Chapter 29: Serra Cafema
The boffins say there are six degrees of separation between humans. I once heard an English Business Angel (the rich guys who fall from the sky and save poor entrepreneurs with a timely injection of cash) say South Africans seemed to have only one degree of separation between them.
I was one degree away from putting up my outraged dukes and knocking the wings off said Business Angel for accusing me of being inbred, when he explained himself and saved us all a lot of embarrassment:
“It’s really got nothing to do with how well you play the banjo, or your true feelings for close relatives and farm animals. What I mean is you South Africans all seem to know someone in common, whether you come from Jo’burg or Cape Town or out in the sticks.”
OK then. A compliment. My ruffled feathers were smoothed over once again. I closed my third eye and rubbed the scar on my left shoulder where they surgically removed that tiresome second head at birth.
And so it was, as we aspiring (and not outrageously inbred) rock stars took to the skies in that little Cessna 206 with our private pilot Ingrid Benson, that we began the South African version of nose-rubbing: The Do-You-Know? game.
Ingrid, a bubbly Natal Midlander from the Karkloof area, knew many of our good friends and so, chugging north towards the Angolan border, we gossiped like old ladies across a communal washing line.
As we flew, the operatic, sere Namibian geology unfolded below us. In every broad river valley we saw galaxies of fairy circles, like Earth-freckles. We discussed our various theories on this.
“Termites eating around their nests?” I ventured.
“Euphorbia poisoning, maybe?” suggested wife Jules.
“No, I rather fancy the alien origins of the fairy circle,” declared our pilot. Was this really a good time for Sky Captain Benson to play us her loony tunes? How much trust can you actually put in your Cessna pilot if she believes Jabba the Hutt really does stroll the galaxy?
“Oh, relax,” she laughed, reading our faces like the morning paper. “I’m just talking about little meteor showers falling from outer space. Namibia, as you well know, is famous for its meteor showers. I think these fairy circles are impact impressions.” I eased my finger off the Eject button and enjoyed the ride.
Joining the fairy circles and the spidery lines of the dry rivers down below were the tiny geometric shapes of Himba kraals. We were flying over the massive dry valleys where Dr Georg Hartmann, the geologist-explorer, came with his maps and surveys just before the end of the nineteenth century. Dr Georg named one of the spaces the Hartmann’s Valley. Then he looked up and saw a donkey in pyjamas disappearing from a ridge like a sneaky Hollywood Apache and immediately called it a Hartmann’s zebra. Then he found another valley, saw a river running through it, felt a pang of homesickness and named it after Frau Hartmann: the Marienfluss.
Dr Hartmann, like Messrs Rüppell, Messum and Burchell, was in a rush to adopt Africa into his family, it seems. Or to earn some eternal life credits. It would not be appropriate for me to name anything around here The Marais, however, because my surname means “swamp” in French. But I have my eye on a small wetland or two in the Okavango.
Our landing strip was beaconed by a Land Rover belonging to the legendary Schoeman family, who have a lodge in these parts. Another vehicle pulled up, this one being driven by George Katanga of Wilderness Safaris’ Serra Cafema camp. Bit of a lad, young George. We liked him immediately.
Cafema was a Portuguese explorer over in Angola, and a range of mountains on that side was adopted into his family. The Wilderness camp lies on the Kunene River, not more than 60 km from the Skeleton Coast. George drove us through a little Sahara of sand blown up against dark granitic outcrops, tortured lizard lands with mica schist glittering like space dust on the windblown dunes.
The final descent into the pass leading to the river was spectacular. First, there was a controlled plummet down a dune slope, then a climb up a granite hill. At the top, shining silver in the sun, was the great serpentine, green-fringed Kunene – a water-miracle in this steadfast, stoic desert.
“Kunene means ‘right arm’ in Himba,” said George, “the inference being that ‘right arm’ is really big. Kaoko, on the other hand, means ‘left arm’ or small.”
Two days later, travelling with a group of British tourists on a cultural outing to meet the famous Krokodilla and Ouma, I heard one of the more reserved Brits softly mutter:
“I’d give my Kunene for a beer right now.” Which explains why British humour has no equal. It just bubbles forth from the famed Spring of Droll and needs no laughter-track.
Serra Cafema is one of the world’s truly spectacular areas. Even after travelling so far through this visual giant of a country, we still felt as though we’d come from a land of little chapels into one awe-inspiring cathedral.
This great valley, which is split by the Kunene, was formed by glaciers about 280 million years ago, give or take a week or two, I suppose. This fact lies embedded in the Atlas of Namibia, which also gives the country’s “donkey density” as 140 000. Give or take.
“Crocodiles are the border guards between Namibia and Angola out here,” said George. Upon our arrival at the camp, co-manager Robyn Dreyer warned us not to:
** Succumb to the temptation of an unaccompanied midnight skinny dip in the river;
** Walk within three metres of the water line;
** Trail our fingers in the Kunene while on the evening boat trip.
“The crocs will have you,” she assured us. “They surge out of the water at more than 70 km an hour. You won’t even see them coming.”
And look! There were the Lomaxes, our friends from Windhoek Airport, coming up the boardwalk from their room. They’d had a bit of free drama. One of the staff had a badly split lip. Steve, being a medical man, albeit a dentist, had been called in to do some stitching up.
The next morning our guide, Toni Hart, took the Lomax and Marais parties on a river walk. A grey heron lifted itself off the rocks and flew away, a graceful Japanese painting come to life. We spent a few precious moments with a drop-dead gorgeous violet drop-wing dragonfly dressed in party colours and then found some African wildcat tracks heading under the kitchen.
“He lives there,” said Toni. Sensible fellow.
I got that Hollywood Apache feeling again, of being watched from above. And yes, there they were, a troop of baboons disappearing over a dune. They left a scout behind to trail us and occasionally bark progress reports back at them, while they cavorted like olive circus clowns on the sandy ridges.
Some Himba donkeys spied on us through salt bushes.
“Trans-Kalahari Ferraris,” said Toni.
An African pied wagtail bobbed his butt at us from a salvador bush, and we met the common fiscal with its pronounced white eyebrow, a feature not seen on the species anywhere else. We stopped at a silver-leafed saucer berry bush and sucked on its yellow fruit, which was so sticky it clung to our teeth for dear life.
“The Himba cook them into quite potent liquor,” said Toni. Every species on God’s Earth, it seemed, has a way of getting out of it.
While we were temporarily lost in a world of white-winged tenebrionid beetles, purple morning glories and baby crocodile tracks, we were hailed from behind by a cheerful old man called Dos Santos, who was on his daily fishing mission.
Dos Santos carried a pole strung with an old fishing line, ending in a homemade hook with a wine cork for a float. We asked him, in pidgin Portuguese pantomime, what he used for bait. He scrabbled about in a tatty old bag and brought out a tin half-full of soil and nervous worms.
Dos Santos, a completely rational man of his time, had simply walked out of Angola and its wars in the seventies and set up home alone in a tiny hut made from branches next to the Kunene River. He did odd jobs for the lodge and was growing butternut, pumpkin, carrots and corn for its table.
Utterly fascinated by this happy old Huck Finn, Jules and I swerved off the scheduled walk and followed Dos Santos to his fishing spot, a nearby river backwater. Our baboon sentry barked:
“Two pax veering off with Delta Sierra. Three pax still on path. Leave some lunch for me.” Or something.
We asked about the crocs. Dos Santos said they left him alone. We gave him some tobacco money and the old man put down his fishing pole, lifted his hands to the heavens and invoked a sky-full of blessings upon our heads. We blessed him back and rejoined the main party.
Presently we found ourselves on a rocky peninsula with a splendid view over the Kunene, where the river was pouring itself enthusiastically over a waterfall. Above us in this watered garden moonscape, a blackbreasted snake eagle circled. At our feet, a tiny orange-and-brown skink scurried, occasionally halting to lift his feet and cool the pads under them in a weird imitation of a canoe-paddler.
“A Mexican Wave lizard,” I said
“You’re getting the hang of it,” Toni said.
On the way back we looked in on Dos Santos, who was singing a cheerful song (a) because he had not yet been snaffled by a Kunene crocodile, and (b) because he’d already caught a thick-lipped happy (Thoracochromis albolabris), two leopard squeakers (Synodontis leopardimus) and a slender stonebasher (Hippopotomyris ansorgii).
What’s more, he was going to eat those fine specimens all by himself that night, outside his stick-hut along the Kunene river, by the light of an Angolan moon. What’s not to sing about?
There used to be elephants here, browsing the length of the Kunene in great numbers, until the war wiped them out. On the evening boat trip, we wondered if the area would not be more generously lined with Makalani palms had the soldiers and their machine guns and the grey-shoed politicians in the background spared the herds. Someone, I think it was Toni, had told us a Makalani seed germinates more easily once it’s been through the digestive tract of an elephant. All life is connected.
A hot, heavy, desert wind blew at our backs like the urgent breath of a panting dragon. It batted our boat towards a tiny sandbank, which was technically on “the other side” of the river.
“Look, I’m back in Angola drinking beer after 30 years,” I told Jules, trying not to let the moment descend into a pit of irony. “And look, I’m surrounded by folks in khaki again. But somehow it all feels different. Nicer.”
On the return trip, Toni waved farewell to an almost invisible Dos Santos as he sat on the bank taking in the last glow of sunlight. There was something so essentially happy about that man, I just wanted to jump out of the boat and go sit by his side. But I knew the crocs would show an unhealthy interest in my plans.
That night, around the fire, we met a rich American guy who, for my money, had spent a year too long on Wall Street being a Master of the Universe. Despite being able to call on more cash than my entire suburb back in Jo’burg, he looked a little broken.
“Investment banking: that’s a lot of stress,” remarked Jules. “How did you cope?”
“I drank,” he said, staring deep into the flames.
The next day, while the American contingent was quad-biking about the place, we joined the Brits for a drive out to the Bogenfels arrangement of rocks. We passed Ludwig’s bustards patrolling the sands for crickets while the skies above built up into a stormlight fantasia. Suddenly, Toni stopped the vehicle and dived into a sand dune.
“That’s it, you see,” I assured Sky Captain Benson. “Toni’s got Cafema Fever.”
But the girl was actually just hunting down an armoured lizard that lived in the dune. The lizard was not in for visitors.
“He knows me too well,” said Toni, rejoining us, dusting off half a dune from her ranger outfit.
You can actually get quite stoned, just looking at the desert scenery out here. The various massifs take on the shapes of barking dogs, sharks and dragons. A slight breeze carries the scent of myrrh on the air, and there’s always the chance of spotting a shaggy brown hyena padding over the dunes.
In the afternoon Toni drove us off to meet Oumatjie and Krokodilla, who live in the village of Otapi about eight klicks (kilometres) from the river. Four years ago, Krokodilla (who then bore a now-forgotten name) went off to the Kunene to fetch water, accompanied by her little dog. As she was filling her calabash, a crocodile leapt out of the water and grabbed the right side of her body. The dog charged the crocodile, barking. The distraction worked, for Krokodilla anyhow. The big lizard released the young Himba woman and went for the little dog, which was never seen again.
“Somehow, Krokodilla managed to drag herself ashore,” said Toni, who had befriended both women by now. “She was flown to Windhoek for surgery and stitched up. She recovered well, and wore her hospital gown for many months afterwards. Krokodilla is well known among local Himbas for having flown in an aeroplane and having been to Windhoek. They sometimes mention the croc attack as well.”
We met the two rather gorgeous women in the late afternoon. They received us in their village. Oumatjie, a little tetchy but entranced with Toni’s flame-red hair, was making a basket from Makalani palm leaves. Krokodilla, about seven months’ pregnant with her fifth child, was enjoying a bit of pipe smoking. I don’t know what she had in that pipe, but she looked more relaxed than a Cape Town lounge lizard. Which is hard to do.
We took our photographs, bought some PVC bracelets and said goodbye to this little family in the sand. It was a brief, reasonably gracious encounter, with Toni being a good facilitator, talking in pidgin Himba.
After breakfast the next day, our Sky Captain had us packed and ready for departure. The dune baboons were out on the sand doing an interesting set of dervish-cartwheels like they were on a four-day acid rave in the desert. The African wildcat under the kitchen had eaten the rather handsome lodge rooster in the night and the Brits were practising on their quads in the car park. The lodge at the end of the universe was dealing with another day in Paradise.
“Goodnight Namibia,” I whispered once we were wheels-up and headed for Windhoek. “I’ll see you in my dreams …”