A Drink of Dry Land Read online

  In the evenings I would travel around the river oases that make up much of the Upington community: Keimoes, Kakamas and such. At Keimoes the café man had wondrous sweets. He said they came from a travelling Greek who found them somewhere in the Transvaal. I’d never seen rocket-shaped bull’s-eyes before. The café man’s only gripe was that his newspapers were selling out too fast.

  “I never get a chance to read about the case,” he grumbled. So I filled him in on what I knew.

  But it was only as I was leaving Namaqualand on an SAA flight, after the death sentence (later commuted) had been passed on the luckless farmer, that I realised what was indeed at the heart of the murder trial. Below me, the scrub desert of Namaqualand spread out for an eternity. The brown monotony was broken only by the Gariep River, cutting a lush, verdant line through it.

  If you own land on this river, you’re a made man. A couple of hundred metres away and you’re nothing but a dirt farmer. Or a karakul king who needs huge tracts of scrub – and the attentions of a fickle overseas market.

  During the trial I had to entertain staff photographer Noel Watson, a colourful man with the attention span of a Boland Skollie butterfly, to stop him from chasing the married ladies in town and getting us into a world of trouble. So I took him off through the desert, over the Anenous Pass and finally into Port Nolloth – diamond country.

  Port Nolloth looked like an opium smoker’s den after a police raid as we drove in. It was smothered in fog and quiet as a crypt. Little figures disappeared in the coastal milk, slipping off to the shanties on the outskirts as an angry rooster crowed and Ou Willem rose to meet us. Tatty tail erect as a bushpig’s aerial, he was the sentinel of Divers’ Row.

  We met his owner, one Alf Wewege, the self-proclaimed Mayor of the Divers. Alf waved us into his modest home, pressed beer glasses into our hands and told us of his life and the “spinklers” he and his mates lived in hope of finding. He also told us of the loneliness of living in Port Nolloth, and of one particular weekend with a Lonely Hearts Club girl.

  “I found her in a magazine. She was from Sabie. I paid for her ticket and she took the train out to meet me.” The girl arrived at the Bitterfontein railroad siding, where Alf was waiting. “She was 15 years older than her picture,” he said. “But she had two bottles of mampoer.”

  They spent a glorious weekend together. Alfie showed her the western ocean sunset across the fleet of diamond boats moored in the bay. She showed him some Lowveld charm and the mampoer showed them both just how frail the head can be in the morning.

  “On the Monday, I took her back to Bitterfontein.”

  That first encounter with the diamond divers of Port Nolloth only whetted our appetites for more. A few years later we did the trip again. Our first stop this time was the Scotia Inn bar, where we hoped to find some more of the adventurous souls who wrest stones from the seabed under nearly impossible conditions.

  The gods were with us. Not only did we come across some amenable divers, but one of them turned out to be an old schoolmate, Louis Kriel. He said the seas were too rough that week for serious diving, but that he would take us out anyway for a few days, to get a feel of it all.

  Everyone knew everyone else in town. Especially the divers. And when we headed out the following morning in Louis’s boat, the Gemini Star, the rest of Port Nolloth wanted to know if the Jo’burg boys were seasick yet.

  We, in the meantime, learnt to cook bacon and eggs in the captain’s cabin in the midst of a vicious storm, huge breakers bearing down on us, dolphins following us up the coast and the Rolling Stones doing their thing on the eight-track stereo. In a dancing catamaran, the simple art of frying an egg becomes a feat of agility and balance. Opening a tin of bully beef and forking it out onto a pan to heat requires the timing and skill of a short-order cook and part-time juggler.

  At night we slept below decks. After that experience, I believe I know just what it is like to be trapped inside a washing machine during its rinse cycle.

  In the early 1990s, I had a burning need to visit Namaqualand in The Season, when more than 3 000 floral species erupt from impossibly barren ground and you’re suddenly enveloped in a world of aloes, succulents, lilies, lichens, herbs and daisies in their billions.

  The timing of the trip was left to my mate Les Bush, and on a certain day in August we planned to set out towards the western horizon.

  “Are you sure the daisies will be out?” was all I asked – and received a frosty glare.

  “Yes,” came the terse reply. “Three more sleeps and then we’re gone.”

  Our first major stop out of Jo’burg was the Eye of Kuruman, where, under a Voortrekker memorial stone, were carved the immortal words: “Moenie vir mekaar kwaad word op die pad nie – Genesis 45:24.”

  Which basically means do not get tetchy with your travelling partner on the road. Words to live by.

  Les had found us accommodation in the town of Springbok, where I picked up a self-published book by boxer-turned-Hitler-fan Robey Leibbrandt.

  “This is a boarding house,” I said when we arrived at our overnight stop.

  “No, it’s a guest house. And it comes cheap,” snapped Les.

  Within a few hours, we were settled. We shared a country house overlooking one of the town’s main streets with half of the Namaqualand Old Folks Society and everyone nodded politely at one another as we each put our cheese, beers and sweet wine into various nooks of the fridge.

  Then the owner’s sister, who looked a bit like Meryl Streep, came to invite us to a game of blackjack in the main dwelling. We sat down in the lounge with our beer and our whisky and said hello to two linesmen from the telephone company and their three buddies from the local prison. Betting was restrained at first, then things took a serious turn. Bush was raking in the bucks for a while there, but suddenly Meryl Streep had a second wind and cleaned us all out.

  At five the next morning, after exactly 30 minutes’ sleep, I stumbled through to the bathroom. I was mugged en route by five old folks who accused me of keeping them up all night. I ran for my life, feeling more than slightly liverish.

  “And besides,” they shouted after my retreating form, “you idiots missed the daisy season by weeks. It’s all over. Ha, ha …”

  Undaunted, we went out to the Goegap Nature Reserve, where, the drunken prison warders had assured us, we would definitely find some kind of floral display.

  Les spotted a solitary daisy, nestled cutely into a fold of rock. He planned to lie right in front of this flower with his wide-angle lens and create the impression of abundance. I, on the other hand, hurled myself out of the car and threw up. On the last remaining daisy in Namaqualand.

  Some years later, Jules and I travelled out there in the flower season to celebrate the noon-blooms.

  We stayed in the copper town of Okiep, in the annex of Narap Lodge. Our window looked out on what came to be known as The Garden of Good and Evil. At night we could hear the township folk sloughing off a day’s work with a bottle of wine and a howl at the moon.

  After the turn of the New Millennium, I took Jules off to Port Nolloth, which in boys’ terms is the equivalent of showing your girlfriend the inside of your tree house. Like most things in life, the little port had changed radically in the past decade or so. Definitely more of a cappuccino town these days.

  Before heading back, I had to show her The Bus out at MacDougall’s Bay.

  Way back then, Noel Watson and I had discovered a double-decker bus parked in the middle of Mac Bay village. Although it was locked, we could see signs of habitation. It especially fascinated Noel, who grew up in an Irish tinker’s caravan in the back yard of his parents’ home in Knysna. We took photographs.

  The bus was still there. No one had bothered to give it even a lick of paint, however. It seemed to have done duty as a bush bar at some stage, but now stood derelict and faded. Like memories of four days at sea, one egg in the pan, one egg on the floor and a helluva big wave on the way.

  Chapter
5: Bushmanland

  Pella Cinderella

  The first time I stayed over at the Augrabies Falls I shared my lunch with the granddaddy of all Chacma baboons. I’d been sitting on the stoep of the chalet catching up on notes from the road, sipping a beer and contemplating a brace of ham sandwiches waiting on the table inside. They had little cheese wedges shoved into them with a dash of Tabasco to give the meal more personality.

  The falls were thundering away in the middle distance, the dassies were skittering about over the rocks and the flat lizards were catching some serious rays. The world was spinning away perfectly.

  And then this fellow sauntered up to the chalet. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and sat there very quietly as he approached. He carried himself like a vacuum cleaner salesman who works out a lot in his spare time and has been around the block more than once. There was no fear in those amber eyes, just pure speculation. He sized me up, thought he could take me on with both arms amputated and his tail tied to a braai stand and simply walked inside.

  No fuss, no bother. He came out with one of my sarmies clutched in his right hand. Found himself a good rock about five metres away, sat down and began nibbling thoughtfully. Suddenly he made a face, glared down at the sandwich and I thought uh oh, this is where he beats the living daylights out of the cook. But he turned out to be a bit of a gent, and simply flicked the Tabasco cheese off the bread and onto the ground, where a platoon of ants began to celebrate.

  The baboon polished off the pirated food, looked up at the slightly outraged silent form that was me, blinked once and took off down the road. I rushed inside and claimed the other sandwich, which was lying there untouched. He’d taken what he thought to be his fair share – and no more. This Augrabies Chacma was nothing like his rude Cape Point counterparts, who will rob you blind given half a chance and bark at you to boot.

  Some years later, Jules and I were driving up to Augrabies and the mountains of Bushmanland began doing some very tricksy things. One minute they were symmetrical and low on the horizon. Then they suddenly popped up huge, as if someone had inflated them. Then they rushed behind us and deflated again.

  “Maybe they’re breathing in and out,” said Jules.

  We arrived at Augrabies in the middle of a sand storm. Strong winds had sprung up, generating positive ions that turned us into negative, crabby travellers. We had temporarily forgotten that quote from Genesis back at the Eye of Kuruman, the one that urges you not to squabble with your road-partner.

  The wind got us into such a tangle that we muddled about from chalet to chalet, parking in the wrong place about four times, our tempers fast overheating. Fear and loathing in Augrabies. We unpacked in bristling silence. Then I made a “peace drink” and calm returned to our universe.

  Listen up, just in case you ever get the traveller’s blues. Don’t murder your companion. Instead, just make yourselves some instant coffee with a lot of condensed milk. We call it the Nama Super Latte, but you can call it whatever you like. It works like a charm. Suddenly you’re on a caffeine-and-sugar high and darting about the place like a grinning ferret.

  In the late afternoon, just as the sun dropped down through the haze of dust, we walked over to the falls. The Gariep River took five million years to slice deeply through volcanic rock formations left over from the Great Gondwana Takeaway, during which Australia and Madagascar left Team Africa and formed their own very close corporations. The Nama call it Aukoerebis, the “noise-making place”, and the Khoikhoi, who used to live in these parts, avoided it like the plague. Many unfortunate souls, among them an old friend of mine, Savvas Georgiades, have fallen to their deaths off these rocks.

  We had our own near-disaster at one of the vantage points. My shoes slipped on the rocks while I was trying to photograph the rushing water and for a moment I was dangling on the wire fence, my feet not finding purchase. I took my slippery shoes off and padded about on my bare feet, which worked better.

  Taking photographs at Augrabies is a trip. At first, you get caught up in the majesty of moving water that rolls loudly over the rocks. Then the wide-angle beauty of the surrounding rock-scapes hits you. And then you see one of those fiesta-coloured flat lizards and you wonder: how close will he let me get? You step in cautiously, constantly focusing your lens. You’re eventually amazed when your lizard fills the frame and he has not skittered off in alarm. Augrabies lizards are cool. They stay put. They know tourists don’t want to eat them.

  So there I was, scampering from lizard to dassie to waterfall to rocky gorge, when I heard an anxious gurgle behind me. Jules had inhaled a midge, and was choking on the bug. But it was nothing that the Heimlich manoeuvre and another cup of Nama Super Latte couldn’t cure.

  They say the bottom of the Augrabies Gorge holds a treasure chest of diamonds – and a Great Snake. Every self-respecting major river in Africa needs its very own Great Snake, like the Zambezi, which is home to a character called Nyami Nyami. The huge Gariep Serpent has diamonds in its eye sockets and rules from Augrabies to the distant Richtersveld. Experts have seen real-life pythons of up to eight metres in length around here, and it’s a well-known fact that they swim like demons. But where do the reports of diamond-eyes come from? A late-night campfire and some Kakamas soetwyn, perhaps.

  But we do know that the Augrabies is one of the world’s great waterfalls, that it drops down more than 150 metres to the gorge and that, amazingly, it was once privately owned, by a Mr Piet Nel. He sold it to the Union Government for £9 000 in 1910.

  On the Dry Lands Journey of 2004, however, we arrived in perfect conditions, with high cirrus clouds cresting like milk streaks above us and diffusing the harsh light. I took a walk to the gorge opposite the falls and found a lone dassie meditating in the late afternoon, gazing over his fiefdom of rock, water and sky.

  Back at the chalet, we held a bird party for starlings, weavers, sparrows and bulbuls. We laid out a feast of rusks, and they cheerfully tucked in. I kept a lookout for my Augrabies Chacma. In fact, I had prepared a sandwich for him – without cheese or Tabasco this time.

  The next day we headed off to our favourite Bushmanland haunt, a cathedral-oasis (I’ll explain) called Pella, tucked away in the scrub desert about 30 klicks (kilometres) west of the town of Pofadder. Many people think Pofadder is named after South Africa’s famously lazy (but very poisonous) puffadder snake. In fact, the town gets its name from a local chief named Klaas Pofadder, a livestock rustler who lived and died (in a hail of bullets) at this spot. The place was called Theronsville but the name never stuck – so it reverted to Pofadder, in honour of the most dramatic event to have taken place here.

  On the way, with Jules behind the wheel, I read her old journal entry from the spring of 1999, when we first came here:

  “I can feel my bladder is full, but I know we’ll be in Pella soon, so I shut up, quietly cursing the corrugated road. I see donkeys under two date palms – you can tell we’re in the land of missionaries.

  “By the time we arrive in Pella, my bladder is close to bursting. We drive through this hot, dusty little village and just before the church we see a small wooden sign that reads Kultuur Koffiekroeg. Then we’re at this incredible cathedral that was built more than 150 years ago, using a picture in an old encyclopaedia for reference, by a group of gifted amateurs.

  “Three nuns emerge from the cathedral to greet us: Sisters Anne-Dorothy, Marie-Felicity, and Therese-Henriette, who assumes the role of guide for us. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the 86-year-old nun was probably looking forward to a nap. Now she has to play with tourists but she’s full of good cheer.

  “I should ask her where the toilets are, but I get distracted again as we enter the cathedral, where it’s wonderfully cool compared to the still, baking air outside. We make an appointment to meet again at five that afternoon, when the light will be much softer for photographs. Chris wants to discuss camera angles with me, but I can’t concentrate. Have to find a loo or a secluded spot behind a tree.

>   “Sister Therese-Henriette tells me where the toilet is. I go off to one of the houses and find the toilet signs but Drat! All three doors are locked. And I can’t pee just anywhere, there are kids with big eyes all over the place. Then I see another gate, another house, another door and I just walk in. The place is filled with gospel music and delicious Sunday dinner aromas and chattering voices. Sister Anne-Dorothy finds me, gives me the toilet key and I rush back past a bemused Chris, who doesn’t know what’s going on here.

  “I make it just in time. Utter bliss. But the saga is not over yet. As I flush, my sunglasses fall off my head and into the whirling bowl. All I can do is laugh. It’s all too silly …”

  Shame. And there I was that day, thinking that my wife had just had a touch too much sunshine.

  Anyway, we trooped off to our lodgings for the night at the Kultuur Koffiekroeg, a matjieshuis (literally “mat house” in the Nama tradition, and adopted by the old-time white farmers of Namaqualand) containing a king-sized bed covered in a jackal kaross and a potty behind a curtain. On a table next to the bed was a bunch of fresh flowers in an old enamel cup. All this for 50 bucks a night – what a bargain.

  Jules set up her laptop inside the reed restaurant, kicked off her shoes and dug her feet deeply and happily into the soft Bushmanland sand. On the hessian walls were faded murals showing date palms and matjieshuise and a rough watercolour of Pella Cathedral.

  We met the pretty Paula Simboya, the manager. She and owner Christina Jannetjies, who also goes by the name of Ouma Toekoes, were on the local tourism committee.

  “Would you like to be our guests at the Miss and Mister Junior Pella competition later this afternoon?” she asked shyly. And why not, we replied.

  So Jules and I attended the local beauty competition at the Pella Community Hall. We sat behind a raft of naughty teenage boys, who were eyeing some equally flirty teenage girls. An orange-peel fight erupted, followed by some melodramatic behind-the-hand whispering, accompanied by the noisy consumption of those rather devilish cheesy curls that come in jumbo plastic bags and stain the fingers an unforgettable saffron.