A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  One could just imagine old Frank and Willie getting the moer-in with the fishing holidaymakers and their gillies who trashed the place at weekends with beer bottles and fish innards and such, leaving it all for the locals to clean up on Monday mornings.

  We finally arrived at the elegant Cape Cross Lodge in the early afternoon, grubby as kindergarten children. Jules also bore the evidence on her blouse of an encounter with a rebellious nutty chocolate ice cream purchased in Hentie’s. The front-of-house manager, a young man called Juan who obviously never judged a girl by her confectionery stains, treated us like visiting royalty and showed us to our room, named Hartlaub’s Gull.

  It was strange to encounter such regal accommodation in the middle of a desolate place like Cape Cross, known more for its guano, its raucous seals, its Portuguese cross and its remoteness than anything else. I went out onto the balcony to see the Atlantic in her gunmetal grey mood and spotted a sleek jackal loping up from the beach to drink at a little pond in front of the lodge.

  The fur seals (eared seals, if you will) of Cape Cross are world famous, mainly because you can probably hear them barking all the way across the ocean in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve seen them many times, and they always remind me of an overcrowded council flat in crisis. The Cape Cross seal colony is an ever-changing scene of glistening fat bodies in all shades of brown, stretching, hauling themselves over the sand, arching their backs like overweight yogis, bellowing and orking at one another, squabbling and biting, pups yelling for their mothers in unnervingly human voices. I had my Lawrence Green library to hand as we settled in for the late afternoon at the colony, observing this barking Bruegel.

  In On Wings of Fire, the wonderfully colourful Green interviewed an employee of the sealing station, August Hasselund. He not only clubbed them for a living, but was also a bit of a seal-herd. He told Green:

  “Eh vurk mit der yong seals – tich dem dricks for der circus.”

  And it emerged that the seals of Cape Cross were, according to Green’s sources, highly prized for their intelligence and poise and that they made especially fine circus animals. They were, said Hasselund, even better than Californian sea lions in this regard, although the latter had been taught to say “I want my mama” on certain notable occasions. And this was something no Cape Cross seal had been able to manage thus far.

  According to Hasselund, a good circus seal should possess thick whiskers with a downward curve, and their noses should not be pointed. Where would they then be expected to balance that rubber ball?

  Seals with short attention spans would not do. They were known as snoozers and were weeded out soon enough. No one likes a narcoleptic circus performer. You needed barkers. They were the winners. Always on the go, ready to dart about at the slightest command, eyes bright and whiskers trembling.

  “Eh loff der seals an’ der seals loff me,” Hasselund declared to Lawrence Green.

  Mr Green made a literary meal of this frontier spot in Namibia and loved to take photographs of the seals of Cape Cross. In So Few are Free, he notes:

  “There is only one way, I found, to photograph the seals at close quarters. I had to set my camera, race towards the colony so that they could not pick up the scent, leap over the rocks and take my picture without a second’s delay. They all came sliding past me in a panic-stricken cavalcade. This method, however, is not without danger. A large bull weighs up to eight hundred pounds, and some will attack and maul a man. They will grip a man’s arm, worry him like a terrier with a rat, roll on him and crush him. They know what they are doing on the rocks, those seals, while a man can find no foothold. Men killed by seals have a little cemetery of their own on the shore at Cape Cross.”

  Well. That other travel writer, TV Bulpin, says there is no record of the Cape Cross seals having attacked a human being. So we contacted the good folk at Cape Cross Lodge and asked them to check for us. There was indeed a cemetery, but it carried no evidence of seal-on-man violence. Another one of those Namibian mysteries.

  Some advice for seal-snappers: take a long lens, stay behind the wall, focus in on the action and have a good time. There’s no need to test the power of a bull seal’s teeth on your arm or his terrier-like tendencies.

  Believe it or not, Cape Cross is not famous foremost for its fur seals, but for the fact that this is where the white man officially first put his foot down in southern Africa. Some might say this is where all the trouble began. Be that as it may, the Portuguese trader-explorer Diogo Cão arrived here in 1486 and put up a cross in honour of his king, João I, father of Henry the Navigator.

  That stone cross loomed over the noisy seals and the occasional porky jackal and little else for more than 150 years, until the arrival of Captain Messum, who had nothing on his mind but the smelly treasures of sea-bird guano. Messum landed at Cape Cross and went inland, encountering an impressive mountain that glowed gold with the evening light. He tried to name it Mount Messum, but nobody backed him on this particular ego-trip; to this day, it is still called the Brandberg (Burning Mountain).

  Which is where my photographer friend Les Bush, a locally famous guide named Jan van Wyk and I found ourselves in the late winter of 1995. Jan had come armed for tourists, with everything in the Land Rover that one could possibly wish for. To his delight, we did not need the tents, the tables, the feasts or the portable toilets he had on offer. We slept in the open in canvas packs, cooked our own meals and fed Jan the occasional beer on the drive. After two days of this life, he said he felt like he was the tourist, not the guide.

  We arrived at the Brandberg, this stand-alone mountain in the desert. Up there, it has its own ecosystem, separate from the dry, intense harshness below. Forests, springs and attendant life forms all flourish on the Brandberg.

  “They even built an airstrip on top of the mountain,” said Jan. “But the winds up there are quite rough. One day a pilot in a light plane flipped right over and broke both his legs. He still managed to crawl down the mountain and get help.” This place is not for wimps.

  Because we needed to be at a specific spot for evening photographs of the Brandberg, Jan had to forsake his normal luxury campsite and set up something cruder for us on the side of a hill nearby.

  Within an hour of wolfing down something basic for supper, Les and I were snoring away, leaving Jan at the fireside with his pinotage. By 4 am, though, we were both up and smoking, listening to Namibian nature chattering away all around us. A jackal trotted by in search of an insomniac rabbit. The valley below was full-moon silver.

  “I can’t believe it,” chuckled Les.

  “Can’t believe what?”

  “That someone’s paying me to be here.”

  Ten years on, I told Jules this story as we prepared for a belly safari in a nearby ring of mountains that was finally named after the guano-hunting Captain, the Messum Crater.

  To be honest, I’d been a tad disrespectful of the venerable Welwitschia mirabilis in years gone by. The appeal of this grotty old plant with its tatty long leaves, burnt at the edges, with no salt in its snap beans, simply escaped me. Now I was out to give it another chance, in the world’s largest Welwitschia nursery, this collection of honed volcanic rocks, tyre-biters to the last.

  First we lay down in a bejeweled miniature wonderland of lichen. Some were bright orange, others were faded green, patterned in concentric circles. Some resembled small lacy ferns, spread over pebbles like dark and portentous tea leaves. Others rose up politely like petite forests. Then there were the brown crusties, turning the earth strangely crystalline underneath.

  While we worked, Jules looked for something appropriate on the radio. To our amazement, out here in the old Messum Crater, we picked up no fewer than eight radio stations. Utterly spoilt for choice, we finally decided on delicious silence.

  Hours later we tore ourselves from this spot and drove to where whole families of Welwitschia stood like gnarled old warriors across the plains of rocks. I began a photo session with one female specimen, who was probably no
more than a seedling at the time the Greeks were getting snippy over the abduction of Helen of Troy.

  My love affair with this specimen was conducted through a camera lens, when I began to notice its finer detail and the bug life it supported. Each plant, its leaves cut to ribbons by centuries of wind, was its own planet. You could photograph a respectable Welwitschia mirabilis from 100 different angles and never come up with the same image. It lives out here on nearly nothing, baffles botanists and counts human lives in dog-years. We are probably nothing to a Welwitschia but a temporary hitch in history, and as ugly as sin, to boot …

  Chapter 17: Skeleton Coast

  Tobacco Road

  A British journalist once said:

  “If Hell has a coat of arms, it probably looks like the entrance to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast Park.” And I guess he could be right, if you regard that image of skull and crossbones from a certain angle.

  But for others, the Big Jolly Roger on the gate at Ugab River represents the entrance to an almost mythical world of shipwrecks and shaggy dune hyenas. The stuff of the old stories you tell in a seaside shanty at night, while the storms batter at the door, in the midst of hundreds of kilometres of deserted beach assaulted by a furious Atlantic Ocean. It also means a jolly good drink-up in a far-off place. Combine that with the prospect of a fish or two, and you can understand why boys generally like to come here.

  We presented our accommodation permit for Terrace Bay and went through the regulation photo session at the grinning gates. On the radio we caught snatches of a BBC report on a Russian hostage crisis and then, mercifully, it faded into the crackle of static. We left the world of current affairs, slapped on some Van Morrison and drove into the mystic, so to speak.

  Pretty soon we came to a wreck on the beach. If you ever find yourself in these parts looking for shipwrecks, don’t pass this one by. It’s a respectable wreck by anyone’s standards. The weathered wooden frame still exists, tucked into the sand with its rusting old winch. The timbers arch into the sky like an old hobo’s stubby teeth and, if you go in close, there are great textures to be photographed in the discoloured wood and nails.

  Judging by the legends of the Skeleton Coast, you might think you’re going to run into a wreck every few minutes in your drive towards Terrace Bay. Fact is, these vessels disintegrate rapidly out here. The ocean minces them up quite efficiently. Back in the sixties, you would have found a lot more evidence of wrecks. But the true stories remain, faithfully chronicled by Skeleton Coast legends such as Amy Schoeman, who, with her family, has been running world-class flying safaris to the area for longer than anyone else.

  As with the sands around Lüderitz, most of the Skeleton Coast is a controlled area, with a lot of it being simply forbidden. And when you call a place a Sperrgebiet, everyone’s going to believe there are diamonds lying all over the show. And so it is with the Skeleton Coast. In centuries gone by some illegal diamond hunters tried approaching the coast from the sea. One guy lashed two small boats together, made a platform of sorts, and managed to get his Baby Austin onto the beach. He was going to scoop up the treasure (imagined or real) and simply drive out of there. But maybe someone had a case of loose lips in a Swakop bar the previous week and “told”, because the dreaded camel cops were lying in wait for him on the other side of a sand dune.

  Back in the 1880s, an unidentified German man was said to have loaded provisions onto his four donkeys and walked the 1 600 km from Swakopmund to the Kunene and back. Many have died on the coast, either from failed prospecting enterprises or after being shipwrecked.

  In her classic book simply entitled Skeleton Coast, Amy Schoeman records that in 1975 approximately 200 Portuguese refugees from Angola crossed the Kunene in more than 60 vehicles on pontoons. They entered the Skeleton Coast area and spelt the word “help” in stones on a sandy incline.

  Luckily for this group, a South African Air Force plane was out searching for a rumoured boatload of war orphans that had gone missing on the way from Angola to Walvis Bay. They found this ragtag group of refugees and an overland rescue was initiated.

  Just more than a decade later, a Nigerian stowaway was discovered near the mouth of the Kunene. He (and three others, who were subsequently lost at sea) had been found on board a Pakistani ship and put to sea in a dinghy near the Skeleton Coast.

  Perhaps the most famous shipwreck story from the Skeleton Coast is that of the Dunedin Star, which hit a shoal just south of the Kunene mouth on 29 November 1942. The captain ran her aground and sent out distress messages. Four boats of various kinds went to her rescue. More than 100 passengers and crew were on board.

  The ship’s lifeboat was used to ferry 42 people onto the beach, but after a couple of trips it broke down, leaving the rest on board. They were the first to be rescued by one of the ships. But no one could land and pick up those on the shore, because the sea had turned too rough. So an overland rescue convoy was sent from Windhoek.

  Then followed a series of unfortunate events, the culmination of which was that one of the rescue vessels, a tug called Sir Charles Elliott, ran aground. And then one of the Lockheed Ventura bombers sent to drop supplies to the beached survivors became bogged down in loose sand. Meanwhile the overland convoy had suffered no fewer than 34 flat tyres en route. And since they only had one single hand pump (and no radio) between them, they set no records reaching the survivors either.

  All in all, it took a mammoth effort and 26 agonising days before the rescue attempts were completed. These days, with a decent set of charts and the wonder of GPS navigation, only an utter fool of a sailor would end up in the jaws of the Skeleton Coast.

  So we made a photo-meal out of our first wreck (the South West Sea, deceased in 1976), had a snack and continued.

  Our next stop was at the Huab River Lagoon, where its white-breasted cormorants lined up for photographs along the turquoise waters. Close by was an old oil rig, collapsed in the sand. It was one of the many originally unsightly reminders of mining attempts along the Skeleton Coast. Back then, people were less environmentally aware and when their enterprises crashed they simply vanished, leaving all their industrial crap behind. But now the cormorants had taken over this oil rig for a breeding platform and it looked visually sexy, in a brooding, post-Armageddon industrial sense.

  Perhaps this is what South Africa’s Vaal Triangle will turn into in 1 000 years: one big breeding centre for birds, nesting and laying eggs in the rafters of giant corporations who lost their souls polluting the ground and the air for shareholder profits. Don’t get me started. Let’s get back on the Skeleton Coast track. It was time to show off some deeply hidden knowledge to my wife, who is normally the storehouse of facts.

  “Ah, the home of the oil beetle,” I said, as we left the rig.

  “What?”

  “I once read in a Geoffrey Jenkins novel that these little white beetles you find out here – there’s one, look – show you where the oil is.” That’ll give her pause for thought.

  “Wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Mary Seely, a desert ecologist who has far more credibility in these matters than your Mr Jenkins, states specifically that the tenebrionid beetle does not indicate the presence of oil.” I had a brief sulk at that. Then just north of Springbokwasser we both fell under the spell of soft light, dramatic sand dune-shapes and a couple of beers.

  The wind was picking up, and I remembered spending a night out here in the Torra Bay area with photographer Les Bush and guide Jan van Wyk ten years before. We’d been veering west from an unnerving stopover in the frontier Himba town of Opuwo and heading for a night’s luxury in Palmwag, near the crossroads of Damaraland and the Kaokoveld. Jan, for one, was looking forward to a night in the bar and a good sleep under the covers without having to put up with our insomnia and noisy 4 am smoke-breaks.

  “I want wrecks,” said Les.

  “No wrecks here,” smiled Jan. “For that, we have to drive to the coast, to Torra Bay.”

  “Well,
then, let’s do it.”

  Jan protested. There would be nowhere for us to sleep. The weather was foul. There was an acute shortage of beer. And so on. I threw my lot in with Les and our guide was defeated. He drove us across the mountain range towards the Skeleton Coast. To make matters worse, I had found a ZZ Top tape in the glove compartment and Jan (a self-confessed musical no-go zone) was now exposed to Texas rock at top volume. We fed him our share of the beers to keep him calm.

  We found a wreck, photographed it and drove to Torra Bay, where we pitched camp right next to an ablution block on the beach, which was understandably deserted on account of the foul weather on the way. No matter. Les and I climbed into our canvas bedrolls, sheltered by the Land Rover. Jan preferred to set up his bedroom on top of the vehicle, in the teeth of a vicious wind that seemed to blow all the way from the taverns of Cape Town.

  “There’s space with us, Jan. Come down, Jan.”

  “No thanks, boys. You’re a couple of chattering monkeys in the morning. I’ll take my chances up here.” It took a few days for Jan to forgive us.

  Now, ten years on, Jules and I arrived at the outskirts of Terrace Bay. We were welcomed by more heavy machinery, gaunt black metal ghosts silhouetted in the grey mist. And a very large, weather-beaten sign bearing the Jolly Roger. It was like the Bates Motel for fishermen.

  “I can’t believe there’s accommodation here,” said Jules, a spoonful of disappointment and a cup of panic in her voice. The drive had been rather like a moon landing. And when you’re suddenly on the moon, it’s nice to know there’s catering. Up here in Terrace Bay, the prospect of a bed and a warm meal suddenly vanished.