more than £5 000 were raised.

In 1879 two ships, the Swallow and the Christina (to be fair, they were of British origin), were loaded with rescue supplies for the Dorslanders. They made their way up the west coast to Rocky Point, near Cape Cross on the Skeleton Coast. Landing there was impossible, so they returned to Walvis Bay. Dorslanders, hearing of this great gesture of kindness from the Cape, sent wagons off to Walvis. The goods were picked up and taken all the way back to Etosha, and the trekgees pumped once more.

An interesting aside here. Captain WB Warren of the Swallow, while scouting around the Cape Cross shoreline for a possible landing spot, actually saw the very padrão left here by officially the first white man in southern Africa back in the mid-1500s, Diogo Cão.

Possibly the most colourful account of life in the Dorsland laager is a work of fiction written by prominent South African author WA de Klerk, entitled The Thirstland. He writes of the group’s carpenters, who made wooden chests, benches, yokes, wheel rims and, tragically, a lot of coffins. They were mainly members of the Holtzhauzen family, and they used “teak from the north” in most of their work.

Then you had the gunsmiths, the agriculturalists, the ironsmiths (working with fired leadwood, their “black figures looming up through the clouds of steam”) and the leatherworkers, who made veldskoens and whips for the convoy.

But, for me, the most powerful image is De Klerk’s description of the way the women worked a hippo carcass after a day’s hunting on the Kunene River:

“The prospects were that the great fat-hunger of the Trek would eventually be appeased,” De Klerk writes. “Under the trees, at roughly constructed tables, the womenfolk stood cutting up hunks of fat into strips, trimming it, washing it all to a shiny whiteness. The young girls carried the strips on wooden trays to sunny flats, setting them out on the grass. There it lay, like snow on the Cape mountains. The Himbas, hacking at the carcasses, fought noisily with each other for choice titbits. The hunters, tired after a hard day’s work, sat under the anas. Clouds of tobacco smoke hung in the lifeless air. There they sat, drinking coffee, cleaning their guns, talking, and ever talking.”

But it wasn’t all Hippo Heaven on the Kunene up in the Kaokoveld. Apart from the malarial mosquitoes, you had your Nile crocodile, a menace that exists to this day. One night, young Nellie le Grange of the Dorslanders went swimming up near Swartboois Drift. A juvenile crocodile took her by the leg. She screamed, but the rest of the camp thought it was just a bunch of girls having a good time by the river. Finally, one Cillie van der Walt and some other Dorsland women dragged both Nellie and the crocodile onto a sandbank and threw sand in the big lizard’s eyes so it would release its grip on the girl. Nellie was saved, but the leg was slow in healing.

An interesting character had entered the world of Dorsland Trekking by now: William Worthington Jordan, a young man of colour from the Cape. How these hardened old Calvinists with rather racist views on life took to a non-white fellow is one of the great Dorsland mysteries, but it was so. He won their confidence and became their spokesman. Jordan knew all sorts of places and languages, including Portuguese, and interested them in crossing the Kunene and setting up home in Angola. Which they did, from about 1880 onwards. They were now the Angola Boers, living on the Humpata Plateau. And it was also there that WW Jordan set up a little trading store for himself. I don’t get the sense Jordan was an exploitative man, no more so than most of us. He was just quite good at setting up a win-win situation.

And when the settlers became edgy up on the Humpata, it was Jordan who found them a home back in German West, this time in the Grootfontein area. Although many Boers stayed on in Angola until well into the twentieth century, the Grootfonteiners came and set up what they called Upingtonia: a new world for a restless people.

Upingtonia was a complicated place. The local tribes were opposed to a new state in their midst, and so were both the Portuguese and English colonial powers. What wizardry would these hard-faced Boers be up to now? Bismarck, that “German of Germans”, wouldn’t even lend them a little cannon to defend themselves. There were battles with the Hereros, the Owambos and even the Hottentots. Eventually, Jordan was murdered by a prominent Owambo and the spirit seemed to leak out of the Upingtonia Utopia.

The Angola Boers had, to an extent, integrated with their unlikely colonial masters, and had even waged some successful battles on behalf of the Portuguese. The Dorslanders also, unfortunately, declared war on the elephants of the region and chased most of them down for their tusks. Ivory was the trade of the day, and somebody had to pay for that coffee and tobacco …

Chapter 24: Owamboland

Dog Biscuits

“When you were about seven years old,” I said to Jules, as we drove east out of Etosha, “I was a soldier up here. Certainly not the best soldier, and not even in uniform. In fact, I wore an oil-spattered khaki overall most of the time and did as little as possible.”

She raised an interested eyebrow, so I took her back more than 30 years to the early seventies …

“Just as the rainy season began in Owamboland, the Dakota transport plane dropped us near the German bakery town of Grootfontein. We’ll be there tomorrow.

“I arrived like a scrubbed little altar boy. Within a week I had become Shrek. I didn’t shave, didn’t make my bed, didn’t give a damn. No one really noticed.

“They had tried to make me an army officer. Despite the fact that I hadn’t distinguished myself at high school. Tie that up with ‘poor sportsman’ and the reality that the only war I liked was up there on the movie screen, and you had yourself a National Service loser, for sure.”

“I’ve always thought you were more of a movie fan than a Captain Caprivi,” said Jules.

“Teenage years, who needs ’em?” I replied. “Back then, my ‘Sunshine Corner’ entry would have read: ‘White Anglo-Afrikaans teenager. Plays good pool until the third double. Writes up in his room to escape the world of pimples, maths and Abba. Looking for a girl. Looking for a life. Is there anyone out there?’ Not great officer material for any army.”

“Couldn’t you just refuse?”

“Well, you did have a choice. You could always go to jail for six years instead. But that would have been a bit of a jolt for a privileged white boy like me. So I thought hey, let me go for the lesser of two weevils and lurk in a military store for nine months. Preferably somewhere near the back where they stack the blankets.”

“Why didn’t you just go overseas?”

“Short answer? I didn’t have the confidence,” I replied, as we drove through Owambo country.

“My dad was a decorated member of a bomber corps in World War II. He fought Hitler, he was motivated. He returned a war hero. I didn’t feel much like a war hero. I couldn’t get my head around the Total Onslaught propaganda. What was that? Like, another bad hair day down at Pooh Corner? Rabbit thinks Kanga’s a spy. Piglet’s shadow looks like the Giant Woozel. Lookout, here comes Tigger. Join the army. Fight blacks and Russians. Why?

“In fact, if I were to shoot anyone with an assault rifle, it would probably have been someone white and closer to my everyday life at boarding school. Like that fat bully from the far north who took two years of my high school and turned them into a nightmare, just because he could. I’d have been made Marksman No 1 on the firing range if that bastard’s face had been on the target. Then you would have seen me go. Oh yes, please.”

Intrigued, my wife urged me to tell her more about my army daze up here in northern Namibia.

“We have to backtrack to South Africa for that, to the day my Ma drove me out to the little town of Heidelberg, south of Johannesburg, where a kindly-looking corporal pointed out ‘my flat’ to us, like an estate agent on show day.”

Ma, ever the trusting soul, was delirious with joy that her son would be accommodated in such smart quarters. I did, however, see the fellow smirk behind his hand. I knew something nasty was afoot. The minute she drove off in her V-6, thinking happy thoughts about her boy in browns, the corporal turned to me and said:

“Nice flat, hey? See how much you like it by next week.”

My corporal was hard to love. But not as hard as that flat. At first I called it Luxury. Six weeks later its name had become Hell Hole. You had to keep the place reflector-shining, so you could constantly see your sad little self on the spotless floor. You couldn’t sleep on the bed because it had to be ironed square every night for inspection. You had to put milk cartons into socks to square them off. Was there nothing round in this man’s army?

My privileged white boy status meant little here. Damn, I even had to learn to iron my own clothes.

Every night, we worked into the small hours chasing dirt from our flats. Sometimes it was real dirt, sometimes it was the dirt that lurked purely in the minds of the inspecting officers. But dirt it was. And slowly, our little band of do-nothings began to form. The Sixteen Slackers. The kind of guys you’d probably find in AA meetings, Smokenders gatherings, Weigh-Less conventions and the back-benches of Parliament.

Three months crept by in slow seconds. I learnt to march in step, leopard-crawl up to my dreaded flat, turn corridor floors into mirrors with my ass, carry huge logs about like on-board luggage and grow really intimate with my FN rifle.

I ate up the entire smorgasbord of seventies military service: received a Dear John letter in the first month, trimmed down to nearly nothing, learnt a whole new range of curses, became a whizz at keeping boots shiny and then made the near-fatal mistake of singing Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock at a Delta company braai with an impromptu group called The Cape Town Sonofabitch Boys Blues Band.

Somehow, we were living American lives in South Africa. We fell in with US culture, clothing and music. We listened to what our American counterparts were saying over in Vietnam, where they, too, were “winning the war”. We couldn’t even come up with our own slang. Instead, we called our enemy “gooks” and, just like the Yanks, in the course of running around in the bush we mostly shot ourselves.

My fascination with the events on a farm across the world – where Jimi Hendrix bit his guitar and Joe Cocker was unleashed on the world – brought me the unwelcome attentions of a rotund staff sergeant, who liked to shout a lot. He was like Danny de Vito without the cute bits.

One day under a tree, Staff Doughnut read out some typed-up orders:

“Who wants to fail this course now? Who wants to spend the rest of his army days in a border camp?”

My friends and I, The Slackers, went for it. I punched my hand up into the air, where it became entangled in a thorny branch. Staff Doughnut glared at me, called me kaksleg and sent me “out of the bus”.

And so it was that 16 Army College dropouts were despatched by military airplane to Grootfontein, a greasy smudge of a supply depot in the Big Sand.

They called us Bokkies. That’s because we wore brass Springboks on our green berets, which meant we were owned by the infantry. Body, soul and hair, which they delighted in shaving short.

We stepped off the plane into a mad dance of heatwaves that rose from the ’strip. A skinny little supply driver called Ace arrived to pick us up. He wore a Ban the Bomb T-shirt, aviator shades and his hair curled down over his ears.

Ace honked the horn of his Bedford truck.

“Why are you guys formed up and at attention? There’s no rank here, only me. Hop in, let’s take you home.” Good old Ace. The Schumacher of his day.

We chugged into Fort Grootfontein in the mid-afternoon. Unshaven louts in overalls guarded the gates, glowering down from the watchtowers, their T-shirts tie-dyed and torn. There was a general air of Lost Patrol in this camp. At first, we were frightened. Then we came to love it. It was something like Opuwo for honkies.

The obliging Ace led us to four vacant tents and then fell to the ground laughing when one of us asked about PT schedules.

I shared a stretch of tatty green army issue canvas with three of my crew. Maurice: a loveable Afrikaner lady-killer with a pencil-line moustache and the logic of Daffy Duck. Benny the Deal Man. Jimmy: my mate from Cape Town. And me, still slightly worried about the PT shedules.

I soon learnt, however, that keeping fit in Grootfontein meant a very slow and amiable slouch across the parade strip to the open, multiplex john with one’s buddies every morning. Twenty plastic thrones were laid out, ten on each side, facing each other and surrounded by a wall of flimsy hessian that flapped in the breeze. I was constipated for a week before I gave in, gathered some interested parties and made a sortie to the communal latrine.

At dinnertime, everyone stormed the mess tent and grabbed a tray of army grub and a seat at a fold-up metal table. All tables were full, except for one. That was reserved for Mal Smit, a South Wester who was very scary when you first met him.

Mal Smit (Jacky Hammer to his few friends) was a one-man Wrestlemania team covered in machine grease. Even his lidded eyes were a kind of muddy brown.

This jovial juggernaut had before him two massive plates of beef stew, a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Lemon Twist. His only dinner companion was his jackhammer, which lay on the table like the Hammer of Thor itself, fresh from its display case in Asgard.

But that was where his resemblance to the Norse god of thunder ended. Mal Smit growled at his food, spat gristle on the floor and messed all over the table. As he ate, he uttered grunts of contentment and stroked his jackhammer like a wife. No one joined him, censured him or teased him. Also, no one spoke to him except for Ace, who seemed to have great status among the hard-bitten South West Africans in the camp.

Ace the Accidental Hero. Who could flip a vehicle faster than you could say rinderpest, an ability that earned him Big Kahuna status with the drivers, most of whom had set themselves the goal of destroying their vehicles on the murderous white highway to the northern camps that we supplied each day.

To walk away from the blazing wreck was, to them, a great and anarchistic thing to do. The locals didn’t love us much. But they were all very small potatoes compared to Ace from Cape Town, who had smashed two Bedfords so far and looked very capable of taking out another five before clear-out time at the end of the year. And here’s the kicker: Ace never meant to. He would have loved nothing better than to complete a convoy unscathed. But his destiny was to become an icon to the Gobabis Gang.

We 16 disgraced infantrymen then met our new mentor, Sergeant Major Mole. Mole was a World War II relic, a diminutive man with spectacles so strong they could have shamed the Hubble Telescope. His rheumy old eyes hid like darting pinpricks behind the glasses.

Mole was ancient. He had a raspy voice like a diesel engine. He was an infantryman down to his puttees. He had fought in Tobruk, he had faced Rommel’s Desert Rats in the war theatres of North Africa with his Lee Enfield rifle and his funny tin helmet and now, for his sins, he was the S’ar Major of Camp Loopy.

“My Bokkies are here!” he exulted when he saw my mates and me milling around the mess tent after dinner. “At last! Some real soldiers!”

Oh shame. Little did he know ...

The Major in charge of the camp was deaf as a post. He wore what looked like a set of grapes hanging from his left ear – an old-fashioned hearing aid. We used to do the old street trick of whispering to him, having him turn the hearing aid up and then shouting down his ear.

And then there was Corporal Kat. He hated infantrymen in any form. He was the kingpin of the camp. Sorry for us.

Within days of being there, we had all found ourselves little niches in the camp. Like mice hiding away from Corporal Kat.

Maurice, for instance, slid into the kitchen detail and specialised in fry-ups for a fee. Benny became the storeman, whence he despatched blankets, military equipment and essential supplies with the shrewdness of a Shylock.

Jimmy and I teamed up and convinced the transport lieutenant he needed two infantrymen to run the spare tyre department.

And whenever any of us needed to break out of camp, we were allowed to escort convoys laden with provender to scattered SADF camps up north. After all, that was really why we were there: as security guards for the drivers on the Great White Highway.

On Friday nights at Grootfontein Supply Depot you wrote yourself a weekend pass and a friend in the orderly’s office would stamp it and send you on your merry way.

Jimmy and I found ourselves on the southbound highway to Windhoek in the dead of night with no moon to guide us, only a tiny tape player next to us on the ground, grinding out James Taylor hits.

Presently, a family from Tsumeb would pick us up in a very large, shark-like Chevrolet. Ma would holler from the front seat:

“Stay awake, manne. Keep an eye out for the kudu.”

That’s it. We were nothing but uniformed kudu-spotters. Racoon-eyed, fed to the gills with sweet, strong coffee and biltong, we would stare out at the road, fearing immediate expulsion into the dark night if we nodded off.

The family would play Jim Reeves on the eight-track tape. Jim Reeves, whose voice could put a crazed amphetamine addict to sleep in three bars. A difficult journey for the kudu-lookouts indeed.

When we finally arrived in Windhoek, we checked into Hotel Romeo, the SWA Command tent camp, and wandered about town trying to accost German girls who had far better things to do with their time. After a movie, too much beer in the tent and a few slaps in the face, we found ourselves back in Grootfontein on Sunday night. A totally wasted exercise.

So we started hanging around the Meteor Hotel in Grootfontein, where we found equally grotesque types to party with. And it was better.

Everything we’d learnt in boot camp dissolved in a pond of lager tins and plain old shirking. Every ounce of energy we’d put into running mini-marathons over hills, marching till the sun drooped over the Heidelberg water tower, polishing each item of army kit until it virtually disappeared, now went into an insane competition to see who could expend the least energy each day. This was not a place for heroes.

“I’m bored with this story,” I told my silent and slightly aghast wife as we drove towards the mining town of Tsumeb more than 30 years later. “Let’s go hunt down a beer.”

Chapter 25: Angola Days

Across the River

Just outside Tsumeb lies a very deep hole – the legendarily bottomless Lake Otjikoto. The one I still call Leguan Lake.

Jules and I parked at the entrance, in front of a tall, rather dramatic carving of many startled faces in a tree stump. Which stood just to the left of a large mural of an attractive Herero woman drinking an amber-coloured liquid, captioned thus:

“Lake Otjikoto Here you are; Touch African curios at the kiosk; Taste sweets, fruit cooldrinks and biltong love bites and enjoy Otjikoto.”

The shop owner, an amiable old man, took us on a brief tour of his strange carved-animal garden, replete with parrots, guinea pigs and a crocodile lurking in the shade.

“And here are photographs of the cannons that were hauled out of the lake in 1983,” he said. “The Germans dropped them into the lake at the end of World War I. You can see them at the Tsumeb Museum.”

I bought some of those romantic biltong bits (rather yummy, actually) and had an impromptu picnic with Jules within sight of the deep, azure waters of Otjikoto.

“We used to come here a lot in the old days,” I said. “Before there was a shop and a crocodile pit. This was where I met the Leguan of the Lake.”

“Give me another love bite and you can tell me all about it,” said my wife.

“On one trip, my detail was to escort a refrigerator truck full of perishables to a camp on the Angolan border and return in a Land Rover,” I began. “Which was fine, as long as Ace, cold stone killer of an army truck, wasn’t doing any of the driving.

“We used to come here to throw bread to the tilapia in the lake. This time, we found a one-metre leguan (rock monitor lizard) at the roadside nearby. It looked as if someone had driven over his back. There was life but, like the rest of us, unless you took a pulse you wouldn’t have said so.”

Using the Don Quixote trick with mirrors, we surrounded the animal with many silver boxes from the food truck, all but one of them reflecting the wicked sun’s rays. The antediluvian creature waddled its way into the shady box with the lid up and we had him.

Braised steak was the lizard’s lunch. We poured the stew over his head while he glared at us, the congealing mass of stew slowly dribbling down his warty face.

The lizard was deposited in the back of the truck, where he promptly lowered his metabolic rate to cope with the freezing temperature, and we drove on towards the camp on the border.

Four hours later, we arrived and opened the tin box. The leguan was still in a state of silent fury, and hadn’t touched a morsel. He seemed to know all about army ration packs.

We left him to wander about the camp. In fact, we never saw him again, but news of his exploits reached our ears months later. He’d somehow made his way into a helicopter and when the chopper pilot took off on his evening reconnaissance flight, the lizard went berserk and forced him to make a very hasty landing.

I left the border camp the next day, bound for Grootfontein in a Land Rover with the driver and signalman for company.

Three hours out, something in the engine went Spang! and we found ourselves in the dead-hush of the northern scrublands with a tin of bully beef and two smokes to share between us.

So we set up a cigarette roadblock and stopped civilians mad enough to travel the Great White.

A large trucker gave us a couple of menthol smokes, a little old lady in a Mini Minor handed over half a pack of Texan Plains and both parties were released on their own recognisances.

“Why are you dressed like hoboes in those overalls?” they wanted to know.

“We’re from Grootfontein,” I growled at them.

Ah, yes, they nodded. They had heard about our camp of retards.

The day wore on. We just sat in the heat. And sat some more. Like baboons on a rock, we quibbled a little and then lapsed into a mindless, staring silence.

Finally, we were rescued by some engineers. Back in camp, my store partner Jimmy told me the good news:

“A guy called Vermeulen is prepared to give us a case of beers a week if we make a nest for him at the back of the store.”

The nest was simple: we moved two columns of huge tyres out, thus creating a double bed-sized cavity in the storage area. Vermeulen did the rest. He dragged in two mattresses, a pile of magazines and about enough beer to satisfy a large Australian wedding party. And then he simply disappeared.

Jimmy and I would go about our business of minding the store each day, and now and again we would hear a gentle snore from the back.

We never saw Vermeulen again, but every Friday there would be two dozen ice-cold Windhoek Lagers laid out for us on the toolbox in the store. And when someone in authority ever approached, we would just raise our voices and clang about with tyre levers, to drown out the snores of the King of Grootfontein: Vermeulen, the laziest man alive.

Pretty soon the Min Dae (Few Days) syndrome struck. I knocked 40 nails halfway into the splitpole wall of our store. Each morning we would fight over who was to smash another nail in, signifying one day closer to Civilian Street.

Mal Smit was celebrating his 40 Days thing in true style. Each week, he would mail a little piece of his jackhammer home to his mother in Otjiwarongo.

Corporal Kat had vowed to stop Mal Smit from stealing military equipment, but Smit outsmarted him every time. Kat resorted to blockading the Grootfontein post office. Mal Smit still managed to send off some part of his jackhammer each week. The main body of the jackhammer grew thinner and thinner as our time of departure approached.

The drivers decided to hold a 40 Days party out at the shooting range, where no one could remember the last person to qualify for a sharpshooter badge.

The party began hectically and held its pace right through the evening. At about midnight I was well-oiled and starved. I grabbed a piece of steak, flung it on the grill, turned to shout at someone and then immediately took the meat off and ate it raw.

Finally, someone dropped us off at our tent just before 2 am and I passed out on my bed, sick to my gut. Corporal Kat lumbered in and told me I was on guard duty.

After a lot of noise, it was agreed that I should stand guard right outside my tyre store. So off I sloped, in no shape at all.

I found a pile of used truck-tyres outside my store. But first, I had to get rid of the raw meat inside me. Then I returned to the tyres and dived in.

The next morning, I was sitting holding my head at the fold-up desk, shuffling papers and breathing to the strangely comforting rhythm of Vermeulen’s snoring at the back, when my friend Claude Maladjusted walked in.

“Funny thing happened to me out in the park,” he told me in his unconcerned hippy way. “I saw this thing on the ground, it looked like a red rubber discus. So I kicked it. So it just disintegrated under my takkie. You know what? I don’t think it was a discus after all.” And then he sauntered out.

Three years later, I found myself sitting under a bridge somewhere in the Orange Free State, wondering where life would take me next. I’d just finished final exams at varsity and was hiking up to Pretoria to be a newspaper reporter.

It was relatively safe and easy to hitchhike about the country in those days. That night was difficult. I suppose, in the fading Free State light, the sight of a bearded, long-haired scruff with a rucksack and a thumb in the air inspired no one to stop.

I made a small fire, ate a packet of crisps, drank deep from a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and went to sleep at the side of the highway.

In the morning, I washed my teeth with sherry and slipped under the back of the flyover and used the South West Africa section of my roadmap for toilet paper. Big mistake. Two weeks later I received call-up papers to go play in the army again. And my three-month sojourn would take me through the heart of South West.

You’d think by now they would have lost my file at military headquarters. I had not covered myself with glory during my national service. But they wanted me back in uniform and shipped, after some refresher training, into Angola.

I had no idea what that war was about. It was still all Tigger and Woozel stuff to me. I was, however, well aware that it was a case of dog biscuits or detention barracks. So I bitched and moaned in my usual brave style, dug out some old army kit and found my way to De Brug (near Bloemfontein) for three weeks of fitness training, fire and movement.

I fell in with a bunch of like-minded guys and we moved into a tent together and slept on the ground. Life was made interesting by one Lance Corporal Cuddle, bagpiper for the regiment and member of our ten-man squad.

Every morning just before dawn, the bagpipe warm-up session sounded like seven cats in a bag trying to do each other grievous sexual bodily harm. Everyone swore at Cuddle.

But I grew to love his pipes dearly. Once he had them tuned, they were pure single malt. Cuddle would stride off into the morning like a warrior from Glenfiddich or Glen Grant. Somewhere there.

Then there was Gus the Gunner, a stocky, swarthy man given to acts of generosity, short outbursts of prayer and muttered words of devotion to his beloved machine gun. Gus could also run all day and never break his stride.

Bob the Bird Man and I were the only unmarried ones in the section, so they made us scouts and our job was to walk ahead of the rest of the mob on patrol. When you could snap his nose out of the Roberts Birds of South Africa and direct his mind to matters on the ground, Bob seemed quite affable. He was, in today’s parlance, a twitcher.

I somehow lost interest in keeping myself clean after the first three days at this bush camp. Hell, they make you sleep on the ground, they make you run around all day and clean your rifle at all hours and then they expect you to rush off and shower so you can get dirty all over again. Forget that for a lark. They called me Pigpen. I didn’t care.

I remember three things from that Angola training camp: Cuddle’s bagpipes, singing Welsh coal mining songs for beer in the Officers’ Mess and, after three weeks of lousy food, finding out that the cooks had kept all the best meat cuts for themselves. Dealing with those cooks was difficult because they had protection from the brass and could run quite fast.

Four cramped train-days later, we arrived at Grootfontein. I was the only one in my group who had been there before. I told them all the old stories, about what a cute little camp this was, the deaf Major, the hookers at the Meteor Hotel, and so on. Even gave them a rundown of my lovely tyre store, which had been my domain four years previously.

So what had happened to my little camp? What was this massive, sprawling city before me? The sign said Grootfontein, but the village had grown into one massive troop displacement complex. Thousands of tents lay before us, jets roaring above, trucks lined up in their hundreds, armour pieces in full array, rows upon rows of riflemen running this way and that. It was like a Hollywood epic. The only thing is: Hollywood and the CIA had left the building.

The war had turned serious while I wasn’t looking.

They gave us brand-new trucks, German Unimogs, piles of ration packs and pointed us in the general direction of Luanda. I’ve no idea where we went, because then we operated on a need-to-know basis. No one thought we needed to know. Except for the thing with the tanks. Which, in fact, we didn’t need to know.

Some guys from Military Intelligence choppered down and told us all about the new-fangled Russian tanks we could expect to see bearing down on our positions shortly. They had fearsome guns, impenetrable armour and could see at night with infra-red sights.

That’s it. I’m pissing off home, I said. Began gathering up my few things and walking south. Ten minutes later I found myself back in our base, having marched off in a semicircle. I was a human boomerang.

At night, we used to lie in trenches on guard, two guys at a time, talking about the Russian tanks. All we had was one machine gunner and a drunken mortar man. Between them they might just have been able to scratch the side of the Russian tank.

Every day, we moved positions so nobody could get a fix on where we were, including ourselves. Cuddle’s bagpipes were banned in the bush, so we gave him all our ratpacks and there was a hot meal waiting for us each evening when we returned.

I was totally night blind. We all discovered this one night on patrol when I led the boys in the wrong direction, fell into a donga and knocked myself out for a couple of hours. I woke up in total darkness, nearly wet myself and went back to sleep again. By the light of an Angolan dawn, I saw I was only five metres out of camp. No more night moves for us.

Bob the Birder was almost worse. He would spot a double-crested-triple-billed necktwitter in a tree, haul out his Roberts, confirm the sighting and then follow it for the rest of the afternoon. Not realising that he was actually leading us all after the bird and away from the patrol path.

The only shot I ever fired in Angola was a panicky round loosed off at an Angolan steer. Our lieutenant decided we needed fresh meat after our ratpacks failed to drop out of the sky.

So we found this herd of cattle and chased a steer across the road at the back of the Unimog, where the lieutenant was waiting, perched on the tailboard, his rifle at port. He shot the animal, it fell down and he motored off in the Mog to get more support and a big knife. It was barbecue time. I was left in charge of the Angolan steer.

I had a smoke, whittled some wood, thought about writing a letter and then, suddenly, the beefer came alive again and charged me like Angry Meat from Hell, with his eyes distended, his jaw flapping and his horns aimed at my chest. I dropped him two feet from me and stood there shaking. War is hell.

The braai afterwards was even less of a success. Our leader had shot the fellow in the spleen, so the meat was off. Cuddle made us a Dog Biscuit Delight and we all spent the afternoon on our truck, tanning in rifle oil. And then we were given two days’ leave at Calueque Dam, got drunk and were thrown into detention for the rest of our time.

“So now let’s go off to Grootfontein,” I said to Jules a lifetime later, as we finished our snack and headed for the car park. “I have to put some ghosts to bed …”

Chapter 26: Grootfontein and Beyond

Back to the Meteor

Grootfontein’s Meteor Hotel, my weekend refuge in the early seventies, had become a one-star Travel Inn while my back had been turned for 30 years.

We used to call this place “Four in One” for the fact that, at the fag-end of a Saturday night, there would usually be four soldiers fighting amongst themselves for the attentions of one preening local woman of indeterminate age and origin. After a few months of Fort Grootfontein, anybody in a skirt looked like Hollywood to the likes of us desperate dog-biscuiteers.

After we dropped our gear in the best room in the house, Jules and I ventured out to the courtyard, the ancient site of some of my finest teenage drinking bouts. We even sat in Bokkie Corner, where my mates and I used to count the beers – and the days left in this man’s army. I felt nothing. There were no lingering traces of S’ar Major Mole, Corporal Kat or Vermeulen, our tyre store tenant. Just a very friendly waiter, some toasted sandwiches and a cold beer.

“OK, I’m ready for Hoba,” I said to Jules a while later.

Let me tell you about Hoba. Just outside the town of Grootfontein lies the largest object to have landed on Earth intact from outer space. She’s a fabulous, 60-tonne meteorite made of iron and nickel, kind of square and hulking, wedged into a limestone deposit on the farm Hoba-West, but she’s a celestial body, the real thing.

Her rivals reside in New York City and in Mexico. In the 1890s, the famed Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary brought the Ahnigito Meteorite home from Greenland. Peary rather hopefully estimated its mass at 90 tonnes, but it weighed in at just over 30, half the size of Aunty Hoba. Next in line is the Bacubirito Meteorite of Mexico, weighing 24,5 tonnes. Many thousands of years ago, a meteorite much bigger than Hoba and her contenders landed in Arizona, but it broke up into little bits. It made an awfully big hole out in the desert, but left very little of itself behind.

Strolling past Hoba without knowing the story, you might not think much of her. To many geologists, however, Hoba has become something of a Holy Grail, because she comes from out there, possibly forged by the early beginnings of our solar system. They say Hoba could well have been a minor planet that suffered a meltdown maybe 300 million years ago, perhaps after a brush with another planet. No one can pinpoint the date of her arrival on Earth, blazing through the atmosphere to land up here in northern Namibia, but they say it’s somewhere between 30 000 and 80 000 years ago. Whenever she landed, the Hoba Fireball (as she was then briefly known) must have given Earth’s audience one helluva lightshow.

“It is all too easy to envy the ‘Namibians’ of the time their good fortune in being spectators to the grand finale of Hoba’s space flight,” said Michael Brittan in his book, Discover Namibia. “Yet the awesome happenings must have prompted much spiritual supplication among the tremulous populace, to say nothing of the trail of psychological scars which it may have left. It must be remembered that the saga of civilisation still tells of a time when meteorites which fell to Earth were believed to have been sent by the gods.”

Whichever way you look at it, Namibia is indeed a country of fallen stars. You’ll find little meteorites in southern Namibia and on display in Windhoek. This is serious Big Sky Country. Lawrence Green, of course, calls the meteorites “shrapnel from the sky”, and digs out another priceless anecdote surrounding the phenomenon.

A Nama chief living in the Bethany district once sold a meteorite (For Sale: Namibian Stones – nothing’s changed) to a passing smous (trader) for a barrel of rum. The meteorite was so heavy it broke the trader’s wagon and had to be left behind in the bush. The chief reclaimed the meteorite and sold it a number of times to unwitting passers-by, who would also find the weight unbearable. Finally, someone came along with a really strong wagon and dragged it off.

And although you can see marks on her where people have taken a sample or two, no one’s managed to drag Hoba, the Alien Queen of Namibia, from her limestone bed.

After our rather monastic cell (with communal showers and toilet) in Fort Namutoni, the room at the Meteor Travel Inn came over like top-drawer Las Vegas. The bed went on forever, we had our very own en-suite bathroom and, praise be to St Christopher, there was a TV set. I ran off across the road and shopped at the bottle store for whisky and lime schnapps. I also found a place that sold rolls, ham, biltong and corn chips. We flung ourselves on the bed and had a royal boarding-school pig-out feast in front of the TV.

Within minutes of those awful flickering images, I wanted to jump back in the bakkie and head out to the desert again. After two months of swerving about The Mystic (our new collective name for the Kalahari, Namaqualand and Namibia), reality bytes of Hurricane Ivan, the fox-hunting issue in Britain and the war in Iraq were too much to process. We switched off the TV, put Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus album on the laptop sound system and staged the famous Meteor Travel Inn Strip Gin Rummy International Challenge.

Later, we immersed ourselves in very hard water that the soap turned chalky white.

“Look, I’m finally bathing in the milk of asses,” my rather schnappsy wife called from the bathroom. All was very well here at the Meteor, and my army ghosts kept a discreet distance.

The next day Jules and I went in convoy up the Great White to Rundu. With the faintest of hangover headaches, just like we used to in the old days.

We soon hit the Makalani Palm Belt, which ranks up there with seeing your first Tropic of Capricorn baobab back home in South Africa. Once we crossed the veterinary disease control point (the rinderpest gate) we were in the land of the Kavango. Each thatch-hut village had its own craft speciality: giant clay pots, male busts, big birds.

We met David Punga, who specialised in wooden aeroplanes, helicopters and luxury motor vehicles. Inside one of David’s large cars were two startled wooden passengers. David reached inside, set the speedo dial at 100 km/h and we all fell about laughing. The passengers found nothing funny in it, however.

“We used to drive this road with our big trucks and our sunglasses and trade our overalls and our bully beef for huge carved drums and very exotic masks,” I recalled to Jules. “We were tourists with FN rifles.”

But nothing from those days could spoil the mood in the bakkie right now. This Kavango drive was a jolly experience. We stopped and met Paul Jack, a guy on a bicycle carrying an enormous load of firewood. He told us the Kavangos were the friendliest people on Earth, smiled for a photograph and carried on cycling northwards.

We reached the bustling river town of Rundu just after lunchtime. We drove past bars with names like Club Serious and dusty suburbs with dirt yards, skirted a busy marketplace and made our way through indigenous and blue gum forests to Sarasungu River Lodge, our home for one night.

From our chalet, I could see the Calais Village across the Kavango River in Angola. I remembered buying many pairs of the well-known Calais takkies, locally-made canvas boots we all loved to wear as we sat in the shade of a Cuca shop somewhere in the bush, drinking Portuguese beer with a shot or two of that head-banging Aguardente liqueur. All so exotic.

We went out on the river in a little motorboat, and the air was hazy from spring burning in the bush. The good citizens of Calais were all having their evening baths in the river. The smell of carbolic soap wafted across the water. Some kids called out, some saucy girls flashed their breasts, some waved, some turned away in modesty. The children of Angola, from a distance, looked like the happiest Huckleberry Finns on Earth. Then we drifted closer, and I saw a one-legged youngster with a crutch, trying to keep up with his mates on the riverbank.

“Lots of landmines still on that side,” said our guide, a young lodge manager called JP. I fell silent for a time, crumpled back into my own memories.

There was a thriving, informal cross-border business on the go. Ferries, both mekoros (wooden canoes) and motorboats, were taking people backwards and forwards across the river. We floated past a trucking camp on the Namibian side. The vehicles were parked under trees, the drivers were lighting fires and stray dogs were stretched out hopefully on the sand nearby. Fishermen passed us, hauling in their tiny catches. We let out a few optimistic lines, trawling for bream or tigerfish, but with no success. It hardly mattered, once the seal on that first sunset beer was cracked.

I remembered Rundu as a pretty nervous place, back in the seventies. There was the matter of that ongoing war, to be sure. But, as I later discovered, Rundu was also the centre of a massive cross-border smuggling operation that involved rhino horn, elephant ivory, drugs and guns. Shady sorts in a sunny place, as the saying goes.

Now it came across as a very busy yet isolated town, with Namibians and Angolans all mixed up together in social, linguistic and economic ways. The Dodgy Gang was probably still in town working those old smugglers’ routes but, as we found out over Texas-sized T-bone steaks that evening, other issues were in play.

At supper, we complimented the Sarasungu owner, John Craill, on his very reasonable rack rates.

“After the French tourists were killed, I bought the place for a song,” he said. “So I feel no need to rip people off.”

Few people living in Rundu or further along the Caprivi Strip, especially those involved in tourism, would forget the events of 3 January 2000 in a hurry. A French family of tourists – two parents and their three children – were attacked on the Trans-Caprivi Highway about 50 km east of Bagani.

Bandits in uniform opened fire on the Bidoin family’s rental campervan, killing Michael (18), Aurelie (15) and Cecile (10). Their parents, Claude and Brigitte, both teachers on the French island of Mayotte, were critically wounded.

Just before this tragic and merciless killing, armed men in uniform shot at a minibus and a bakkie not far from the Omega military base in the Caprivi. The wounded drivers of the vehicles, which were loaded with foreign nationals, somehow managed to reach Andara Catholic Hospital, where they received some basic treatment before being flown to Windhoek. The drivers, who worked for a Danish non-governmental organisation, underwent operations for multiple gunshot wounds to their legs and were eventually stabilised.

The military commander at Bagani told the media that his men were preparing to drive out to the scene of the first shooting when the French family’s hired campervan was discovered in the middle of the road with its headlights on.

“The soldiers who found this vehicle saw a woman running, holding one of her arms,” said an officer. “They came closer and saw a man badly wounded outside the van.”

Inside the campervan, they discovered the dead bodies of Claude and Brigitte’s children. They had died of multiple bullet wounds. Their parents, who miraculously survived, had each taken at least half a dozen bullets to various parts of their bodies.

Various armed groups were blamed in the media blizzard and shock that ensued. It was Unita forces fighting the Angolan MPLA government, some said. Others accused rogue Angolan government soldiers of the attacks. Whatever faction spawned the killers, the result was disastrous for the entire region. A carefully cultivated Caprivi tourism flower that was just about to bloom was lopped off at the head. Four years later, when we passed this way, the after-effects were still being discussed. Tourist numbers were gradually starting to climb.

“In fact,” someone down in Swakop had told us previously, “the attacks in the Caprivi affected the whole country. The rest of the world just heard the word ‘Namibia’ and took us right off their itinerary.”

The Caprivi Strip, this “crazy, colonial finger” stretching eastwards into the underbelly of Angola and, eventually, Zambia, is the creation of nineteenth-century Germany, which longed for access from its sandy colonial possession in the west to the Zambezi and the trading ports of the Indian Ocean. To those mapmakers back in Europe, it looked like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, they failed to notice a “smallish obstacle” called the Victoria Falls. Anyhow, the Zipfel (as some would affectionately call it) is now part of Namibia, even though it doesn’t look very Namibian at all.

We continued to Andara Mission, passing huge piles of gathered thatch on the roadside. We looked briefly for a historic watermill and a tree bearing the name and date Hendrik van Wyk – 1879 with no success. Lawrence Green notes that after this ill-fated Dorsland Trekker had been killed by a local Mbukushu chief, “his grief-stricken widow, realising that there was no escape, lit a barrel of gunpowder, killing herself and the baby, the murderer and a number of tribesmen”.

“Why do they call this place Popa Falls?” Jules wanted to know when we arrived at the famous body of water. “Popa Rapids, maybe, or Popa Narrows, yes. But not Popa Falls.” She was right. This was where the Kavango River dropped a few metres in a series of tumbling rapids, no more.

We paid our N$20 entry fee to a jovial barman at the restaurant, walked past the camping grounds and discovered a security guard in a deep sleep, waded in the waters until we got bored and went back for a beer.

While long-tailed glossy starlings fossicked around near a leaking tap, we sat in the shade drinking beer and eavesdropping on a very loud cellphone conversation being conducted by a pork-chop-eating South African businessman behind us. To be reminded of the commercial pressures of Johannesburg so far out here in the middle of nowhere was not comfortable. We decided to escape this nasty experience and take our chances with whatever the Caprivi Game Park had on offer.

Chapter 27: Rundu–Impalila Island

Caprivi Stripped

One hundred thousand elephants were said to be among the casualties of the Angolan War, which dragged on from the 1970s until the turn of the Millennium. Take one Angolan elephant and, using mental computer graphics, multiply that by 100 000 in your head. Add God knows how many rhino and herds of smaller game to that picture. Now imagine hunting all of that. Think of all the gunfire. Think of those happy chaps in helicopters, rubbing their hands with glee. Relishing all that ivory. Killing off a potential tourism business that could have preserved the lives of the animals and sustained hundreds of thousands of inhabitants for centuries.

Jules and I have a friend called De Wet Potgieter, undoubtedly one of South Africa’s finest investigative journalists. De Wet, despite many threats and coercion attempts, produced a controversial book called Contraband, dealing with South Africa’s role in the international trade in ivory and rhino horn. Much of the book deals with the area through which Jules and I now found ourselves: the Caprivi Game Park.

This is what environmentalist Craig van Note of Monitor, the Conservation, Environmental and Animal Welfare Consortium, told Washington in August 1988:

“According to reliable sources in Africa, a massive smuggling ring has been operating for years, with the complicity of South African officials at the highest levels of the government and military, to funnel ivory and other contraband out of Africa. None of this ivory shows up on any customs book in Africa and very little at destinations in the Middle East, India and the Far East,” he said.

“Aircraft, trucks, ships and even railroads bring the booty south to depots where huge stockpiles of ivory are maintained in South Africa. That CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) member nation, which projects the image of a conservation-minded model for Africa, is in reality one of the largest wildlife outlaws in the world.”

Jonas Savimbi and his Unita rebel forces in Angola, he added, “largely supplied by South Africa, have ruthlessly liquidated perhaps 100 000 elephants to help finance the war”.

“South African taxpayers financed the war,” I exploded at no one in particular as Jules read to me from De Wet’s book while we drove through the eerily quiet and green part of the Caprivi Strip, where those now dead elephants once criss-crossed the area with ease and in great numbers. “Me, I think those tusks went to finance some individuals’ rich and famous lifestyles.”

I later found out that while I was running around Angola, worrying myself sick about the efficacy of a Russian tank, piles of rifle cases packed with ivory were being shipped out of Rundu marked as “dental equipment”. There was, indeed, a total onslaught. Just ask the ghost-elephant herds of Angola. They know.

One hero looms large in this area, in the unlikely form of South Africa’s legendary Colonel Jan Breytenbach, founder of the much-feared 32 Battalion and, earlier, commander of 44 Parachute Brigade.

Back in the 1980s, the late great photographer Herman Potgieter and I met a remarkable man named David Barr. This, however, is not the story of David, so I’ll be brief. A Vietnam vet, this Californian lover of Harley Davidsons ended up as Colonel Breytenbach’s gunner in Angola during his stint with the 44 Para Brigade.

They tripped a landmine one day and David ended up under the vehicle.

“Colonel Breytenbach saved my life,” he told me. “For that, and for the way he led his men, he will always be my hero.”

David Barr lost both his legs. That did not stop him from strapping on some special prosthetics and taking up skydiving, however. Nor did it stop him from riding his Harley (called The Old Dog) around the world, several times. Herman and I saw David again in the Outback town of Kununurra, in north-east Australia, eight years later. He was lean, fit and strong (no more Jack Daniels and hard rock living) and he’d fought Tuaregs off in the Sahara with one of his metal legs. And he still asked after Jan Breytenbach.

Unusual family, the Breytenbachs. One brother was the “terrorist-poet” Breyten, and I met him while covering one of his treason trials in the Pretoria Supreme Court. The other was top photographer Cloete, with whom I worked on various magazine assignments in the 1980s. I had never met Jan, but no one in uniform back then could possibly be unaware of his legend.

I often wondered how dinner with the Three Brothers Breytenbach would go …

They made Jan Breytenbach Chief Conservator of the Western Caprivi. He entered the conservation fray with the same single-minded focus that he had deployed in the field of battle.

De Wet Potgieter writes that, after confronting one of the highest ranked SADF officers over the matter of an Air Force helicopter laden with ivory from Savimbi on its way to Defence Minister General Magnus Malan, Jan Breytenbach was removed from the Caprivi.

“It was Jan Breytenbach’s strong belief in nature conservation and the stubborn way he had refused to yield to demands by certain of his superiors that cost him his position as part-time nature conservationist for the Western Caprivi while still a serving SADF officer.”

In one of his books, Eden’s Exiles, Breytenbach says:

“It was almost a passion among a great many South Africans who served on the border to return to the Republic with a well-matched pair of elephant tusks. The second most desirable item was a leopard skin.”

And there was my friend Mal Smit from Grootfontein, innocuously sending home no more than his old, beloved jackhammer in little chunks, while the “real soldiers” were trading in tusks…

In the year before Namibia’s independence, according to Potgieter, “the stream of trucks moving tons of contraband from Angola and Namibia increased”.

“Just let it go,” Jules said, as we left the park and entered the Kongola checkpoint at the Kwando River. But I couldn’t leave those days just yet, because pretty soon we were driving past the now-cleared site of Fort Doppies, where Jan Breytenbach once ran a “guerrilla school” with the aid of a young lion called Terry.

We all eventually heard about Terry, especially after a particular occasion when some apartheid cabinet ministers visited the camp. After they had been wined and dined in grand style, one venerable cabinet minister was busy using the “long drop” toilet when young Terry tackled him through the hessian wall. The politician screamed in terror, grabbed his trousers and ran straight through the wall, with the lion “snapping at the minister’s bare buttocks”, according to the irrepressible Breytenbach.

“Now there’s a story I like,” said Jules, as our Isuzu got its first real taste of Namibian “slip-slide” through the Great Caprivi Sand Forest. We were following Lance Young of Susuwe Island Lodge through the towering jackalberries, leadwoods and Kalahari apple-leaf trees. Then we encountered African mangosteen, raintree, Rhodesian teak, Natal mahogany and good old camelthorn. All around us were traces of elephant dung. And then, through the trees, we spotted a breeding herd. They flapped their ears warningly and fixed us with bloodshot eyes.

We arrived at the landing next to the papyrus-lined Kwando River, put our stuff in a flat-bottomed boat and drifted across to the lodge on the island, serenaded all the way by carmine bee-eaters in their little pink-and-turquoise evening suits.

The very long trip was winding down to a natural geographic conclusion. The last section in the Caprivi had, for me, been bittersweet. It was just great to be out on a flatboat an hour later, with nothing to worry about except getting a little bee-eater to sit still for a photograph. I thought about Jan Breytenbach a lot, but then a squacco heron flew overhead, an enormous coppery-tailed coucal crash-landed into the reeds nearby and I was into the Mystic once more.

In the morning we were out again before dawn. The smooth river was creased by the wake of our boat, and the fluffy phragmites glowed pink in the rising sun. Jacanas, the early birds, trotted over sleeping water lilies, their flowers closed like the fists of babies. We puttered slowly along, rousing a pod of hippos that popped up behind us like indignant corks.

It was strange to be in a land of plenty, of water, grazing and trees, after the delicately calibrated desert ecosystems we’d been through these past weeks.

When the afternoon light grew rich, Lance took us by vehicle to the Horseshoe, a nearby lake fed by the Kwando.

“Not long ago I saw more than 500 elephant here,” he said. Yeah, yeah. And now you’re going to show us fresh air, I thought. As travel journalists, we get that all the time. Wow. You should have been here last week. Then you would have seen Narina trogons by the dozen. Black rhino by the gross. Palmnut vultures in their hundreds. And so on. But I was enjoying the drive, and didn’t really care.

“The elephants go to Angola for the early rains first,” he continued, “and when they come back here they’re edgy. I think there’s still a lot of poaching going on in the north. But they calm down as the season goes on.”

We found a city of baboons enjoying the soft sunlight of the day. There was a Chacma soap opera going on by the waterside, and we sat and watched Bush TV. Apes of our Lives. Newborn babies stumbling about, youngsters chasing each other up a tree, aunts deep in conversation, the family drunk lying listlessly on his back in the shade. And, from a vantage point, a very large boss baboon watching over everyone, wearing a serious frown.

Then the elephants came out to drink, their babies sheltered among the great pillared legs and round bellies. The herd matriarch lingered, nonchalantly edging along the shore towards us, occasionally lifting her trunk as if to gauge the mood of the people watching. Needless to say, she could only have detected a kind of enchanted reverence wafting from us. Nevertheless, she took her herd around us. Bush TV had just got a whole lot better.

When elephants get near water, they always make you smile. They act as if they can’t contain themselves a second longer and surge forward, kicking up vast amounts of dust. This large herd of elephants – about 100 of them – jostled for position along the shoreline and settled in for a long drink-up.

Having read so much about the horrors that their ancestors had faced not so long ago, I was hugely relieved to see part of the great Angolan herds of yore.

Susuwe is part of the New Deal sweeping through the Caprivi, in which local community members benefit from tourist enterprises in their tribal areas. The lodge hired more than 20 local people, it was run on a shareholding basis with the area tribe and guests paid a voluntary levy that went towards “good works”, like schools and water pipelines. There were craft and firewood projects and education systems in place. This is where life gets better for everyone, I thought.

After breakfast and farewells we headed for Katima Mulilo, past the sign that read “Speed Kills, Condoms Save”, the Pass Me Not Food Supply shop and the Think First Village. We bought a slightly aged Namibian newspaper that told us how Oprah Winfrey had given away 276 free Pontiacs on her show. We drove on through the border post for a brief swerve into Botswana.

Shortly after entering the Chobe National Park, Jules and I had to stop for a while and watch a gaggle of ground hornbills laughing their heads off while one of their number did a famous snake-swallowing act. We only left once the last millimetre of snake-tail had disappeared down the bird’s bulging crop.

Lunchtime found us with hamburgers and beer under slow fans on the veranda at the Chobe Safari Lodge, watching South Africa lose a televised cricket match to a rampant West Indian side.

At 3 pm we passed back through Botswana Customs. Albert Muyoba from Impalila Island Lodge picked us up in a boat and we sped over the cool waters of the Chobe River to Impalila Island Lodge.

I had hoped they wouldn’t recognise me from the previous time. A year or so before, I had road-tested a bottle of Karoo Agave (which tastes like five-star Mexican tequila), pronounced it great, embarked on a course of anti-malarial Larium, had a huge breakfast at Johannesburg International Airport, taken a scheduled flight up to Bulawayo and arrived in Zimbabwe shaken, sweating and homicidal from the chemical cocktail inside me. Colin Bristow, a pilot, safari guide and expert caller of furious bird parties (he made like an invading pearl-spotted owl), took my measure, loaded me in his Cessna 210 and flew me right up into a midday thermal.

We landed at Impalila where I nearly murdered a British tourist for greeting me, and hid in my lodge unit waiting for the Jekyll-Hyde feeling to pass. The next day it was still there. While interviewing the manager, Simon Parker, in his office, I saw a black mamba creeping around the rafters. I thought it was the Agave-Larium talking, until Simon said:

“That snake makes me uncomfortable. Let’s go and do this outside.”

“How are you, Chris?” were Haydn Williams’ first words as he greeted us. Damn. Haydn had taken us tiger-fishing last time. Africa might forgive, but she never forgets.

The next morning we went to a fishing village with Albert on our way to Botswana Customs. These were the descendants of the Zambian Lozi people and we were visiting their temporary fishing camp, which looked disappointingly empty. I should say “almost”, because there were in fact two men there who had the look of all-night drinkers.

While the patient Albert tried to take us on a cultural tour of the fishing camp, one of the drinkers began to heckle us via Albert. We found out they’d all been making “seven-day sorghum beer”, and possibly there had been too much sampling. Albert relented, giving the man one American dollar, and turned to me:

“OK. You can photograph him now.”

I was incredulous.

“What? A photograph of a drunk next to a hut? I don’t want it.”

Albert shrugged his shoulders helplessly, as if to say work with me here, OK? I got the message. Posed the lolling man in front of a fishing net. Snapped once. Thanked him. Climbed back into the boat. And as we left the island, the rest of the villagers all poured out of the bushes in their droves. Not all cultural visits are a roaring success …

Without much ceremony, we pointed the dusty Isuzu south for the very first time on the trip and drove through Botswana’s many cattle disease checkpoints, run with military precision.

We stopped at Nata Lodge for a bite to eat and decided to stay over because the price was right and the beer was cold. There we were, at the edge of the great Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans, without an ounce of curiosity left to go out and experience them.

Instead, we settled into our safari en-suite tent, cooked up some two-minute noodles, drank single malt and played the Nxai Pan Rummy Challenge with Black Twos Wild Thing. Admired my tough old Swakopmund kudu veldskoene covered in diesel and dust and, in the morning, drove back past two dead donkeys being devoured by white-backed vultures.

As we pulled up in front of our home in Wendywood, the odometer gave us a reading of 10 004 km.

“Which is quite incredible,” said my fact fundi wife, “when you think that the diameter of the Earth is only 12 000 km.”

“What’s for supper?” I asked …

Chapter 28: Palmwag, Damaraland

Rock Star Safari

Never say goodbye to Namibia. I’d done this rash thing once before, and look where it landed me. After that 10 000-km journey, Jules and I thought maybe we’d stay out of the desert for a decade or so. I even gave my Namibia map to an interested friend.

Yet here we were eight months later, drinking good old Tafel Lager at Windhoek Airport, waiting to meet our very own charter pilot. Like rock stars or something. On a return engagement, five nights only.

The compact Ingrid Benson arrived in her Sefofane Airways Cessna (ZS-Papa Foxtrot Romeo) and loaded us up, along with Steve and Maggie Lomax from Manchester, England. She was booked to drop us off in Damaraland and continue north to the Kunene with the Lomaxes, an affable couple on a pre-honeymoon honeymoon. Sort of a romantic practice run.

The winter landscape of Namibia, at a height of 3 000 metres, is like the patterned back of a sleeping Nile crocodile. Rocky outcrops, dry river courses with their drainage lines, the claw marks of natural erosion and dark mountains were all interlocked into a tawny jigsaw shape. Madagascar makes biologists froth with excitement as new species constantly reveal themselves. The ancient and natural stone temples of Namibia do the same thing for geologists. Every rock trauma, every scar, is splayed open and telling a story.

“Am I mad?” wrote Jules in her journal that night. “Looking down, I felt the mountains were beginning to sing together in deep baritone voices, like the private conversations of elephants, just below our level of hearing. A silent opera in a very old amphitheatre.”

After two hours in the air, the Cessna descended sweetly onto the gravel plains amid the wolf’s milk bushes, to finally kiss its own lost shadow. This was Palmwag, Damaraland.

Kapoi Kasaona from Wilderness Safaris’ Rhino Camp was there to meet us. Kapoi straddles two cultures. He’s a modern Himba from Purros whose father had been determined to educate him well. On the drive, he spoke to us about his dad, whom he obviously admired greatly.

“My father says if a thing is not planned, it’s not worth doing at all,” he said.

Kapoi began working locally for the Save the Rhino Trust some four years before, doing camel patrols to track the rhino on this huge wilderness concession of half a million hectares next to the Skeleton Coast National Park.

“In the 1960s this used to be farm land,” he told us. “Cattle, sheep and goats were here, but there were also about 300 black rhinos. Then the border wars began, and so did the poaching for rhino horn. The locals mostly did the shooting, the South Africans mostly did the buying.”

Soon, there were only about 30 rhino left in the whole area. Then Blythe Loutit formed the Save the Rhino Trust. Today, if you ask the environmentalists about numbers in the Palmwag area, they’ll naturally be coy about answering. But it’s believed that the rhino population is back to about half of its 1960 count.

“It’s a very special animal,” said Kapoi. “We’re talking about Diceros bicornis bicornis – the desert-adapted black rhino.”

Wilderness Safaris and the Save the Rhino Trust had brought tourism to the area, and the community was seeing the benefits. Schools and clinics had been built, and locals were being trained as guides and trackers and lodge staff. Rhino Camp had become an international lodestone for students and scientists; a day spent in the gravel fields of this moonscape in search of wandering rhino had become one of the country’s top adventures.

“But,” said Kapoi, “the best kind of rhino encounter is when the animal doesn’t even know it’s being followed, so there’s minimal stress. The guides always try to bring the tourists in downwind of the rhino, so it never scents them.”

On our previous drive through the district, Jules and I had spotted some feisty camels on a grassy ridge. To impress Kapoi, I suppose, I hauled out my Epson P2000 image storage device and showed him a photograph of one of the camels we’d seen.

“His name is Nelson,” said Kapoi, as if it were the most natural thing for me to be carrying pictures of his beloved beasts in my jacket pocket. “And there, in the background, those are some of the breeding females.” It was I who ended up being impressed.

“You should have seen Dries,” said Kapoi, warming to a beloved subject. “He was hard to stop once he got going. But he wasn’t as crazy as Jan. Let me tell you about Jan. He once led a charge of camels right at a herd of desert elephants.” Normally one prefers to rush away from these peevish giants.

“There we were, riding these camels that were moving at speed towards the elephants. The other trackers and I had no choice but to jump off and run away. That was Jan.”

Kapoi and his camels. He said they were excellent at tracking the black rhinos around Damaraland, being silent and stately in their movements.

“Except for when they knelt down to allow the trackers to climb off,” he said. “The saddles would creak, the rhinos would be alerted and they would run off. Then we’d have to mount the camels again and go find them.”

We later found out that these were the very camels used by explorer Benedict Allen on his three-month crossing of the Skeleton Coast. He trained Nelson, Jan and Andries into something of a safari squad and then took the nervous camels on their well-documented odyssey for the BBC book and TV series called The Skeleton Coast. At journey’s end, Allen donated the camels to the Save the Rhino Trust. And here was I, of the initial opinion that these three fellows were simple Damaraland layabouts with no pedigree to speak of.

Initially, the lunchtime light did not favour the harsh land as we drove on with Kapoi and a French couple from Lyon, Fabrice Bouillot and Corinne Bernard. We passed clumps of Euphorbia damarana, and I remembered those unfortunate bus travellers at Uis who had used the stuff for “barbecue bush” and died horrible deaths.

“That latex from the wolf’s milk bush kills all, except for the kudu and the black rhino,” said Kapoi. “You see those white splashes on the rocks? The rhinos excrete the latex through their urine.”

A blackchested snake eagle banked over us in the late afternoon. The dense air of sea level and the softer light somehow conspired to make it look enormous, like a condor. We drove past the smelly shepherd’s bush with the basalt of the Etendeka Mountains jabbing the sky and then arrived at the clear pools of the Uniab River. Cresting a hillock, we came upon hundreds of springbok in a slow-moving tapestry of creams and fawns, doing the “trekbok” thing, ambling to the horizon in search of something nice to eat.

Just after a ruby sunset, we bounced into the camp, which was set in a lake of plumy lemon-tinged grass in the light of a grapefruit half-moon. There we met relief manager Andrea Staltmeier, bearing cold wet towels for dusty brows.

Over a feast of leek soup, lamb and couscous, Andrea revealed that she came from a small skiing village in Bavaria. Apart from being an adept player of the oboe and the accordion, Andrea had also been an instructor in aerobics and Pilates.

“One day I had a vivid vision of playing traditional Bavarian music to Japanese tourists for the rest of my life,” she said. “And so I fled to Africa.”

There was a certain trick (or should that be “trickle”?) to showering in our tent. Our bucket contained 15 litres of warm water, enough for four minutes of frantic washing. Gallant as ever, I took up only 30 seconds of shower-time and let my wife have the rest. Not for nothing did they call me Pigpen in the army.

Wake-up was before first light. By 6.30 am we were on our rhino-tracking expedition. By the cold light of dawn I had a prickly feeling at the back of my neck. I just knew we were being watched from somewhere. This must have been how the Westward Ho! wagoneers of the American prairies felt as they traipsed through Apache country.

And there they were, the canny beasts, lining the ridges of Damaraland. Looking down at us from a safe distance. Then wheeling in fresh sunlight and galloping off like the magnificent Hartmann’s zebra we knew them to be.

We stopped beside an ant nest, which was ringed by a handy harvest of grass seeds.

“The Damara people collect these seeds,” Kapoi said. “They soak them in water for three days and then add honey.”

There was silence.

“And then what?” Jules asked.

“Then they drink it. Very potent. Very delicious,” Kapoi added with a touch of mischief.

The French were great. We had bonded over red wine and camera talk the night before. I was most impressed by the lyonnais sense of humour.

Stopping by a teenage Welwitschia mirabilis, Kapoi dismissed it as “only 500 years old”.

“That’s very old,” said Fabrice. Kapoi told him a respectable Welwitsch grew to be thousands of years old.

“What’s the point,” asked the Frenchman, “when everything else has a shorter life? It must get very lonely.”

“I suppose that’s what vampires have been asking themselves for ages,” someone quipped. And so we drove on into the morning, learning a little, laughing a lot.

When you go tracking black rhino out here, you actually spend most of the day with your nose in wild lavender, ostrich salad, medicinal Himba plants, fluffy ice bushes and the indomitably green mustard bush, the Salvadora Persica. We tried the salvador berries, which both elephant and Himba delight in, and they tasted like a blend of English mustard and horseradish.

Another salvador tip: the fibrous stems are used locally as toothbrushes.

The basalt rocks began to take on weird shapes in the growing sunlight, and with my macro lens I found some form of life behind almost every stone. On one kopje the bleached branches of dead shrubs looked like the skeletons of a platoon of soldiers who died trying to take the heights.

The radio finally crackled:

“John, John, I’m standing by,” responded Kapoi in Afrikaans. A little while later we came upon John Hendricks, a Damara from Sesfontein who had become a local tracking legend. With John were two trainee trackers. They were after two rhinos who had caught their scent earlier in the day and had led them a merry 20-km chase to an oasis on the Uniab River.

The trainees looked like they were seriously reconsidering their career choices. John, despite having slogged all day over stony ground, looked fresh and ready for another trek. We peered into the thick riverine bush.

“Hell of a place to lose a rhino,” whispered my wife.

We retreated to high ground, the wind blowing steadily in our faces. A fog bank full of sullen clouds rose from the west, where the Uniab joined the Atlantic and flamingos twiddled their toes hopefully in the mud. The wind was driving in from the western ocean side, snaking into the desert along the riverbed.

We all decided to have lunch and re-think our strategy. Kapoi & Co whipped out tables, camping chairs and a repast of quiche, meat pies, salad and mealie bread with jam. The trainee trackers were famished and, after we guests had helped ourselves, they set to with gusto. Then the fickle river wind whipped away a stack of serviettes, which went flapping into Damaraland. The trainees just went on eating while John and Kapoi rushed off and recovered them. The two rhino veterans returned and had a couple of stern words with the younger men.

After lunch we followed John and saw the rhinos, a mother and a four-year-old calf, in a longish depression in the ground. Ma had tremendous dinosaur-like horns – a regular little fat Triceratops. Grey, antediluvian lumps moving confidently through a brown stony desert.

We ran up a hill to get a vantage point, ducking to keep our silhouettes from breaking the horizon line. I hoped like hell the rhinos hadn’t heard me chuffing up the incline. The Mom had definitely sensed something. She swivelled and glared short-sightedly up at the top of the hill, her young boy taking cover behind his mother.

Mother and son stood posing for photographs, turned swiftly and jogged off into the horizon, tails curled pig-like over their backs.

Back at the camp, Andrea poured us a drink and told us about an Italian guest who’d recently visited the area.

“She’d come from the south,” said Andrea. “Somewhere along the line, a horse bit her.” Suddenly this vast country seemed very small indeed.

“We remember her from the roadhouse near the Fish River Canyon,” said Jules. “The lady who wondered if maybe she had rabies.”

I was having a beer on the porch with Fabrice, my newest French friend, when a very large and fearsome armoured cricket climbed up his leg. He looked down and shrugged. I brushed it off. Then we both realised just how scary that little critter really was. If I had come across something half his size back home in Jo’burg, I would have locked us all up and pressed the panic button.

“Yes,” said Fabrice. “Me too. I would have screamed like a girl. Anuzzer beer?”

The next morning, on our way back to the airfield, we were given an amazing “pronking” display by a resident herd of springbok. They were darting about, throwing themselves crescent-backed into the sky, like little jump-jets trying to escape their skins. Full of beans. The girls in the herd looked suitably impressed.

We came across a Namaqua sandgrouse sitting on her eggs in the folds of a Welwitschia, a sight I’ll probably never encounter again. Then a Rüppell’s korhaan that was being mobbed by an angry gang of finchlarks. It was trying to gobble down a baby finchlark as fast as it could. Corinne spotted a leopard at a riverbank. The rest of us missed that sighting, but within minutes we were surrounded by curious Comanche (actually Hartmann’s) zebras that we’d surprised sunning themselves on a ridge.

Suddenly a tiny three-day-old oryx calf, fawn and startled, wobbled across the road into a thicket. Its mother had probably given it instructions to lie still close to the road, but the vehicle noise made it totter up and stumble away. Further on, Kapoi pointed out a scrub hare, lying prone under a bush, not even blinking. Becoming Damaraland.

We dropped the French off at their vehicle at Palmwag Lodge, made the acquaintance of a camel called Tom and went to meet Ingrid at her Cessna. We said goodbye to the splendid Kapoi with the white, white teeth and, like the true rock stars we imagined ourselves to be right then, we were hoisted up into the blue Namibian skies.

Chapter 29: Serra Cafema

Crocodile Country

The boffins say there are six degrees of separation between humans. I once heard an English Business Angel (the rich guys who fall from the sky and save poor entrepreneurs with a timely injection of cash) say South Africans seemed to have only one degree of separation between them.

I was one degree away from putting up my outraged dukes and knocking the wings off said Business Angel for accusing me of being inbred, when he explained himself and saved us all a lot of embarrassment:

“It’s really got nothing to do with how well you play the banjo, or your true feelings for close relatives and farm animals. What I mean is you South Africans all seem to know someone in common, whether you come from Jo’burg or Cape Town or out in the sticks.”

OK then. A compliment. My ruffled feathers were smoothed over once again. I closed my third eye and rubbed the scar on my left shoulder where they surgically removed that tiresome second head at birth.

And so it was, as we aspiring (and not outrageously inbred) rock stars took to the skies in that little Cessna 206 with our private pilot Ingrid Benson, that we began the South African version of nose-rubbing: The Do-You-Know? game.

Ingrid, a bubbly Natal Midlander from the Karkloof area, knew many of our good friends and so, chugging north towards the Angolan border, we gossiped like old ladies across a communal washing line.

As we flew, the operatic, sere Namibian geology unfolded below us. In every broad river valley we saw galaxies of fairy circles, like Earth-freckles. We discussed our various theories on this.

“Termites eating around their nests?” I ventured.

“Euphorbia poisoning, maybe?” suggested wife Jules.

“No, I rather fancy the alien origins of the fairy circle,” declared our pilot. Was this really a good time for Sky Captain Benson to play us her loony tunes? How much trust can you actually put in your Cessna pilot if she believes Jabba the Hutt really does stroll the galaxy?

“Oh, relax,” she laughed, reading our faces like the morning paper. “I’m just talking about little meteor showers falling from outer space. Namibia, as you well know, is famous for its meteor showers. I think these fairy circles are impact impressions.” I eased my finger off the Eject button and enjoyed the ride.

Joining the fairy circles and the spidery lines of the dry rivers down below were the tiny geometric shapes of Himba kraals. We were flying over the massive dry valleys where Dr Georg Hartmann, the geologist-explorer, came with his maps and surveys just before the end of the nineteenth century. Dr Georg named one of the spaces the Hartmann’s Valley. Then he looked up and saw a donkey in pyjamas disappearing from a ridge like a sneaky Hollywood Apache and immediately called it a Hartmann’s zebra. Then he found another valley, saw a river running through it, felt a pang of homesickness and named it after Frau Hartmann: the Marienfluss.

Dr Hartmann, like Messrs Rüppell, Messum and Burchell, was in a rush to adopt Africa into his family, it seems. Or to earn some eternal life credits. It would not be appropriate for me to name anything around here The Marais, however, because my surname means “swamp” in French. But I have my eye on a small wetland or two in the Okavango.

Our landing strip was beaconed by a Land Rover belonging to the legendary Schoeman family, who have a lodge in these parts. Another vehicle pulled up, this one being driven by George Katanga of Wilderness Safaris’ Serra Cafema camp. Bit of a lad, young George. We liked him immediately.

Cafema was a Portuguese explorer over in Angola, and a range of mountains on that side was adopted into his family. The Wilderness camp lies on the Kunene River, not more than 60 km from the Skeleton Coast. George drove us through a little Sahara of sand blown up against dark granitic outcrops, tortured lizard lands with mica schist glittering like space dust on the windblown dunes.

The final descent into the pass leading to the river was spectacular. First, there was a controlled plummet down a dune slope, then a climb up a granite hill. At the top, shining silver in the sun, was the great serpentine, green-fringed Kunene – a water-miracle in this steadfast, stoic desert.

“Kunene means ‘right arm’ in Himba,” said George, “the inference being that ‘right arm’ is really big. Kaoko, on the other hand, means ‘left arm’ or small.”

Two days later, travelling with a group of British tourists on a cultural outing to meet the famous Krokodilla and Ouma, I heard one of the more reserved Brits softly mutter:

“I’d give my Kunene for a beer right now.” Which explains why British humour has no equal. It just bubbles forth from the famed Spring of Droll and needs no laughter-track.

Serra Cafema is one of the world’s truly spectacular areas. Even after travelling so far through this visual giant of a country, we still felt as though we’d come from a land of little chapels into one awe-inspiring cathedral.

This great valley, which is split by the Kunene, was formed by glaciers about 280 million years ago, give or take a week or two, I suppose. This fact lies embedded in the Atlas of Namibia, which also gives the country’s “donkey density” as 140 000. Give or take.

“Crocodiles are the border guards between Namibia and Angola out here,” said George. Upon our arrival at the camp, co-manager Robyn Dreyer warned us not to:

** Succumb to the temptation of an unaccompanied midnight skinny dip in the river;

** Walk within three metres of the water line;

** Trail our fingers in the Kunene while on the evening boat trip.

“The crocs will have you,” she assured us. “They surge out of the water at more than 70 km an hour. You won’t even see them coming.”

And look! There were the Lomaxes, our friends from Windhoek Airport, coming up the boardwalk from their room. They’d had a bit of free drama. One of the staff had a badly split lip. Steve, being a medical man, albeit a dentist, had been called in to do some stitching up.

The next morning our guide, Toni Hart, took the Lomax and Marais parties on a river walk. A grey heron lifted itself off the rocks and flew away, a graceful Japanese painting come to life. We spent a few precious moments with a drop-dead gorgeous violet drop-wing dragonfly dressed in party colours and then found some African wildcat tracks heading under the kitchen.

“He lives there,” said Toni. Sensible fellow.

I got that Hollywood Apache feeling again, of being watched from above. And yes, there they were, a troop of baboons disappearing over a dune. They left a scout behind to trail us and occasionally bark progress reports back at them, while they cavorted like olive circus clowns on the sandy ridges.

Some Himba donkeys spied on us through salt bushes.

“Trans-Kalahari Ferraris,” said Toni.

An African pied wagtail bobbed his butt at us from a salvador bush, and we met the common fiscal with its pronounced white eyebrow, a feature not seen on the species anywhere else. We stopped at a silver-leafed saucer berry bush and sucked on its yellow fruit, which was so sticky it clung to our teeth for dear life.

“The Himba cook them into quite potent liquor,” said Toni. Every species on God’s Earth, it seemed, has a way of getting out of it.

While we were temporarily lost in a world of white-winged tenebrionid beetles, purple morning glories and baby crocodile tracks, we were hailed from behind by a cheerful old man called Dos Santos, who was on his daily fishing mission.

Dos Santos carried a pole strung with an old fishing line, ending in a homemade hook with a wine cork for a float. We asked him, in pidgin Portuguese pantomime, what he used for bait. He scrabbled about in a tatty old bag and brought out a tin half-full of soil and nervous worms.

Dos Santos, a completely rational man of his time, had simply walked out of Angola and its wars in the seventies and set up home alone in a tiny hut made from branches next to the Kunene River. He did odd jobs for the lodge and was growing butternut, pumpkin, carrots and corn for its table.

Utterly fascinated by this happy old Huck Finn, Jules and I swerved off the scheduled walk and followed Dos Santos to his fishing spot, a nearby river backwater. Our baboon sentry barked:

“Two pax veering off with Delta Sierra. Three pax still on path. Leave some lunch for me.” Or something.

We asked about the crocs. Dos Santos said they left him alone. We gave him some tobacco money and the old man put down his fishing pole, lifted his hands to the heavens and invoked a sky-full of blessings upon our heads. We blessed him back and rejoined the main party.

Presently we found ourselves on a rocky peninsula with a splendid view over the Kunene, where the river was pouring itself enthusiastically over a waterfall. Above us in this watered garden moonscape, a blackbreasted snake eagle circled. At our feet, a tiny orange-and-brown skink scurried, occasionally halting to lift his feet and cool the pads under them in a weird imitation of a canoe-paddler.

“A Mexican Wave lizard,” I said

“You’re getting the hang of it,” Toni said.

On the way back we looked in on Dos Santos, who was singing a cheerful song (a) because he had not yet been snaffled by a Kunene crocodile, and (b) because he’d already caught a thick-lipped happy (Thoracochromis albolabris), two leopard squeakers (Synodontis leopardimus) and a slender stonebasher (Hippopotomyris ansorgii).

What’s more, he was going to eat those fine specimens all by himself that night, outside his stick-hut along the Kunene river, by the light of an Angolan moon. What’s not to sing about?

There used to be elephants here, browsing the length of the Kunene in great numbers, until the war wiped them out. On the evening boat trip, we wondered if the area would not be more generously lined with Makalani palms had the soldiers and their machine guns and the grey-shoed politicians in the background spared the herds. Someone, I think it was Toni, had told us a Makalani seed germinates more easily once it’s been through the digestive tract of an elephant. All life is connected.

A hot, heavy, desert wind blew at our backs like the urgent breath of a panting dragon. It batted our boat towards a tiny sandbank, which was technically on “the other side” of the river.

“Look, I’m back in Angola drinking beer after 30 years,” I told Jules, trying not to let the moment descend into a pit of irony. “And look, I’m surrounded by folks in khaki again. But somehow it all feels different. Nicer.”

On the return trip, Toni waved farewell to an almost invisible Dos Santos as he sat on the bank taking in the last glow of sunlight. There was something so essentially happy about that man, I just wanted to jump out of the boat and go sit by his side. But I knew the crocs would show an unhealthy interest in my plans.

That night, around the fire, we met a rich American guy who, for my money, had spent a year too long on Wall Street being a Master of the Universe. Despite being able to call on more cash than my entire suburb back in Jo’burg, he looked a little broken.

“Investment banking: that’s a lot of stress,” remarked Jules. “How did you cope?”

“I drank,” he said, staring deep into the flames.

The next day, while the American contingent was quad-biking about the place, we joined the Brits for a drive out to the Bogenfels arrangement of rocks. We passed Ludwig’s bustards patrolling the sands for crickets while the skies above built up into a stormlight fantasia. Suddenly, Toni stopped the vehicle and dived into a sand dune.

“That’s it, you see,” I assured Sky Captain Benson. “Toni’s got Cafema Fever.”

But the girl was actually just hunting down an armoured lizard that lived in the dune. The lizard was not in for visitors.

“He knows me too well,” said Toni, rejoining us, dusting off half a dune from her ranger outfit.

You can actually get quite stoned, just looking at the desert scenery out here. The various massifs take on the shapes of barking dogs, sharks and dragons. A slight breeze carries the scent of myrrh on the air, and there’s always the chance of spotting a shaggy brown hyena padding over the dunes.

In the afternoon Toni drove us off to meet Oumatjie and Krokodilla, who live in the village of Otapi about eight klicks (kilometres) from the river. Four years ago, Krokodilla (who then bore a now-forgotten name) went off to the Kunene to fetch water, accompanied by her little dog. As she was filling her calabash, a crocodile leapt out of the water and grabbed the right side of her body. The dog charged the crocodile, barking. The distraction worked, for Krokodilla anyhow. The big lizard released the young Himba woman and went for the little dog, which was never seen again.

“Somehow, Krokodilla managed to drag herself ashore,” said Toni, who had befriended both women by now. “She was flown to Windhoek for surgery and stitched up. She recovered well, and wore her hospital gown for many months afterwards. Krokodilla is well known among local Himbas for having flown in an aeroplane and having been to Windhoek. They sometimes mention the croc attack as well.”

We met the two rather gorgeous women in the late afternoon. They received us in their village. Oumatjie, a little tetchy but entranced with Toni’s flame-red hair, was making a basket from Makalani palm leaves. Krokodilla, about seven months’ pregnant with her fifth child, was enjoying a bit of pipe smoking. I don’t know what she had in that pipe, but she looked more relaxed than a Cape Town lounge lizard. Which is hard to do.

We took our photographs, bought some PVC bracelets and said goodbye to this little family in the sand. It was a brief, reasonably gracious encounter, with Toni being a good facilitator, talking in pidgin Himba.

After breakfast the next day, our Sky Captain had us packed and ready for departure. The dune baboons were out on the sand doing an interesting set of dervish-cartwheels like they were on a four-day acid rave in the desert. The African wildcat under the kitchen had eaten the rather handsome lodge rooster in the night and the Brits were practising on their quads in the car park. The lodge at the end of the universe was dealing with another day in Paradise.

“Goodnight Namibia,” I whispered once we were wheels-up and headed for Windhoek. “I’ll see you in my dreams …”

THE READING ROOM –

Suggested literature on Namibia

- NAMIBIA SPACE: Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit (Struik, May 2006)

- LORDS OF THE LAST FRONTIER: Lawrence G Green (Howard B Timmins, 1953).

- SO FEW ARE FREE: Lawrence G Green (Howard B Timmins, 1946).

- TO THE RIVER’S END: Lawrence G Green (Howard B Timmins, undated).

- THERE’S A SECRET HID AWAY: Lawrence G Green (Howard B Timmins, Reprint 1981).

- ON WINGS OF FIRE: Lawrence G Green (Howard B Timmins, 1967).

- SECRET AFRICA: Lawrence G Green (Stanley Paul & Co, 1936).

- PEOPLES OF NAMIBIA: JS Malan (Rhino Publishers, 1995).

- THE KALAHARI (THIRSTLAND REDEMPTION): EHL Schwarz (Maskew Miller, undated).

- THE HENDRIK WITBOOI PAPERS: Translated by Annemarie Heywood and Eben Maasdorp (National Archives of Namibia, 1989).

- ORIGIN AND MEANING OF PLACE NAMES IN THE ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK, NAMIBIA: H. Berry, “Stoffel” Rocher, Mark Paxton, Tryg. Cooper (self published, revised edition 1995).

- A WALK THROUGH PREHISTORIC TWYFELFONTEIN: Shirley-Ann Pager (self published, undated).

- BADLAND: AN AMERICAN ROMANCE: Jonathan Raban (Picador, 1996).

- SCOTTY SMITH, SOUTH AFRICA’S ROBIN HOOD: FC Metrovich (Books of Africa, 1970).

- THE SHELTERING DESERT: Henno Martin (AD Donker, 1983).

- NAMIBIA: FASCINATION OF GEOLOGY: Nichole Greunert (Klaus Hess Publishers, 2000).

- SAND AND WATER – A PROFILE OF THE KAVANGO REGION: John Mendelsohn and Selma el Obeid (Struik, 2003).

- SKELETON COAST: Amy Schoeman (Struik, 2003).

- DISCOVERING SOUTHERN AFRICA: TV Bulpin (Discovering Southern Africa Productions, 1970).

- THE THIRSTLAND: WA de Klerk (Penguin Books, 1979).

- DISCOVER NAMIBIA: Michael Brittan (Struik, 1979).

- KALAHARI: Michael Main (Southern Book Publishers, 1987).

- MAFEKING ROAD: Herman Charles Bosman (Human & Rousseau, 1969).

- THE THIRSTY LAND: John Brown (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954).

- SKELETON COAST: John H Marsh (Hodder & Stoughton, 1944).

- COMMANDO: Deneys Reitz (Jonathan Ball, 1998).

- TREKKING ON: Deneys Reitz (Faber & Faber, 1933).

- THE SKELETON COAST: Benedict Allen (BBC Books, 1997).

- INSIGHT GUIDE TO NAMIBIA: Insight Guide Team (APA Publications, 1994).

- HIMBA – NOMADS OF NAMIBIA: Margaret Jacobsohn (Struik, 1990).

- CONTRABAND: SOUTH AFRICA AND THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN IVORY AND RHINO HORN: De Wet Potgieter (Queillerie, 1995).

- EDEN’S EXILES: Jan Breytenbach (Queillerie, 1997).

- HEAT, DUST AND DREAMS: Mary Rice and Craig Gibson (Struik, 2001).

GLOSSARY

Bäckerei

bakery

Buchter

bay-dweller

CCF

Cheetah Conservation Fund

calcrete

silvery white lime-rich deposit

caul

covering of birth sac over infant’s head; in some peoples, it is highly regarded, indicating that the child has a special gift

handlanger

assistant

kaross

skin blanket made from wild animals, normally jackals and other small veld animals

klick

kilometre

laager

encampment of wagons

likkered

an Americanism meaning to get someone drunk, as in “liquored”

mangelwurzel

type of beet, with yellow root

moer-in      , have the

to be fed-up

Oktoberfest

annual German beer festival

padrão

Portuguese stone cross

platteland

rural area

ratpacks

army issue ration packs

skink

species of lizard

Sperrgebiet

prohibited area

Star dune

star-shaped dune (wind from all sides forms it into a star shape – best appreciated from the air)

sugar Jones

sugar craving

tilapia

species of fish

Tingatinga

Tanzanian artist, Edward Said Tingatinga, whose work was characterised by colourful animal motifs done in high-gloss paints and enamels

veldskoen

type of hardy shoe

CONTACT DETAILS

South Africa:

Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

Tel: +27 (0) 11 274 2000

Augrabies Falls National Park

Tel: +27 (0) 21 422 2810

Goegap Nature Reserve

Tel: +27 (0) 27 712 1880

Namibia:

Namibia Tourism Board – Windhoek

Tel: +264 (0) 61 290 6002

Namibia Tourism Board – Johannesburg

Tel: +27 (0) 11 785 4626

Namibia Tourism Board – Cape Town

Tel: +27 (0) 21 422 3298

Ai-Ais Bungalows (operated by Namibia Wildlife Resorts)

Tel: +264 (0) 61 285 7000

(NWR Head Office)

Tel: +264 (0) 61 236 975 (reservations)

Canyon Hotel (Keetmanshoop)

Tel: +264 (0) 63 223 361

The Nest Hotel (Lüderitz)

Tel: +264 (0) 63 204 000

Sossusvlei Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 63 693 223

Namib Naukluft Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 61 372 100

Hotel Schweizerhaus (Swakopmund)

Tel: +264 (0) 64 400 331

Cape Cross Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 64 694 017

Terrace Bay – see NWR Head Office

Huab Lodge (Kamanjab)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 697 016

Khorixas Rest Camp

Tel: +264 (0) 67 304 716

Bush Pillow Guesthouse (Otjiwarongo)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 303 885

Halali & Namutoni Rest Camps (Etosha) – see NWR Head Office

Meteor Travel Inn (Grootfontein)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 242 078

Sarasungu River Lodge (Rundu)

Tel: +264 (0) 66 255 161

Susuwe Island Lodge

Tel: +27 (0) 11 706 7207

Impalila Island Lodge

Tel: +27 (0) 11 706 7207

Wilderness Safaris Head Office (Johannesburg)

Tel: +27 (0) 11 807 1800

South Africa:

Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

Tel: +27 (0) 11 274 2000

Augrabies Falls National Park

Tel: +27 (0) 11 428 9111

Goegap Nature Reserve

Tel: +27 (0) 27 718 9906

Namibia:

Namibia Tourism Board – Windhoek

Tel: +264 (0) 61 290 6000

Namibia Tourism Board – Johannesburg

Tel: +27 (0) 11 702 9602

Namibia Tourism Board – Cape Town

Tel: +27 (0) 21 422 3298

Ai-Ais Bungalows (operated by Namibia Wildlife Resorts)

Tel: +264 (0) 61 285 7000

(NWR Head Office)

Tel: +264 (0) 61 236 975 (reservations)

Canyon Hotel (Keetmanshoop)

Tel: +264 (0) 63 223 361

The Nest Hotel (Lüderitz)

Tel: +264 (0) 63 204 000

Sossusvlei Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 63 293 636

Namib Naukluft Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 61 372 100

Hotel Schweizerhaus (Swakopmund)

Tel: +264 (0) 64 400 331

Cape Cross Lodge

Tel: +264 (0) 64 46 1677

Terrace Bay – see NWR Head Office

Huab Lodge (Kamanjab)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 697 016

Khorixas Rest Camp

Tel: +264 (0) 67 331 196

Bush Pillow Guesthouse (Otjiwarongo)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 303 885

Halali & Namutoni Rest Camps (Etosha) – see NWR Head Office

Meteor Travel Inn (Grootfontein)

Tel: +264 (0) 67 242 078

Sarasungu River Lodge (Rundu)

Tel: +264 (0) 66 255 161

Susuwe Island Lodge

Tel: +27 (0) 21 423 1912

Impalila Island Lodge

Tel: +27 (0) 11 234 9997

Wilderness Safaris Head Office (Johannesburg)

Tel: +27 (0) 11 807 1800