A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  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.