A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  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 ot
her. 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 ligh
t 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.