by James Best
Sam looked concerned. ‘Don’t die, Dad.’
‘I’ll try not to.’ I thought of the difficult phone call I’d have had to make to Benison if Sam had been killed by lions—not something the parent of an Australian child normally has to worry about.
That night Milner told me the company had asked him to assess whether it would be suitable for Sam to travel with them from Windhoek to Victoria Falls. ‘I told them Sam will be fine,’ he said, with a smile and a thoughtful expression.
‘I don’t know about sleeping in tents. It stresses both of us out,’ I said.
He looked up from the fire. ‘You can book a room at all the places we stop, you know.’
I felt relief sweep over me. ‘Oh, excellent! We’ll definitely do that.’
Milner smiled. ‘He’ll be fine, James.’
Before going to bed—again in a tent but this time without any resistance from Sam—I took him to the nearby bush bar so he could buy himself a lemonade, a reward for not fussing about our accommodation. I gave him twenty Namibian dollars, which should be enough, and stood back to see how he would go. He had been improving over his many attempts at retail transactions. Two Namibians were in the bar: a woman behind the counter and a man sitting on a chair nearby.
Sam went up to the bar and spoke to the woman. ‘Lemonade. Sprite.’
The woman gave him the drink and, in her thick Namibian accent, asked for fourteen dollars. Sam misheard her, and thought she said forty.
He pointed at her across the counter. ‘Liar! That’s too much!’
She spied the twenty-dollar note in his hand. ‘Fourteen. One, four.’
‘Oh,’ Sam said. He handed over the money and got the change. He then looked at the man and said, ‘You’re bald,’ before promptly walking out. I followed, apologising profusely. Well, I thought he’d been improving.
A busy few days followed: the long drive back to Windhoek, neuroplasticity exercises and school lessons. We were getting into a real rhythm here, with Sam and I negotiating at the beginning of the day which lessons and exercises were on the agenda. As always, I would push him a little into his discomfort zone. His chess game was starting to progress, and there was now more of a competitive edge to the games. The boxing was easier for him, so I invented more difficult combinations. The cards continued to be a struggle. We took another long shuttle bus ride, this time with local Namibians, not tourists, over to the German coastal town of Swakopmund.
Skipping over the flat central Namibian plains, we watched the sun set on the wide flat horizon after yet another cloudless sky. I reflected on how the trip was going. There were some improvements in Sam, certainly, but it was still early days. The trip had still been way too busy—I was struggling to reel in the pace, and unfortunately the next few weeks were also heavily booked up. There was little I could do about it. I would have preferred to be staying in Swakopmund for a week rather than the three nights we had planned.
Sam continued to grumble about being away from his electronics, away from the certainty of binary. Yet he didn’t seem nearly as stressed as he’d been a week or two earlier and his facial rash had resolved. Since we’d introduced the scoring system, he seemed to be more focused on improving his own behaviour. He did, however, still need to improve his willingness to face his fears. To pick hot toast out of the toaster, to eat scrambled eggs, to wear long sleeves.
I was also feeling the strain. The burden of responsibility was challenging my body and spirit. My heels were bruised from so much walking with heavy luggage and I’d developed ‘tennis elbow’ tendonitis in my left arm from swinging our twenty-kilogram packs around. Backpacking had been much easier in my twenties. My forty-ninth birthday was the following Sunday, and I was feeling like an African taxi with 400,000 kilometres on the odo: still running, but wondering which part is going to breakdown next.
As well as the flesh, my spirit was also feeling weak. I was missing my wife terribly. I was increasingly excited about chances to talk to her on Skype and when I couldn’t get through I would feel very down. I worried about my other two boys and what they were up to, and issues happening in their lives.
While we were consciously working on Sam’s adaptive skills—a psychology term to describe the practical, everyday skills a human needs to function in their environment—mine were also being tested and expanded. The countless challenges each day—technology, writing, teaching, filming, blogging, supervising Sam and just travelling—left me exhausted each evening. I never knew what was around the corner, but I was getting better at going with the flow. There was the constant niggle in the back of my head that I had to get this right. This was the only opportunity I would have to help Sam in this way. I had to make it count.
CHAPTER 10
Sand safari
Our first day in Swakop, as Swakopmund is affectionately known, was spent chilling out. We walked into town, surrounded by rolling dunes on three sides and rolling waves from the South Atlantic on the fourth. Swakop was once the main harbour for German south-west Africa, so it’s full of colonial German architecture, with dormers in steeply pitched shingle roofs, symmetrical facades and small casement windows. It seemed fitting our lunch was a wurst sandwich.
On the long walk back, a tiring Sam asked how far it was to the hostel. ‘Is it right?’ I broke out the video camera to record our conversation as we walked down the road, holding it out on an extended arm, selfie-style.
‘Say it properly,’ I replied.
‘Is it the next one right?’
‘No,’ I said again. ‘Slow down and say the whole thing. “Dad, do we turn right at the next intersection?’’’
He tried again. ‘Dad, do we go right at next section?’
I encouraged him to give it another go.
‘Dad, do we go right at the next insection?’
‘In-ter-sec-tion.’
He focused all his attention. ‘In-ter-sec-tion.’
I smiled and patted him on the back. ‘Good.’
After a pause, he looked up at me. ‘I’m trying hard, Dad.’
My heart welled up inside my chest. ‘I know you are. You really are.’ I was so proud of him.
I was trying hard to slow down, I really was, but when I discovered there was a day excursion to the Namib Desert from Swakop the temptation was just too great. It would be a good geography excursion. Well, that was my excuse and I was sticking to it. We joined two older English couples and a German fellow in a small four-wheel drive truck that pulled up outside our hostel. Our driver and guide, Burger, was an ex-waxhead from Namibia. In his misspent youth he had walked his red kudu leather shoes on every beach in South Africa and Namibia. Well, so he claimed, and who was I to doubt him?
Heading south, we passed through desert to Walvis Bay, an ex-British protectorate that had been subsumed into Namibia when apartheid collapsed. Now a playground for Namibia’s well-heeled, architect-designed houses and condos lined its boulevards. The large lagoon was home to vast flocks of flamingos, making all sorts of malarky. Two large males flared their tail feathers at each other in an elaborate dance to impress the females in the flock. A long line of pelicans, looking like beads on an invisible string, soared over the truck.
Burger clearly enjoyed his job. Without warning he yanked hard at the wheel and suddenly we were off-road, sliding on the narrow beach between the dunes and the surf. The coastline south was five hundred kilometres of sand, with nary a dwelling or even a tree. We were on the longest beach in the world, which was also home to the largest diamond field in the world—the backbone of the Namibian economy. The highly secret and secure mines were located somewhere in the great desert spreading below us.
The dunes towered above to our left before plunging steeply down to the waterline. Their mustard-cream hues were striped with lines of crimson where garnets remained, long broken into dust by the toiling winds, while the lighter crystals of other stones had blown away. The grey sand of the beach was new. As it aged, the iron-rich magnetite crystals w
ould oxidise and become a richer, more vibrant colour. Blown over the ever-expanding and changing dunes, the sands darkened over the eons to yellow, orange and finally red.
The dunes of the Namib were living beasts. Our footprints would be swept away by the South Atlantic winds within minutes. They were being moulded before our eyes. It was relentless. If our truck was left for a day, its wheels would have to be dug out. It was a beautiful but unforgiving vortex, absorbing all and governing all.
‘We are in the desert!’ Sam chimed from the back seat. ‘It is the oldest desert in the world.’
Burger asked how old it was.
‘Fifty-five to eighty million years,’ Sam promptly replied. Burger raised his eyebrows, impressed. Our geography field excursion, coupled with our earlier Google searches, was proving a success.
Late in the morning, we climbed one of the larger beachside dunes. It took about half an hour to make the ascent. As I stood on the edge of the dune, exposed skin rasped by the flying sand, I experienced vertigo while looking into the shadowy valley below. The view from the top was dunes stretching north and south and inland as far as the eye could see. The dunes stretched over one hundred kilometres inland, in fact. Fifty thousand square kilometres of sand, sand, sand. I was reminded of the science-fiction movie Dune. I hoped there were no giant sandworms.
Sam pretended to be dying of thirst at the top, and rolled around on the sand. Unfortunately, the Vaseline we’d applied to his face to stop his rash returning collected a goatee of sand. Not a good look.
After lunch, our truck surfed the dunes, as Burger cut the engine and let it slide a hundred or so metres down the sixty-degree slopes. It was the best, and certainly the most natural, rollercoaster ride I’ve ever been on.
On our way back to Swakop, vegetation slowly started to reappear. Hardy animals came with it. A lone springbok, a pair of jackals protecting their hidden young in their lair, a dune lark watching over its nest. We were well satisfied after an exhilarating day. Sam was happy he’d been brave and made the difficult climb up the dune. Tomorrow we were heading to the largest and reddest dunes in the world, smack in the middle of the desert at Sossusvlei. This would be a new challenge.
Our driver for the next three days was Gabriel. Thin, bespectacled and congenial, his placid manner permeated the small truck. As a married Herero man, by custom he was obliged to always wear a hat and carry a walking stick. Gabriel’s tribal name was Veruanaije, which was also his father and grandfather’s name. If Gabriel were to have a son, it would continue to be passed on. His name translates to a question. When the Germans fought the Herero back in 1904, older women in the villages were told the Germans fought with guns and horses. ‘Veruanaije?’ was their reply, meaning ‘What do the Herero men fight with?’
Our small group contained only two other travellers: TJ, an effusive Dutch fellow in his fifties, and Corinna, an eighteen-year-old Londoner on a break from volunteer teaching in the north of Namibia. From Swakop we headed inland to skirt the Namib sands on their eastern border. At first, the road was salt, kept intact by the regular moisture of the coastal fogs. Once away from the coast, it became gravel corrugations.
The flat landscape, suffused with salt, was the faintest yellow. Mirage lines hovered on the horizon, and heat and glare reflected off the pale and flat rock-strewn terrain and still paler road. Salt lines streaked the dirty brown and black hills on the horizon, resembling nothing so much as giant mounds of tiramisu. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and then an ancient dry riverbed marked only by a line of deep-rooted trees.
The road wound down and through a deep gorge that wasn’t visible until you were almost on top of it. We descended to the dry, shaded, sandy riverbed below. During World War II, when Namibian-based Germans were recalled to the fatherland to fight, two young geologists went AWOL and hid in this gorge for two years, living off game and digging into the riverbed for water, before they were finally caught and imprisoned. It was a good place to hide from the heat, and from the world.
Sam completed his schoolwork in the truck and then read more of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I was so glad he was finally reading fiction. Now he had started it seemed like there was no stopping him. During the trip I asked Gabriel if there were lions about.
‘No, but there are leopards,’ Gabriel answered. ‘There are three big cats you need to be careful of, Sam: lions, cheetahs and leopards. When you come across any of these you need to know what to do. If you see a lion, you should look him in the eye, slowly walk backwards, and you should be okay. If you see a cheetah, make a lot of noise and rush towards it, and they will usually run away.’ Sam was looking worried. Gabriel continued. ‘But with a leopard, you are in big trouble. They are very aggressive and very strong and if they decide to attack you, you will be killed. You run up a tree, they climb after you. You cross a creek or river, they follow you.’
Sam wasn’t happy. ‘No! Not die! I will get away.’
I piped up. ‘Don’t worry, Sam, we won’t come across a leopard.’
After the gorge, we travelled through undulating plains leading up to red rock towers. Occasionally we spotted zebras, ostriches and oryxes grazing near the road. Large mountains appeared first as faint blue ridgelines in the distance before looming large and ominous either side of the road, which cannoned straight between them like a cathedral aisle. Cliffs, mesas—the lines of this landscape were either vertical or horizontal, with little deviation.
We reached our desert campsite at sunset after being delayed by a flat tyre sustained on the gravel. Sam was happy the ‘tents’ had power, en suite bathrooms and, incredibly, wi-fi (well, more or less). This was soft camping. Benison would have liked it: there was even somewhere to plug in her hair dryer. The only thing missing was a fence. Hmm.
Over dinner, Sam had more opportunities to experiment with new foods: pup, a cornmeal mash, and curry sauce and cucumber. I also encouraged him to practice his conversation skills with these relative strangers, and used the video camera to record some footage for the university study. We discovered that Corinna had taught Namibian children with the following Anglicised names: Precious, Big Boy, Silence (well, he’d be easy to teach), Marvellous, Surprise, Treasure, Rejoice, Promise, Given and Gift (twins, with a younger sister Bienvenue), Trust, Angel (a boy) and, my favourite, Brangelina. (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had a long association with Namibia. Their daughter Shiloh was born in Swakopmund in 2006.)
The morning reveille went off at 4.30 a.m., and we were ready at the nearby park gates before dawn. Cliffs and rocks slowly emerged in the low light while we waited. Sam had never been up before dawn before; at least, not in his conscious memory anyway. At dawn, the gates opened to admit a long line of tourist vehicles and four-wheel drives into the park.
As our truck passed through the park, red dunes started to appear around the sandy road, increasing in stature as though working towards the dramatic final act. A hot air balloon hovered nearby as the sun rose above the horizon. The road down the valley arced right and the main dune range was revealed: three-hundred-metre-high ancient monsters rendered in deep apricot, light and shadow, serpentine arcs. There was no Atlantic wind moulding the sands here. This was a graveyard of ancient rusted sand: spiritual, still and sombre.
Leaving the vehicle, we ventured over the sands to Deadvlei, a small pan long cut off from water by the encircling dunes. Here camel thorn trees had germinated nine hundred years ago and died six hundred years ago. They still stood, forlorn but proud, their dead limbs and branches reaching for the sky like men dying of thirst. It was an arboreal Pompeii, created not by super-heated ash but super dry and still conditions. Human footprints were visible in the cracked clay from the last time the pan was wet, six centuries ago.
Sam and I took the opportunity to have a quick game of chess. It was a good flat surface for the board. I let him win again, but he was definitely getting savvier. Sam asked questions about the footprints and why the trees died. He didn’t like the fac
t that there had been no water for hundreds of years, and worried we might ‘die’ from thirst, but fortunately was easily reassured. He asked what score he’d got the previous day.
I decided to give him some encouragement. ‘Eight.’
‘Yay!’ He was truly excited. The ethics spun in my head.
The temperature soared as we tramped up a dune ridgeline. Despite being encouraged and then harassed by me, Sam couldn’t make it all the way to the top, but that was okay, it was pretty tough going in the soft sand. Two-thirds of the way up we aborted the attempt and bounced down the steep face at a slow jog, sinking ankle deep with each step. We plonked onto the pan at the base and emptied our shoes of a kilogram of warm red sand apiece.
It had been a great day.
Back at camp, Sam splashed in the pool while I supervised. Gabriel, TJ and Corinna had gone off to visit a nearby gorge, but Sam had had enough. Some toddlers from a group of Germans nearby wandered over towards the pool. Sam wasn’t happy. He feels uncomfortable around toddlers, especially without his shirt on. Pointing awkwardly, with a crooked wrist, he said, ‘Go away, you.’
The German adults startled. ‘Sam, don’t,’ I cautioned from my chair nearby.
He continued to be bothered by the presence of the toddlers. I hovered carefully until they were whisked away by their parents, who seemed to have caught on that there were issues underlying Sam’s behaviour. They weren’t fussed, but I was. It was this type of behaviour, unsupervised in years to come, that could get Sam into some seriously troubling situations.
At dinner, Gabriel bailed up to me, excited. ‘You know, Sam asked me my middle name and where I came from!’ His enthusiasm and insight into Sam was touching.
And with another dinner on safari was another success with Sam trying new food: this time poike, a chicken and vegetable stew with rice. On the food front, Sam was kicking goals with both feet.
The next day I turned forty-nine. Sam gave me a tantrum for my birthday. I had told him when he woke up that he hadn’t received eight out of ten the previous day after all, but only seven, because of his behaviour at the pool. Sam wasn’t happy. ‘But they started it,’ he said, referring to the toddlers. His anger and frustration rose. Once again I was a bad father whom he variously wanted replaced, gone or dead.
