Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Clinton’s tone softened as he took a slug of beer and declared, “I’m a white kaffir and proud resident of Makhado, which is what the town is now called. I quite like the fact that it has been renamed in honour of a VhaVenda chief who rained down fives types of hell on some white ivory hunters – not some Calvinistic Voortrekker who lived here for ten minutes then died on the way somewhere else. But do you have any idea how much it costs to change every street sign, government letterhead, map and so on in a town that was settled in 1898?

  “See that guy over there?” he said, flinging his eyebrows in the direction of the affable and obliging waiter who had been plying me with amber. “His name is Ronnie, helluva nice guy. When the new government came to power, he got his own land. No running water, no sewerage, no electricity for the first few years – just a plot. I helped him build his three by three metre house from corrugated iron. With R1000 he could have bought 4000 bricks, but the government decided that this kind of grant was extravagant. Ask him if he’d prefer to live in Louis Trichardt surrounded by bricks and mortar or in Makhado under a roof that rusts.

  “I have no problem with a majority government or even paying higher tax rates because I have benefited financially from apartheid, but I get the hell in when they screw their own people.”

  Like many South Africans I met, Clinton did not merely view the process of change as inevitable but welcomed the shift to a more just society. He even seemed resigned to his redundancy.

  At forty he had five years left on his contract with the defence force, after which new jets were being procured and he didn’t qualify for maintenance training. “That’s affirmative action for you,” he sighed. “The government has mandated a quota system designed to give more blacks access to senior jobs and better pay. We weren’t even given the opportunity to apply for renewal. I’m the wrong colour and the wrong age. In fact the only thing that most white South Africans get for free these day is piles.”

  It was at that point that I called it a night. I was lulled into REM by Clinton’s bravado and flagrant non sequiturs drifting in from the patio. I dreamt of balletic gazelle, cats that could outrun the ram-raiders’ sports car du jour and troupes of blue-arsed baboons.

  Chapter 6

  Where the Wild Things Are

  Travelling west from Louis Trichardt, the mango, avocado and banana plantations, and the vendors selling these fragrant delights from plastic buckets by the side of the road, capitulated to grey eucalypt forests. These in turn became scrubby farmland on soil that curious shade of orange which characterised the early efforts of the fake-tan industry.

  The road itself could have been the expert level in a video game. So narrow that two sedans could not approach each other without exchanging licks of duco from their side mirrors, it was pockmarked with chassis-scraping potholes. These were frequently fol lowed hard upon by unheralded chicanes in the middle of which sauntered a herd of cattle that only screeching brakes prevented from becoming meat on my grille.

  At the end of this perilous road lay the Kruger National Park. The Punda Maria gate marks the entrance to the park’s most northern camp. It was late afternoon by the time I paid my modest entrance fee at the stone hut and proceeded through the boom gate towards the settlement. Excited by the prospect of a game drive I had booked for that evening – dusk and dawn are the prime viewing times – I was also glad to have some company in the form of Sam, who worked as a chef at the camp and needed a lift from the gate.

  Sam, however, wasn’t what you’d call the chatty type. But the one piece of information I did eke out of him was a beauty. After responding to a stream of questions with either “I’m not sure”, “I don’t know” or “You do realise I’m not a ranger”, we drove the nine kilometres between gate and camp in silence. That was until he sprang to life with, “You see that clearing? One of the women I work with saw a man being squashed by an elephant there last week.” And that was his story. He didn’t know whether the guy lived or died. Ditto where he had come from, where he was headed or if he was a poacher.

  The camp was founded in 1919 and consisted of a series of eighteen whitewashed mud-walled huts with pitched thatched roofs which extend to shade verandahs. Captain JJ Coetser was the first ranger to be posted to the area and was therefore given the honour of naming the camp. Much like the joke that ends with the line “Why you do ask, Two Dogs Rooting?”, he christened the outpost after the first animal he encountered, a zebra. Using what he believed to be the Swahili term for striped donkey, he declared that the settlement be known as Punda Maria. It was only some months later that it was pointed out that Punda Maria is, in fact, the correct Swahili term for a zebra. For reasons never quite uncovered, JJ didn’t correct the error but stuck with the original name on the grounds that his wife’s name was Maria and she was awfully fond of striped frocks.

  Because the region’s dense vegetation is not as conducive to game viewing as the vast grasslands to the south, Punda Maria is one of the least popular camps in Kruger. Yet only ninety minutes north is Thulamela, a series of stacked stones on the edge of a plateau bordering the forested Luvuvhu River. Accidentally discovered in 1983 by a ranger on patrol, it turned out be a settlement that had been occupied as early as 1200AD and whose occupants were clearly a wealthy, sophisticated society that mined gold and manufactured jewellery. They also fostered expansive trade ties as glass beads from India and pieces of Ming dynasty porcelain have been recovered from the site.

  The temperature dropped along with the sun as I made my way to the assembly point to meet the tour guide, who introduced himself thus: “My name is Ezekiel. I’ll be your leader and protector. I have a gun.”

  A jovial Xhosa, Ezekiel possessed an easygoing charm, encyclopaedic knowledge and a wry wit that put the tour group at ease. With myself and four Nebraskans – whose names I can’t recall but were distinctly of the verb oeuvre: Chip, Chuck, Biff, Rip – all stowed in the elevated viewing vehicle, Ezekiel piloted us into the crepuscule down dirt tracks tantalisingly marked with no-entry signs.

  Turned out Zeke was something of a botanist on a crusade to make visitors understand that without the flora, the park’s fauna would be a contradiction in terms. Over here was a row of towering evergreen nyalas. Over there was a clump of russets whose clusters of silver foliage drooped to the soil and indicated the presence of underwater streams. In the distance stood a lanky cathedral of guarris, whose branches are used as divining sticks by witchdoctors.

  Zeke and I were the only ones on board who found these facts remotely interesting; Biff and Biff Junior launched into their own conversation while Mrs Biff shielded her embarrassment by staring into the bush, the still air filled only with the grinding of her unnaturally pristine caps.

  “Did you know,” said Zeke, embarking on a more mainstream subject, “that the heart of a giraffe is bigger than that of an elephant?”

  “Crikey!” cried Biff Junior in a lame Steve Irwin impression. Whereupon I reached across Zeke, grasped his rifle and emptied two tranquilliser darts the size of frankfurts into Biff Junior’s thigh. Actually, Zeke just caught me staring at the rifle and gently shook his head with a “It wouldn’t be worth the paperwork” look in his eye.

  What floated my safari companions’ collective boat was not the bachelor herds of grazing impala whose skin was glazed mocha by a waning sun. Nor was it the grey kudus that glided silently through the bush like antlered spirits. They had come for Punda Maria’s renowned birdlife, a fact which became startlingly clear when Mrs Biff hissed, “Paradise white at ten o’clock”. This was followed by a perfectly synchronised donning of infrared binoculars avec swivel. It couldn’t have been more precisely choreographed if Martha Graham had been crouched on the bumper bar yelling, “Lift, two three, now turn two three.”

  Like a seasoned nightclub comic working the room, Zeke obligingly tailored his observations to the feathered domain and pointed out European rollers, helmeted guinea fowl, green pigeons and black-shouldered kites.

&
nbsp; Armed with searchlights whose beams would illuminate the animals’ retinas like rubies set against black velvet, Zeke and I scoured the ground while the troupe in the back peered into the trees. Every now and then one would stage-whisper something like “Inflamed perineum at six o’clock”, “Scarlet-nobbed dowager at 3pm”, or “Schizophrenic shrike at two, no four, no eight …”

  The tedium was broken when Zeke suddenly stiffened, cut the engine and brought the four-wheel drive to the gentlest of halts. “Leopard!” he breathed in an excited whisper. “And she’s pregnant!”

  I heard her before I saw her; my guidebook’s at first seemingly incongruous description of the call “sounding like a plank of wood being cut by a coarse saw” proving a masterpiece of simile. I could only faintly make out her lustrous flanks of gold and black as she skulked slowly towards the grassy shoulder with her laden belly scraping the tarmac.

  Of the prized sighti ngs in the African wild, no cats are rarer than the leopard. They hunt alone and operate under cover of darkness. To view one without bars between you is at once a blessing and a threat. They rarely attack humans, but of the 152 recorded man-eaters, 94 per cent were male. In my guidebook this stat was swiftly followed by the fact that most leopards are so agile that they can squirm through an average lavatory window with relatively little effort. Can you imagine the incident that prompted this detail?

  Kruger is one of the last places on earth where wild animals can be seen in anything close to their natural state, and when one so rare crosses your path, all the National Geographic close-ups in the world can’t adequately prepare you for the adrenaline rush.

  What sets the leopard apart from the rest of the feline family is its appetite for destruction. Where cheetahs have to be taught that hunting is necessary to survival and lions kill primarily for the purpose of sating their hunger, the leopard is the only cat that kills for sport and would rather chew its own leg off than be caught in a trap.

  Without warning, she took off into the bush in response to some movement on the road. Zeke spotted it before we did. It was a pair of the hundreds of refugees from civil-war ravaged Mozambique who flee across the park each year in search of a better life in South Africa. Many, however, are torn to shreds en route by a leopard with some time to kill or a pride with a hankering for rump and ribs.

  Zeke floored it to the spot where they’d disappeared into the bush and called out in a trio of languages for them to come out. He assured them that they’d be safe and warned them there was a leopard nearby. There was no response.

  “These guys follow the power lines in the park because they know they lead to South Africa,” he said. “Lots of them don’t make it and it’s not good for the ecosystem.”

  We returned to the camp in time for dinner. It happened to be Valentine’s Day and the staff had gone all out in cranking up the romance factor in the tiny bistro. Air Supply was playing on the stereo, candles in wine bottles were burning on the formica tables and the whiteboard on which the menu was printed bore a sprinkling of love hearts. The scene struck me with a pang of longing for my girlfriend Jennie, which gradually gave way to a flush of anticipation, as she was meeting me in Cape Town towards the end of the journey and there was a diamond in my backpack with her name on it. The dining room was empty bar a Teutonic couple that passed the evening whispering sweet gutturals in one another’s ears and peering at my Birkenstocks while swapping condescending “can you believe he’s wearing them without socks?” smirks. The camp store had closed thus cancelling out any possibility of buying some meat and charcoal for the barbecue by my bungalow. Which kinda sounds like a country and western song if you don’t think about it too deeply and refrain from trying to rhyme anything with bungalow.

  Greeted with the invariable cocktail of two parts veiled suspicion to one part utter pity that accompanied my request for “a table for one”, I was ushered to a spot in the corner. There are few activities that underline the otherwise agreeable solitude of being a lone traveller than dining. Especially when there’s a mandatory tealight policy in place and all you have for a company is a newspaper and the Schadenfreude wafting over from the only other occupied table in the place.

  On my way back to the room, the urge for chocolate struck. I retrieved a Mars bar from my rucksack, plonked myself on a verandah chair and took a bite. With my attention distracted by a glistening multitude of stars that can only be viewed away from city lights and smog, a furry flash hurdled the table, wrapped its nimble fingers around the chocolate bar and wrenched it from my grasp. I had met my first vervet monkey – the artful dodgers of the animal kingdom.

  Nuisances in camps throughout the Kruger Park, they are nicknamed “thieves” by the local Shangaan tribe. The adults stand at no more than half a metre high and are predominantly grey but have faces covered in white fur, which gives their plaintive eyes a hyperexpressiveness. These remarkable creatures have also developed a vocabulary of thirty-six distinct calls, half-a-dozen of which relate to specific predators. They also boast some uncanny similarities to certain Homo sapiens in that their friendly greeting is a kiss with pursed lips and that the dominant male in a group signals status by displaying his scarlet penis at any given opportunity.

  Given that I wouldn’t get out of bed at 4.30am for a pelvic massage by Claudia Schiffer, it was with no small measure of self-congratulation that I joined the small group of vehicles that had lined up by the camp gate in anticipation of the five o’clock opening. The best viewing time in the park is undoubtedly the hour following dawn when nocturnal predators are feasting on the night’s spoils and animals of all description are drawn from the frost-crusted grass to the tarmac which slowly heats as the sun climbs.

  No matter how many geographical comparisons you hear – it’s bigger than at least three nations: Wales, Taiwan and Israel – the vastness of the park cannot be adequately comprehended until you start driving. After the vehicles at the camp had peeled off down various side roads, it wasn’t until 9am – that’s four solid hours at forty clicks through a park that attracts one million visitors a year – that I encountered another car.

  Although Kruger is flanked by mountains on its eastern and southwestern fringes, ridged with sandstone hills in the north and crisscrossed by riverine precincts and their attendant alluvial plains, it is for the most part dry savanna bushveld, a craggy carpet of rolling plains.

  It is a landscape of illusions. Like one of those computer-rendered 3D paintings, you can stare at a stretch of bush for what feels like hours seeing little more than the odd scarlet-nobbed dowager. Then as if by some curious process of reverse osmosis, the foliage will produce a glimmer of warthog tusk, a two-tone burst of zebra rump or the muddy wag of a wild dog’s tail. Your eyes become accustomed to searching for the faintest flickers of movement, and the seemingly empty landscape begins to teem.

  The first animals I encountered were a nursery herd of gazelle, presided over by a lone male who would retain his position until a successful challenger emerged from the bachelor herd that kept a discreet distance. This early in the morning, the African sun is twenty-four-carat and rendered their backs caramel, their ribs weak latte and their underbellies pristine white. It was like staring at three dozen Rothko paintings. Except with the aaaw factor cranked to max as the infants tottered unsteadily after their mothers like debutantes in their first heels.

  The scene was made all the more splendorous since it was set against pale bush willows, overhung by an olive marula canopy and punctuated by burn-outs. A common sight in Kruger, these are trees that have succumbed to thirst, resulting in cadavers set in bleached rigor mortis as they reach heavenward in a final futile plea for rain. Eventually they collapse under the weight of tortured metaphors or are devoured by termites.

  The fact that Kruger exists at all can be attributed to two very different factors: the dreaded tsetse fly and an ivory-hungry president. Some sources list Portuguese navigators as having landed on the Mozambiquan coast in 1497, launched an expedition to
the interior then prudently turned tail once it became clear that the area was awash with malaria, a fly that could condemn you to the delirious hell that is sleeping sickness and less than welcoming nomadic tribes that had settled there 800 years previously. Others assert it was a Dutchman by the name of Francios De Cuiper. Either way, the result was the same. Neither hung around. When the first stream of white hunters came along shortly before the dawn of the twentieth century, they discovered a landscape in which you could fire a shotgun in practically any direction and be guaranteed a pelt, tusk or trophy that would fetch a handsome price in the civilised world.

  Having made a fortune from tusks himself, Paul Kruger – mad rooter and president of the Transvaal Republic – decided to curb the slaughter by proclaiming a game reserve in the southern part of the current park. Whether he was spurred by guilt or simply wanted to keep some ivory stock on hand should he need it in the future is a matter of some debate. Two things, however, are clear. His 1898 proclamation marked him as one of the world’s first ecologists and it was accomplished despite strenuous opposition.

  Originally known as the Sabie Game Reserve, the park was bordered by the Crocodile River in the south, the Sabie River in the north, the Lebombo mountains in the east and the Drakensberg range in the west. If the entire Kruger Park is an Aladdin’s cave of natural treasures, this original slab is still the equivalent of a vault where only the most precious jewels are kept.

  On its western fringes lies a cluster of what were once drought-stricken farms but are now private game parks which in the last decade have removed their boundary fences with the park so that wildlife moves unimpeded across the region. Obscenely luxurious and beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of South Africans, their aircondi-tioned tents and individual fresh-water plunge pools are most often filled by either EU industrial barons whose fathers made their fortunes by dubious means in World War II or honeymooning orthodontists from Boca whose greenback tips alone substantially outweigh most of the hospitality workers’ annual salaries.