by Chris Marais
In August 2000, Jules and I stood at the rough little burial ground just outside Uis, looking at the row of graves. There were no plaques or headstones. I’d heard the story some time ago from a Namibian. The travellers had ingested what the Bushmen used to call “wolf’s milk”, and just about the only animals equipped to safely chew on a euphorbia are black rhino and kudu.
We were en route to an old, abused farm north of Khorixas that had been given a new lease on life. There was a liquid supply crisis in the car, however. So we pulled over at the Houmoed General Dealer. A party of six German motorcyclists lay sprawled in the shade of the stoep in their heavy leathers (pay me what you like, you’d never get me to wear leather trousers travelling through Namibia), drinking lukewarm beer and making very small talk. With their shiny BMW bikes, their shades and their outfits, the group of young men and women appeared to be assembled for a rather macho fashion shoot. I looked around for the photographer, his assistants, the lights, the makeup girl and the catering truck. No. Just the models. How strange. Not even a cocaine dealer in sight.
We, on the other hand, were more sensibly attired in Hawaiian shirts, floppy hats and clamdiggers. We looked like such nebbish tourists that, even though we smiled and said hello in passing, not one of the Houmoed fashionistas even turned a head in our direction. We hastily purchased beer for me and bottled water for Jules and ran away.
Suzi van de Reep of Huab Lodge welcomed us like old friends. We’d come bearing love, hugs and greetings from lots of tourist-trade folk back in South Africa. The Van de Reeps, both Suzi and her husband Jan, might live in isolation up here, but they’re very well known and liked all over southern Africa.
Shows what a sense of humour, a smile and good e-mail habits can do for your social life.
While I was unpacking the gear, my wife started coming undone.
“Goodness,” she said. “I can feel my mind loosening up.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. Suzi, on the other hand, did.
“That often happens to people when they arrive here. I think it’s got something to do with the ancient rocks in the river. They’re nearly two billion years old.”
The Huab Complex is one of the oldest geological formations on earth. The more venerable bits of Huab are made of gneiss, a rock that has basically been to Hell and back in terms of pressure and high temperature. The Huab Gneiss was part of the lowest bedrock of the African continent.
A fault in the formation allowed a river system to be formed and the slightly younger granite (200 million years its junior) to penetrate those faults. And when Gondwana started moving about oh, let’s say, 115 million years ago, the area around Huab was smothered under an enormous blanket of lava.
The Huab, like the other river courses of Namibia, is a very old gentleman of a river. Even after the lava flattened most things around here, it was still able to cut its course through the volcanic basalt. And then, about 65 million years ago, it started developing large meandering loops, cutting away into the mountain slopes of its banks. Up until about 10 000 years ago, the area around Huab was lush. Today, it’s another story.
Before 1992, the desert-adapted elephants wandering between the Namib and Damaraland were not animals to envy. They were hunted and chased and hounded out by both the commercial farmers and the local communities. Only in the relative security of the Skeleton Coast Park were they safe. The desert-adapted elephants were not the only wildlife in the area, but they became the local icons.
They wandered through farms that had been devastated by their owners. There were almost no animal stocks and the land was drastically eroded and not ideal for farming livestock or crops in the first place.
Now if only those hardened old hunter-crusty former farmers had twigged onto the real gold of farming – tourism – their lot in life would have been much richer.
In 1992 a bunch of these farms were amalgamated into the Huab Private Reserve. The river occasionally formed pools along its course and attracted game. Once hunting was banned on the purchased farms, the word went out that this was a safe zone and the animals slowly started wandering back.
The gravel travel had bruised Jules’s kidneys and Suzi politely asked if she could play mother and sort her out. After some reviving minerals and a lot of the delicious river water, my wife began to spark up.
“And you should also try out the hot springs,” said Suzi. Which we would, later, with less-than-romantic results for me.
We met Jan van de Reep at supper. That week, he was celebrating his thirty-fourth year in Africa. The lean, affable Jan had arrived in South Africa with just over 100 Dutch guilders, which he exchanged for R25. He was Dutch and working for a flower company just outside Jo’burg, so you’d think he’d be supremely happy.
“I wasn’t. This was not the real Africa I had come to see.”
So he ended up in the old South West Africa, worked on the mines and in the restaurants of Tsumeb and became involved in the flying safari business. He met Kenyan-born Suzi in 1981, sparks flew, lightning struck and he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“And then we found this place,” she said.
“This place” turned out to be a piece of blasted wasteland called Monte Carlo. The previous owner had overgrazed it to the point where you’d have to look very hard to spot a blade of grass. He, his family and their mates shot everything that moved on the farm.
“We’re still finding tiny little oryx skulls lying around, with bullet holes in them,” said Jan. “Their horns, which start growing from birth, were the size of a fingernail.”
And when they met the farmer to discuss the purchase, he proudly boasted to them of the false floor he had fitted into his vehicle. It was used to smuggle the tusks of poached elephants to Cape Town.
“The police suspected him but they could never make a case,” said Jan. “He had a great support system around here, and people would warn him whenever the police were in the area.”
Jan and Suzi, however, had put those times behind them and were re-branding Monte Carlo into Huab Lodge. A slew of industry awards were followed by the establishment of a regular clientele, mainly from Europe. By day, it might be the open spaces and fresh air that the guests love, but by night it’s the Van de Reeps who have them in thrall.
At the table, Jan passed us the water.
“Have some Château de Pomp,” he said.
Then he rose and did the wine introduction. The Van de Reeps had made a hobby out of shopping for interesting Cape wines, mainly from the smaller, more specialised estates. Jan would present the wine and whatever legends he might have uncovered about its origin. And when he wanted to give you a refill, he’d say:
“May I take some air out of your glass?”
An elephant in Damaraland had recently killed an American tourist.
“And have tourist numbers dropped?” the old gent from Britain wanted to know.
“You’d think so,” said Suzi, “but actually, quite the opposite.” And this is a phenomenon that you find almost everywhere in Africa. People flock to sites where tourists have been turned into a snack by predators.
As we were mulling this over, a “Woolly Bum Huab Beetle” of no mean proportions dived straight into my merlot.
“It’s a swimmer,” said Jan.
Before dawn the next morning, after admiring Saturn, Jupiter and the moon through the lodge telescope, we went for a quiet, slow walk with Jan and the two old folks from Britain. I was sure the husband was the ancient worthy who had flapped past me back at the Sesriem filling station some time back. His wife was relatively alert, but he kept tottering into aardvark holes. The potential for disaster was enormous. I should, however, have been paying more heed to my own situation.
Huab Lodge is blessed with natural hot springs that rise from fissures in the rock going down 6 km. Fabulous for arthritis and such. Jan took us to Kanonkop, where the German soldiers once placed a cannon to ward off the Swartbooi Hottentots of Fransfontein, who were alle
gedly fond of other men’s cattle.
He showed us the Hoodia, and we discussed its weight-reducing powers.
“We had a neighbour in Damaraland, a Rhenish pastor, who loved to eat Hoodia sliced like a cucumber, dipped in vinegar and sugar,” said Jan.
We came upon another spring. Jan showed us where the trees had been cut down. “They did that so that they could take clear pot shots at the animals coming down to drink.”
The lead singer of the desert-adapted elephant band in these parts was a fellow called Doetab. Within hours of settling in at Huab Lodge, guests would be briefed on Doetab. We were very keen to see Doetab or a reasonable facsimile of Doetab – in fact, any elephant with dust on its back would do us just fine. We’d heard a lot about these huge, stately beasts that perform miracles of survival between here and the coast in their daily travels.
But, for the moment, we were more than happy with a family of double-banded sandgrouse, the dad creating a running diversion while the two kids lay prone in the twisted grass, the clear markings looking as if they had been embroidered into place.
We drove further, past a clan of baboons in a tree.
“Branch managers,” noted Jan.
Let’s say you’re a birder. Well, this is where you will spot the Damara rock runner, Carp’s black tit, Hartlaub’s francolin, Rüppell’s parrot, the Herero chat, the violet woodhoepoe and, believe it or not, the bare-cheeked babbler. These names crack me up. But then, I’m not a birder.
“What actually peeves me more than the shooting of elephant,” said Jan van de Reep as we continued, “is that they shot the aardwolf out. The farmers actually thought the aardwolf ate their sheep. They also shot the aardvark out because they dig holes in the ground and a hole can break a vehicle’s axle.
“You see all the termites around here? They’ve started eating the live grasses. Now your average aardwolf can polish off 200 000 termites in a night – that’s 750 g of pure protein. And seeing as how termites eat up more than 80% of your vegetation, I’d say it was a pretty good idea to keep an aardwolf or two around, wouldn’t you?”
At supper, we heard how tourists sometimes take a TV documentary too literally. You shouldn’t. There is so much edgy wildlife TV these days that one can actually say they’re a degree away from snuff movies. Photographers competing for that ultimate close-up, others taunting the poor animals while others creep about whispering confidentially in your viewer-ear while looking up a fruit bat’s nose; it’s all too much, really. And then people come out to Africa and expect to get within a metre of a slavering beast, just like on the telly.
“We had a Japanese guest once who’d seen a video of a desert-adapted elephant sliding down a sand dune on his bum,” said Jan. “The filmmaker, who had lived out there for 15 years, had only seen it once. But when the tourist could not experience this immediately, she was absolutely inconsolable. Couldn’t stop crying.”
We were leaving the next day, but not before trying out the hot springs. We dropped into the steaming waters and lay about like happy frogs for a while. The trouble began when I got out and made for the cold pond. I overbalanced on some stray algae and started doing a frenzied balance-cha-cha until finally falling back into the hot water. Leaving a toe snagged in between some slats, all cut up and bruised.
I hobbled back with the support of Jules and tried to get a rather preoccupied Suzi to play mother again. This time, however, her attention was riveted by happenings in the curio shop. Jan held aloft a long PVC pipe and was trying to lure a black-necked spitting cobra into it. Apparently the cobra had slid in for a quick browse and now needed to be somewhere else before a paying tourist saw it.
“Come with us and take some photographs of the release,” urged Jan, once he’d “piped” the cobra and then decanted him into a box.
“I don’t really do good snake,” I said, backing off.
Eventually, I went along and took some photos, but at a considerable distance. The snake just seemed to pour itself out of its confining box and sped off towards some hillside rocks. It was clearly furious and on a mission to kill a dassie or two in red-hot revenge.
PS: We never saw Doetab, but kept in e-mail contact with Suzi van de Reep. On 28 September 2000, she wrote:
“On Monday Doetab nearly got walked into by the girls coming to work. They did not recognise him because one of his tusks had broken off short. I phoned the vet and we went together to look for him. We drove slowly, with the vet on the roof wrapped in a bright blanket, Masai-style. Then we spotted Doetab’s great back just above a thick stand of salvador bush.”
They collared the elephant, took blood samples, patched up some minor wounds, gave him some antibiotics, and within minutes he was up and striding off through the salvador once more.
I wonder if Jan calls his vet “The Huab Doctor” …
Chapter 20: Opuwo – Khorixas
Damara & Damara
The thumping discothèques of Opuwo were just winding down and I’ll swear to this day that the morning star winked at us as we left town in a bit of a hurry. And in case you were concerned about the nature of our early departure from this frontier of Himba extremes, we had paid our extras bill at the Ohakane Lodge the night before and were cleared for take-off, so to speak.
“Watch out!” yelled Jules as I nearly steered the bakkie into a brace of drunken nightclubbers doing an unsteady soft-shoe lurch into the road. They swore at us and so we thought we’d just drive south and go look for some desert-adapted elephants.
We’ve all seen footage of these legends loping across vast swathes of sand dune in the soft light of a late afternoon. This is the power of the media to raise expectations. And if I hadn’t spoken to various experts along the way on this trip, I might also have been hoping for such a poignant sighting.
“The road is long, with many a winding turn,” and then the baby elly links his trunklet up to the tail of his mom, his mom links up with Aunty in front of her and so on, into a computer-generated sunset complete with endless elephants and an infinite number of dunes designed in the shape of Jennifer Lopez’s bum, with a platoon of head-standing beetles looking on in awe. That kind of visual. Or, perhaps, the sight of an elephant sand-boarding down a dune on his ass.
(Author’s aside: We South Africans are so funny about the elephants of the Kaokoveld. When we were Dorslanders up here in the late Victorian era, we hunted them remorselessly. And when we were soldiers up here in the late apartheid era, we shot them from helicopters. Now we want to shoot them with our cameras. Here’s a newsflash. The few that remain want very little to do with us.)
But we were a long way from a decent desert and, quite frankly, any elephant worth his salt would venture into such dryness only as a last resort.
Normally, I was told, they like to hang out in a riverbed, chewing on the noble Ana tree. If you’re going to find any water in this very dry region, you’d do best looking in the vicinity of a once-flowing river. Elephants are also expert at excavating; I’ve seen them do just that in the dry Shingwedzi River in the northern Kruger National Park back in South Africa. That’s why the famous Doetab hangs about the Huab. Think about it. Why would he choose the deep desert instead?
“OK, so I’ll settle for any dune elephant we can find,” I said to Jules as we took the Sesfontein road.
“That’s desert-adapted elephant,” she said. “Listen to me: they don’t love a dune.”
Life is a weird old thing. You go out on a mission for X and Destiny usually dishes you up a Y. The trick, I suppose, is to enjoy Y until X sneaks up on you. Or something like that. Destiny-adapted humans.
And so, when we came across a lovely Monteiro’s hornbill deep in the baobab boughs just before Joubert’s Pass, I was engrossed. And when two Damara dik-diks, little horned whippets, tussled playfully right in front of us on the road and then dived into thick bush and gazed back with Bambi eyes, it was all good. Then three kudu females lunged up a hill as we passed, pausing to look at us from a lofty spot, their hu
ge ears pricked forward and pink against the rising sun.
But, on approaching Sesfontein, we encountered some fresh elephant dung on the road and that really set my motor revving. We drove slowly right up to the old fort and had an outrageously early lager with our new friend at the bar. He told us that a whole cluster of jumbo had passed sometime in the night. The lodge clients were out searching for them. Ah, maybe we would find our elephants to the south.
Down at the disease control gate near Palmwag, the camels stared at us, slowly grinding something sideways in their jaws. And so did the two shifty sorts we’d met coming in. I noticed that the other guy was wearing the aviator shades today. The one with eyes came up to me.
“Where are you going?”
I pointed somewhere south.
Then today’s Mr Shades approached.
“Well, I need a lift there.”
Once again, I had to say no. I was looking for desert-adapted elephants and I had no desire for a nervous journey. We were not hijacking-adapted.
“The Lonely Planet guide calls such types ‘an obnoxious gang of ne’er-do-wells’,” said Jules.
“To me, they’ll always be shifty sorts,” I replied, as we drove into Damaraland proper.
“Most of your mates are shifty sorts,” said my wife, who actually loves them all to tiny shreds.
“No, you’re wrong. They’re an obnoxious gang of ne’er-do-wells,” I replied. “But they’re my ne’er-do-wells. And, actually, some of them do quite well at times.”
And so it was in this mood of light marital banter that we came across evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit of the Damara. History indicates that the Damara people were chased about the country a lot by their more organised Nama and Herero counterparts. So they made the mountains and the semi-desert dry lands their home, learning to survive where few others would want to.
On the road south, the vegetation is gradually stripped down to sage-green euphorbia bushes and stones. You can pull over and pick up crystals, quartz and agates from the roadside that would amaze and delight anyone back home. In fact, you could just check those tyres of yours and take out whatever got caught in the rubber treads, and you’d probably have enough for a stone garden in the courtyard. I think the Damara must be the finest stone salesmen in the world.