Chapter 20: Opuwo – Khorixas
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 huge 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.
For here you will encounter an unending array of signs that offer Namibian Stones for Sale. That’s like selling handfuls of sand in Sossusvlei. And if you stop at any of these stalls, people from the nearest village will come running, their faces wreathed in smiles. And you won’t be able to resist buying a klippie or three. They’ll tell you they’ve got their herdboys on the case all day, looking out for something special in the veld as they pass.
But that’s not the whole story of the stone business in Damaraland. These stones are also great tyre shredders, and as a result you’ll find many informal repair sheds on the road to Khorixas. Some sell beer as well. Not the coldest you’ll ever drink, but who cares? They’re patching up your tyres for a pittance, you’ve got a piece of shade and lots of time. As my friend Jan van de Reep from Huab Lodge would say:
“Why hurry? The snail and the racehorse celebrate Christmas on the same day.”
The official entrance to Damaraland, however, happens as you crest a rise and look down at a landscape that Ridley Scott would instantly admire and cast in his next epic badlands movie. At an abandoned tourism reception centre there was an old tyre on the side of the road painted as a Welcome sign.
The geology of the land became stranger and stranger as we approached a village called Vrede and saw a light-khaki sand formation twisted and eroded by the wind into the shape of the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter films.
We came to a giant meerkat (I think he was made of glass fibre) standing under a lodge sign. He looked like a tall man in a meerkat suit furtively looking over his shoulder as he peed into the dirt.
On the way out to the famous Twyfelfontein etchings, we saw a herd of springbok maybe 50-strong, the largest herd we’d seen, literally flying across the road in huge bounds. Once on the other side, they calmed down and busied themselves with scratching their ears, gazing vacantly out into the distance, nibbling grass and biting at the itchy parts of their shoulders. Once, there would have been vast herds up here, when the land was lush and the Bushman was boss.
There’s a spring on the eastern slope of the Twyfelfontein Valley, above which is a large terrace. Back in time, perhaps 10 000 years ago, a Bushman hunter would have gazed out over the plains from this terrace. He would have been able to see his prey from a long distance and, with his awesome array of talents and methods, it would not be long before the entire clan would sit down to the kind of slap-up meal any hunter-gatherer would crave.
They would have had superb shelter up here and no end of water supply and, if threatened, they might well have been able to defend the heights. So, once a man had had his fill, satisfied his wife and played with the kids, what was he to do with his time? Talk about stuff with his mates? Perhaps get into some serious wall painting, illustrate the story of hunts? Or do some rock etching, for a more permanent impression of the day’s events?
This Twyfelfontein spot was, like the Cederberg down south in the Western Cape, a great leisure option for Man of Old. This is probably one of those special African places where a man had the high ground, no end of food and water and time to spare for art. As we all know by now, there was no satellite TV back then. Oprah, the eight o’clock news, Law & Order and Saturday sport were far off. So they etched. And etched some more.
And I’m not sure what they did to escape reality in those days, but, looking at some of the etchings up there, I’d say there was a fair amount of hallucinogenics to be had.
Our guide was Dion So-/oabeb, a tall, good-looking young man with a degree in Rock Art Studies from what was then the Cape Technikon. We climbed up the mountain and saw our first set of etchings, extraordinarily beautiful on the tumbled Etjo sandstone.
They showed a variety of animals acutely observed and immediately recognisable: a hyena with humped shoulders, rhinos with long horns, kudu, lion, hippos and springbok. There was even an elephant.
Ten years previously, Les Bush and I had been clambering over these very rocks, chatting to our guide, whose life’s ambition was to move to Jo’burg and join the jobless throng. A call from below directed us to a family of desert-adapted elephants wandering off in the distance. It had been a brief, tantalising sighting but it had sustained me for a decade. I was secretly hoping they’d be back, so I kept looking wistfully down the valley.
But, as the saying goes: a watched elephant never boils into view.
At a certain rock the etchings, at least 6 000 years old, exaggerated the look of an animal: a giraffe’s chest might bulge out, a lion’s tail might be far longer than normal, the horns of a rhino might be abnormally stretched. This, said Dion, was because these animals had a spiritual significance.
“This is how they were seen in a trance.”
The dancing shaman would have put himself into a trance state (which entailed bleeding from the nose, sweating and perhaps frothing at the mouth – the same symptoms they would have observed from a dying eland) and would have entered a pantheon of wild animal visions. Each beast had a particular significance. Giraffes with their elongated necks would bring rain. Rhinos would guide energy through their horns. The elephant signified peace. A lion, with its sharp claws, was invoked to heal the sick.
On other rocks we found outlines of seals and a penguin, even the head of a cobra. There were also etchings showing circles with pecked-out dots in the middle. These, we were told, were focus circles, taking the shaman into the form of the required animal.
“I met a traditional healer in the Drakensberg,” said Dion. “As part of his training, he stayed underwater for five days. While I was there, he brought rain. And then he chased it away.”
I would have given anything to have once been part of such an ancient Bushman evening. In fact, I got far more out of Twyfelfontein this time round.
I was just moaning a little about not having seen a desert-adapted elephant on this trip.
“There they are!” Jules yelled. And there they indeed were, a number of them, facing us in the late afternoon. And the fact that they were built of clay and dung and stood immobile and life-sized outside a village craft shop made the moment even more special.
But not as special as what came next, when we saw a sign to the Petrified Forest and swerved in, to be met in the car park by one Barnabas, wiping sweat from his brow after a hectic bicycle race across the veld to reach us.
“Come in, friends! That will be N$10 each. Thank you. For you today, I have lovely petrified trees and even a couple of Welwitschias.”
We walked up a small hill and found a petrified sapling.
“What did you do to the forest?” I wanted to know.
“Nothing. It was always like this.” We’d been royally conned by young Barnabas, but in the sweetest possible way. And when he tried to sell us some of his Damara stone collection, how could we refuse? We gave him fruit, a few more dollars and then saw his eyes light up like Halloween at the sight of my Skaaplek, that bag of fabulous cab-odourising industrial tobacco lying on the back seat.
“Ten more stones,” I said. By now he was looking like Tolkien’s Gollum and the Skaaplek had become his Precious.
“Take what you want,” Barnabas slavered. “Only give me the tobacco.” Which we did. Our new Damara buddy climbed onto his bike, clutching at his marvellous sack of baccy and headed back to his homestead.
“We’ll be fighting over this tonight!”