Chapter 16: Cape Cross
With two cameras slung about my neck and a greedy eye on the lichen fields north of Swakopmund, you couldn’t blame me for what happened next.
The exquisite otherworld of the fabled lichen fields had been sensibly fenced off to prevent visiting 4x4 heroes from driving onto them and making almost indelible tracks that would remain there for many years to come. I know. I saw them in 2004 – the same tracks I’d seen a decade earlier.
I parked our bakkie at the roadside and clambered over the barrier to find myself a metre of lichen to photograph up close and personal with a 105-mm macro lens. Only to be snared on a cable coated with a thick layer of black, tarry grease that rapidly adhered to all parts of me. I looked across at Jules and laughed, because she, too, had turned into a tar baby. Shit, and we were due to check in to a smart lodge shortly. What would they think?
“Well, we’re here now,” I told my wife. “And we’re already dirty. We may as well stay and make the best of it.”
Which we did. In the billowing mist, the orange Teloschistes capensis – a fluffy, strange and rare kind of lichen that can grow as high as ten cm, which makes it a giant among its peers – was as bright as a cartoon lawn. And there was even some good news lurking in those dreaded old 4x4 tracks: the Teloschistes had begun to colonise the hollows left by the tyres of some crazed brandy-drinker of the 1960s, using their slight depressions for protection against the elements.
“They’re probably getting a lot more moisture down there,” said a jubilant Jules. “They’re living on fog drops.”
Down in Lichen World, I saw a tiny fishmoth wiggle its way out of sight. A beauteous black-and-white beetle acted like a little Damara drama queen by sprinting across an open space and diving into the nearest clump of lichen as if pursued by something fast and very fierce.
Lichen is an astounding substance, and we’ve found no better place to appreciate it than Namibia. It is an “extremophile”, living in the most desperately inhospitable environment, enduring for millennia until favourable conditions allow it a brief window to grow or reproduce. Talk about lean patches in your sex life. The noble lichen has to be respected just for that. When a clump of lichen sidles up to you and says, “I haven’t had sex for centuries,” you’d better believe him.
We photographed some of the long-suffering lichen and then returned to the vehicle by contorting ourselves to crawl under the greasy cable. Driving north on the Salt Road, we came upon a peculiar settlement in the middle of the coastal sands. There was no sign to identify this place, but it looked like a deserted weekend-fisherman’s paradise. Intrigued, we drove around past prefab houses eccentrically painted in Fanta Grape, Cream Soda, Chocolate Brick and Chez Guava.
One house was built out of three shipping containers. Another sported a European Union flag. A sign saying Bennie se Rooi Lorrie lay in the sand, alongside a lot of empty beer bottles. We later found out this place is called Wlotzkasbaken and is a much-coveted holiday resort. Plots are handed down from father to son; don’t even try buying something here. All right, then. We won’t.
On the road north, a long cloud stretching from across the ocean arched over us like a wave about to break. Within an hour, we were chugging along in thick mist, the constant companion of the Skeleton Coast. Flocks of seagulls flew across the grey dunes from the sea with mussels firmly clasped in their beaks. Hovering briefly about six metres above the road, they’d drop their cargo on the hardened surface in the hope that the mussel shells would crack open on impact. The lucky ones then swooped down and devoured the contents.
We explored the town of Hentie’s Bay, named after Major Hentie van der Merwe, who was the founder of recreational fishing in the area in 1929. Afrikaners who liked to fish, it seemed, also liked to make a pun. Their holiday homes carried names like Verrweg, El Retro, Nog ’n Skof, Ja Môre and Hollidy Ien. The roads were, obviously, named after fish: Kabeljou, Kolstert, Klipvis and Galjoen.
The town icon seemed to be a large dead tree from which hung a rope noose. The inscription beneath it read: “The Gallows. Erected in 1978 to keep the town and beach clean, initiated by Frank Atkinson and Willie Cilliers, who respectively settled here in 1969 and 1971 as the first two residents of Hentie’s Bay.”
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 …