Chapter 28: Palmwag, Damaraland
Never say goodbye to Namibia. I’d done this rash thing once before, and look where it landed me. After that 10 000-km journey, Jules and I thought maybe we’d stay out of the desert for a decade or so. I even gave my Namibia map to an interested friend.
Yet here we were eight months later, drinking good old Tafel Lager at Windhoek Airport, waiting to meet our very own charter pilot. Like rock stars or something. On a return engagement, five nights only.
The compact Ingrid Benson arrived in her Sefofane Airways Cessna (ZS-Papa Foxtrot Romeo) and loaded us up, along with Steve and Maggie Lomax from Manchester, England. She was booked to drop us off in Damaraland and continue north to the Kunene with the Lomaxes, an affable couple on a pre-honeymoon honeymoon. Sort of a romantic practice run.
The winter landscape of Namibia, at a height of 3 000 metres, is like the patterned back of a sleeping Nile crocodile. Rocky outcrops, dry river courses with their drainage lines, the claw marks of natural erosion and dark mountains were all interlocked into a tawny jigsaw shape. Madagascar makes biologists froth with excitement as new species constantly reveal themselves. The ancient and natural stone temples of Namibia do the same thing for geologists. Every rock trauma, every scar, is splayed open and telling a story.
“Am I mad?” wrote Jules in her journal that night. “Looking down, I felt the mountains were beginning to sing together in deep baritone voices, like the private conversations of elephants, just below our level of hearing. A silent opera in a very old amphitheatre.”
After two hours in the air, the Cessna descended sweetly onto the gravel plains amid the wolf’s milk bushes, to finally kiss its own lost shadow. This was Palmwag, Damaraland.
Kapoi Kasaona from Wilderness Safaris’ Rhino Camp was there to meet us. Kapoi straddles two cultures. He’s a modern Himba from Purros whose father had been determined to educate him well. On the drive, he spoke to us about his dad, whom he obviously admired greatly.
“My father says if a thing is not planned, it’s not worth doing at all,” he said.
Kapoi began working locally for the Save the Rhino Trust some four years before, doing camel patrols to track the rhino on this huge wilderness concession of half a million hectares next to the Skeleton Coast National Park.
“In the 1960s this used to be farm land,” he told us. “Cattle, sheep and goats were here, but there were also about 300 black rhinos. Then the border wars began, and so did the poaching for rhino horn. The locals mostly did the shooting, the South Africans mostly did the buying.”
Soon, there were only about 30 rhino left in the whole area. Then Blythe Loutit formed the Save the Rhino Trust. Today, if you ask the environmentalists about numbers in the Palmwag area, they’ll naturally be coy about answering. But it’s believed that the rhino population is back to about half of its 1960 count.
“It’s a very special animal,” said Kapoi. “We’re talking about Diceros bicornis bicornis – the desert-adapted black rhino.”
Wilderness Safaris and the Save the Rhino Trust had brought tourism to the area, and the community was seeing the benefits. Schools and clinics had been built, and locals were being trained as guides and trackers and lodge staff. Rhino Camp had become an international lodestone for students and scientists; a day spent in the gravel fields of this moonscape in search of wandering rhino had become one of the country’s top adventures.
“But,” said Kapoi, “the best kind of rhino encounter is when the animal doesn’t even know it’s being followed, so there’s minimal stress. The guides always try to bring the tourists in downwind of the rhino, so it never scents them.”
On our previous drive through the district, Jules and I had spotted some feisty camels on a grassy ridge. To impress Kapoi, I suppose, I hauled out my Epson P2000 image storage device and showed him a photograph of one of the camels we’d seen.
“His name is Nelson,” said Kapoi, as if it were the most natural thing for me to be carrying pictures of his beloved beasts in my jacket pocket. “And there, in the background, those are some of the breeding females.” It was I who ended up being impressed.
“You should have seen Dries,” said Kapoi, warming to a beloved subject. “He was hard to stop once he got going. But he wasn’t as crazy as Jan. Let me tell you about Jan. He once led a charge of camels right at a herd of desert elephants.” Normally one prefers to rush away from these peevish giants.
“There we were, riding these camels that were moving at speed towards the elephants. The other trackers and I had no choice but to jump off and run away. That was Jan.”
Kapoi and his camels. He said they were excellent at tracking the black rhinos around Damaraland, being silent and stately in their movements.
“Except for when they knelt down to allow the trackers to climb off,” he said. “The saddles would creak, the rhinos would be alerted and they would run off. Then we’d have to mount the camels again and go find them.”
We later found out that these were the very camels used by explorer Benedict Allen on his three-month crossing of the Skeleton Coast. He trained Nelson, Jan and Andries into something of a safari squad and then took the nervous camels on their well-documented odyssey for the BBC book and TV series called The Skeleton Coast. At journey’s end, Allen donated the camels to the Save the Rhino Trust. And here was I, of the initial opinion that these three fellows were simple Damaraland layabouts with no pedigree to speak of.
Initially, the lunchtime light did not favour the harsh land as we drove on with Kapoi and a French couple from Lyon, Fabrice Bouillot and Corinne Bernard. We passed clumps of Euphorbia damarana, and I remembered those unfortunate bus travellers at Uis who had used the stuff for “barbecue bush” and died horrible deaths.
“That latex from the wolf’s milk bush kills all, except for the kudu and the black rhino,” said Kapoi. “You see those white splashes on the rocks? The rhinos excrete the latex through their urine.”
A blackchested snake eagle banked over us in the late afternoon. The dense air of sea level and the softer light somehow conspired to make it look enormous, like a condor. We drove past the smelly shepherd’s bush with the basalt of the Etendeka Mountains jabbing the sky and then arrived at the clear pools of the Uniab River. Cresting a hillock, we came upon hundreds of springbok in a slow-moving tapestry of creams and fawns, doing the “trekbok” thing, ambling to the horizon in search of something nice to eat.
Just after a ruby sunset, we bounced into the camp, which was set in a lake of plumy lemon-tinged grass in the light of a grapefruit half-moon. There we met relief manager Andrea Staltmeier, bearing cold wet towels for dusty brows.
Over a feast of leek soup, lamb and couscous, Andrea revealed that she came from a small skiing village in Bavaria. Apart from being an adept player of the oboe and the accordion, Andrea had also been an instructor in aerobics and Pilates.
“One day I had a vivid vision of playing traditional Bavarian music to Japanese tourists for the rest of my life,” she said. “And so I fled to Africa.”
There was a certain trick (or should that be “trickle”?) to showering in our tent. Our bucket contained 15 litres of warm water, enough for four minutes of frantic washing. Gallant as ever, I took up only 30 seconds of shower-time and let my wife have the rest. Not for nothing did they call me Pigpen in the army.
Wake-up was before first light. By 6.30 am we were on our rhino-tracking expedition. By the cold light of dawn I had a prickly feeling at the back of my neck. I just knew we were being watched from somewhere. This must have been how the Westward Ho! wagoneers of the American prairies felt as they traipsed through Apache country.
And there they were, the canny beasts, lining the ridges of Damaraland. Looking down at us from a safe distance. Then wheeling in fresh sunlight and galloping off like the magnificent Hartmann’s zebra we knew them to be.
We stopped beside an ant nest, which was ringed by a handy harvest of grass seeds.
“The Damara people collect these seeds,” Kapoi said. “They soak them in water for three days and then add honey.”
There was silence.
“And then what?” Jules asked.
“Then they drink it. Very potent. Very delicious,” Kapoi added with a touch of mischief.
The French were great. We had bonded over red wine and camera talk the night before. I was most impressed by the lyonnais sense of humour.
Stopping by a teenage Welwitschia mirabilis, Kapoi dismissed it as “only 500 years old”.
“That’s very old,” said Fabrice. Kapoi told him a respectable Welwitsch grew to be thousands of years old.
“What’s the point,” asked the Frenchman, “when everything else has a shorter life? It must get very lonely.”
“I suppose that’s what vampires have been asking themselves for ages,” someone quipped. And so we drove on into the morning, learning a little, laughing a lot.
When you go tracking black rhino out here, you actually spend most of the day with your nose in wild lavender, ostrich salad, medicinal Himba plants, fluffy ice bushes and the indomitably green mustard bush, the Salvadora Persica. We tried the salvador berries, which both elephant and Himba delight in, and they tasted like a blend of English mustard and horseradish.
Another salvador tip: the fibrous stems are used locally as toothbrushes.
The basalt rocks began to take on weird shapes in the growing sunlight, and with my macro lens I found some form of life behind almost every stone. On one kopje the bleached branches of dead shrubs looked like the skeletons of a platoon of soldiers who died trying to take the heights.
The radio finally crackled:
“John, John, I’m standing by,” responded Kapoi in Afrikaans. A little while later we came upon John Hendricks, a Damara from Sesfontein who had become a local tracking legend. With John were two trainee trackers. They were after two rhinos who had caught their scent earlier in the day and had led them a merry 20-km chase to an oasis on the Uniab River.
The trainees looked like they were seriously reconsidering their career choices. John, despite having slogged all day over stony ground, looked fresh and ready for another trek. We peered into the thick riverine bush.
“Hell of a place to lose a rhino,” whispered my wife.
We retreated to high ground, the wind blowing steadily in our faces. A fog bank full of sullen clouds rose from the west, where the Uniab joined the Atlantic and flamingos twiddled their toes hopefully in the mud. The wind was driving in from the western ocean side, snaking into the desert along the riverbed.
We all decided to have lunch and re-think our strategy. Kapoi & Co whipped out tables, camping chairs and a repast of quiche, meat pies, salad and mealie bread with jam. The trainee trackers were famished and, after we guests had helped ourselves, they set to with gusto. Then the fickle river wind whipped away a stack of serviettes, which went flapping into Damaraland. The trainees just went on eating while John and Kapoi rushed off and recovered them. The two rhino veterans returned and had a couple of stern words with the younger men.
After lunch we followed John and saw the rhinos, a mother and a four-year-old calf, in a longish depression in the ground. Ma had tremendous dinosaur-like horns – a regular little fat Triceratops. Grey, antediluvian lumps moving confidently through a brown stony desert.
We ran up a hill to get a vantage point, ducking to keep our silhouettes from breaking the horizon line. I hoped like hell the rhinos hadn’t heard me chuffing up the incline. The Mom had definitely sensed something. She swivelled and glared short-sightedly up at the top of the hill, her young boy taking cover behind his mother.
Mother and son stood posing for photographs, turned swiftly and jogged off into the horizon, tails curled pig-like over their backs.
Back at the camp, Andrea poured us a drink and told us about an Italian guest who’d recently visited the area.
“She’d come from the south,” said Andrea. “Somewhere along the line, a horse bit her.” Suddenly this vast country seemed very small indeed.
“We remember her from the roadhouse near the Fish River Canyon,” said Jules. “The lady who wondered if maybe she had rabies.”
I was having a beer on the porch with Fabrice, my newest French friend, when a very large and fearsome armoured cricket climbed up his leg. He looked down and shrugged. I brushed it off. Then we both realised just how scary that little critter really was. If I had come across something half his size back home in Jo’burg, I would have locked us all up and pressed the panic button.
“Yes,” said Fabrice. “Me too. I would have screamed like a girl. Anuzzer beer?”
The next morning, on our way back to the airfield, we were given an amazing “pronking” display by a resident herd of springbok. They were darting about, throwing themselves crescent-backed into the sky, like little jump-jets trying to escape their skins. Full of beans. The girls in the herd looked suitably impressed.
We came across a Namaqua sandgrouse sitting on her eggs in the folds of a Welwitschia, a sight I’ll probably never encounter again. Then a Rüppell’s korhaan that was being mobbed by an angry gang of finchlarks. It was trying to gobble down a baby finchlark as fast as it could. Corinne spotted a leopard at a riverbank. The rest of us missed that sighting, but within minutes we were surrounded by curious Comanche (actually Hartmann’s) zebras that we’d surprised sunning themselves on a ridge.
Suddenly a tiny three-day-old oryx calf, fawn and startled, wobbled across the road into a thicket. Its mother had probably given it instructions to lie still close to the road, but the vehicle noise made it totter up and stumble away. Further on, Kapoi pointed out a scrub hare, lying prone under a bush, not even blinking. Becoming Damaraland.
We dropped the French off at their vehicle at Palmwag Lodge, made the acquaintance of a camel called Tom and went to meet Ingrid at her Cessna. We said goodbye to the splendid Kapoi with the white, white teeth and, like the true rock stars we imagined ourselves to be right then, we were hoisted up into the blue Namibian skies.