by Chris Marais
“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 ri
ver;
** 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.
