A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

“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 q
uestions.

  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.