I finished reading Julian Smith’s excellent book Crossing the Heart of Africa which
attempting to fall asleep in a guesthouse near Worcester. The book chronicles Smith’s attempt to
retrace the steps of an Englishman named Grogan who during the late 1890s and
early 1900s tried to be the first person to travel from Cape Town to Cairo on
foot. Grogan undertook this arduous
journey to prove to the father of a woman from New Zealand that he was worthy
enough to marry the man’s daughter.
Smith made his trip because of his fascination with Grogan and as a
prelude to his own upcoming wedding.
Smith’s book was not as in-depth or as enlightening as
any work by Paul Theroux, yet it was a valuable commentary on traveling and the
hardships that go with it once you leave the Euorpean-esque security of South
Africa and venture into the rest of Africa.
Smith began his journey in Cape Town and traveled north. Theroux began the journey for his book Dark Star Safari in Cairo and traveled
south to Cape Town. I thought it was
most appropriate that I had finished both of their books an hour by car from
where one of them began and the other ended their journey.
The Karoo is a vast semi-desert region in the interior of
southern and western South Africa. It’s
the interface between the vast Namib Desert to the north and the succulent
fynbos vegetation that lines South Africa’s southern coast. It’s an extensive area of low scrubby
vegetation that will remind North Americans of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. To the average person the Karoo is a vast
wasteland with no practical value. To a
naturalist it’s a vast cornucopia of plants and animals found nowhere else on
earth. I wanted to see the Karoo through
the eyes of a naturalist.
Travel into and across the Karoo is problematic during
the rainy season and without sufficient water it is suicidal in the middle of
summer. My visit was during the shoulder
period between those two extremes.
Locals at the edge of the Karoo told me that although the previous
winter wasn’t as rainy as they had hoped I could expect a great display of wild
flowers as I moved across the desert.
Anyone with an eye for nature that has been in the Mojave Desert of
California or the Sonoran Desert in Arizona in spring knows what a beautiful
riot of colorful flowering plants can be produced by winter rains. There the right amount of winter rain occurs
only once every ten years or so.
Conditions were similar in the Karoo and as I drove through it I
regularly stopped to visually inhale the enormous beauty of a desert on fire
with color.
A bird watching guide to Southern Africa recommended
travel across the Karoo on a dirt and rock road signposted the R 355. That same guide forewarns travelers about the
condition of the rocky and bumpy road saying that the R 355 is renowned for
puncturing tires. The guide went on to recommend that travelers carry with them
at least two spare tires throughout their journey.
I intersected the R 355 somewhere northeast of
Worcester. From that point to Calvinia,
the only place resembling a large town in the Karoo, was 130 miles of horrible
road. Its biggest distinction was that
these 130 miles were the longest stretch of road in South Africa without a
settlement or habitation along it.
Unfamiliar birds flushed from the roadside throughout my
journey. My already snail-like pace
across the desert was made even slower by the frequent stops to identify birds
or simply to look at the landscape.
Karoo vegetation has been evolving millions of years since the last
glaciation scoured the landscape.
Evolving with the vegetation was an entire suite of bird species that
had adapted to the unique vegetation.
Clearly there were forty or fifty species of birds here that could not
be found elsewhere in South Africa. It
paid to travel slowly, stop often, and look at every bird I could find.
About thirty miles north on the R 355 I was passed by two
4 x 4 trucks each with a camper top covering the bed and one of them was
pulling a trailer. Had I been back in
Australia they would have been called a caravan. Both trucks had to be traveling at least sixty
miles an hour down this terrible bouncy and rutted road. I wondered what condition everyone’s kidneys
would be in after a morning of jarring travel.
I was traveling less than twenty miles per hour. Their passage produced huge billows of dust
that clogged my view and that of any birds along the road’s verge. An hour after they passed me I found this
pair parked by the roadside. I thought
they had stopped for coffee.
Pale chanting goshawks, one of the prettiest hawks I have
seen anywhere on earth, sat like sentinels on the electric wire poles that
paralleled the road. As predicted, the
ample winter rains had produced a kaleidoscope of colorful flowering plants. At the start of the R 355 virtually every
flower was yellow. However as I
progressed north and the soils and the vegetation became sparser the color of
the flowers changed from pink to lavender to red. The R 355 began to remind me of the road to
Hereford, Arizona along the Mexico border where spring flowers bloom in
profusion.
I checked into the Die Blou Nartige guesthouse near the
edge of town. Herman Wick, the owner,
appeared from a back room and welcomed me to “the Blue Orange” guesthouse. Blou nartije (blue orange in Afrikaans) is an
endangered desert shrub. Herman named
his guest house after the plant and did not know it was an endangered species
until a Cape Town botanist stayed one night and told him about the plant and
its precarious status.
Unloading my belongings from my car I noticed that the
left rear tire was quickly going flat.
The R 355 had struck again almost as if it had been selected to so in
the South African birding guide. I was
lucky it was a slow leak that didn’t get worse until I was in Calvinia.
While there was still some air in the tire I drove
quickly to the nearby "Supa Quick" tire repair shop.
This being a Saturday afternoon the shop was closed. However I laughed as I drove into the parking
lot because the two 4x4 trucks that had passed me going north on the R 355 were
parked in the same lot waiting for repairs.
One tire, on the truck driven by Jan, was flat. When I had seen this pair pulled to the side
of the road they were not having coffee as I suspected. Instead they were fixing a flat tire. Once the flat was replaced the spare tire was
quickly punctured and was rapidly losing air.
“We passed you on that god-awful road,” Neels began. “And then you passed us a little later.”
Neels, his brother-in-law Jan and their wives were from
Ceres, South Africa, not far from Worcester where I spent the previous
night. They were enroute to Bushmanland
for a week of four-wheeling in the desert. At least that was the plan once
Jan’s two tired were repaired. Neels had
called the emergency phone number for the tire shop and learned that the owner
was in the middle of eighteen holes of golf at the local course. He told Neels he would be there to help us
once he finished his round of golf. After
introductions and an explanation of my trip to South Africa they told me about
their regular 4-wheel drive adventures in the desert. “Namibia.
You have to go to Namibia, Craig,” I was told by Neels. “Namibia is where it’s still wild.”
Jan then recounted a story about a recent camping trip to
Namibia. “We parked in the middle of
nowhere and put our tent on the top of the 4-wheeler. It must have been midnight when we were
jolted awake by the roar of a Namibian lion!”
“I looked out the tent flap,” Jan continued, “and there
not sixty feet away was a male lion in full mane. He had with him a female and two youngsters.
They just stood there looking at our truck and the male kept roaring.”
Jan and his wife stayed awake until past two
o’clock. “We were shivering and it was
99 degrees out! Finally the male tired
of roaring and they all just walked away.”
Jan then said, “I think we just pissed them off camping
in the middle of their area and that’s why they roared so much.” Jokingly I asked if they took any pictures of
the lions. Jan’s wife smiled and said,
“The camera was down below in the truck and there was no fucking way I was
going to go get it.”
One desert animal that I really wanted to see in the wild
was the honey badger. It looks like a
large skunk and has an attitude like ten wolverines with steroidal rage. There are several documented records of a
lone honey badger coming on to a group of lions eating an animal they had
killed. Undaunted and outnumbered the
lone honey badger scared them all away and took over the kill. Imagine an animal smaller than a Labrador
retriever. Put white stripes on it and
give it the personality of a wolverine and that is a honey badger.
“Oh, you want to see a honey badger, huh,” Neels
asked. “They are scarce but they are out
there in the desert. We see one or two a year.”
I asked if the stories I had heard about their ferocity were true.
“Damned right they are true,” Jan said. “If I was a male lion and I came onto a honey
badger the first thing I would do is put my paws over my nuts and run away
hoping that crazy fucker wasn’t hungry.”
We talked more about Namibia and then switched to the
wildness of Botswana and from there came back to South Africa. The country was a major discussion point with
about every South African I met. I
recounted some of my experiences so far in South Africa and mentioned that
everywhere I went people were worried about crime. Yet the only time I felt the least bit
concerned for my safety was very briefly in Johannesburg.
“It’s all tribal,” Neels started. “If your great grandfather hurt someone a
hundred years ago, the black South African population remembers it. That means today if you are a descendant of
that person you are a target.”
What Neels described was reminiscent of the Arabs and the
Jews at each other’s throats in the Middle East. Only there the memory goes back two thousand
years not merely one hundred. It is also
the same story with the ridiculousness of the North and the South standoff that
continues today in the United States. At
least here only the South remains bent out of shape because they lost the “War
of Northern Aggression” nearly 150 years ago.
“I think it’s in their genes to be violent,” Neels said.
“Just look at what the early explorers found when they arrived in Africa. Nobody had any interaction with the blacks
before yet when the whites arrived the blacks attacked them.” Grogan, the explorer who walked across the
length of Africa from Cape Town to Cairo commented similarly more than 100 years
ago. It didn’t matter where Grogan was
on the continent, the local residents robbed him blind when they saw an
opportunity. Grogan also described some
brutal interactions between blacks. It
had nothing to do with honor or personal defense or anything else. It was the nature of the locals to be
violent.
“When we were
under white rule in South Africa we had crime but nothing like we have now,”
Jan said. “If you are in Johannesburg
and you cross a street in a way someone doesn’t like they kill you. Go to a crowded area and your pocket will be
picked. Leave your car window down and
someone will steal whatever they can grab.” Neels continued, “It’s almost never
white on white or white on black. Its
black on black or black on white.”
Jan then asked me about the United States. “Where is the most crime in your
country?” I told him that Detroit has
the highest murder rate in the nation. “And
what is the dominant ethnic group in Detroit,” he asked.
In the United States there is continual mention that seventy
percent of the prison population is black.
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and other black leaders claim that the
prison population is dominated by blacks because of a prejudiced judicial
system. However nobody, and especially
no politician, has ever come out and asked the rather obvious question – Could
it be that seventy percent of the people in prison are black because seventy percent
of the crime is committed by black people?’
My guess is that it is.
Unfortunately nobody will ever conduct research to confirm or disprove
that point. Until then we will continue
to hide behind the curtain of white rage and not confront the obvious. There were many more people than Jan and
Neels who said essentially the same thing wherever I traveled in South Africa.
The subject changed back to travel and I mentioned a
woman named Susan who was in my life then.
“So why isn’t she on the trip with you,” Neels wife Evelyn asked.
I mentioned her concerns about travel in Africa and Neels
laughed. “When you come back to South
Africa you bring her along. You will
stay with Evelyn and me for a few days.
Maybe we will take a four-wheeler trip to Namibia or Botswana. She will find out it’s as easy to be in
Africa as it is to be in the United States.”
Neels was correct however a month to the day later Susan was freaking
out in relatively sanguine Nicaragua.
She would never survive Africa.
Christopher, the owner of the tire shop, showed up two
hours after our arrival. Despite Neels
and Jan having about 150 miles of inhospitable desert to cross, and despite the
sun quickly being consumed by the western horizon, they insisted that my tire
be repaired first. “We just want to wait
around to make sure you are ok,” Jan said.
Theirs was an outlook that I found commonly among black and white South
Africans.
My tire had been punctured in the middle of the tread
obviously by a very sharp rock somewhere along the R 355. I was lucky that it hadn’t been more
extensive or more severe and I had wound up stranded in the middle of the
Karoo. Because of the Saturday afternoon call for repair service Christopher
charged me the equivalent of sixty dollars US to repair the tire. The entire operation took five minutes to
complete. That certainly beat the ninety
cents I once paid to repair a flat tire in Tela, Honduras.
As I prepared to leave the tire shop to continue my
exploring, Neels thanked me for two hours of conversation. Jan then said, “You’re not at all like the
other Americans I have met.” I thanked him for the compliment and then asked
for clarification. “You take Africa on
its terms. Most Americans want Africa on
their terms.” A bed and breakfast owner
in Ireland once told me the same thing about accepting her country.
Akkerndam Preserve is a large nature reserve on the north
side of Calvinia. I spent the remaining
sunlight hours enjoying a hike through the riotous colors of desert vegetation
that seemed even more prominent here.
Just before the sun disappeared behind a giant butte, a black-headed
canary sang its evening song while perched on a flowering shrub and a Karoo
chat chortled out its jumbled song from a nearby patch of small trees. I waited there for darkness to overtake
me. When it did I was overwhelmed by the
deathly silence of the desert. It was
the same in the Karoo as it was in the Negev Desert of Israel and the Sahara
Desert of Morocco or the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. Complete silence is one of the most pleasant
experiences you can have in a desert.
Dinner options were limited as I later walked around
Calvinia. Whomever I asked on the street
told me that the best food in town was at the guest house where I was
staying. Calvinia after dark on a
Saturday night was like most other small towns.
Several people sat at the local bar drinking Windhoek larger beer from
Namibia while watching rugby on satellite television. Teenaged boys stood on street corners making
the same ridiculous comments to teenaged girls that teenaged boys make
everywhere on the planet. Mothers
hurriedly left the food store carrying bags of groceries needed to prepare the
night’s dinner. Other teenagers in cars
were driving up and down Main Street “bombing Main” as we did when I was that
age. Then, as has probably happened in
Calvinia for ages, the streets rolled up at 7:30 and everyone went home.
Dinner was lamb pie at the guest house restaurant. I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes
after eight and was the only person present.
By 8:15 there were no empty tables.
“We’re usually busy but not usually this slow,” said Grace one of the
servers. Asking her if she didn’t mean
that the other way around, Grace said “We are the only place to be in Calvinia
on Saturday night. In fact this is the only
place to be on Saturday night.
As Grace asked me where I was staying she also wanted to
know if I would like another glass of pinotage to wash down my lamb pie. Telling her I was staying at the guest house
she said “Since you don’t have to drive there is no excuse not to have another
glass of wine. And because we rarely see Americans in Calvinia let me buy this
glass for you.”
Grace returned with my glass of pinotage and then asked
if I would be there for breakfast.
Answering yes she wondered if I would mind paying for dinner tomorrow
morning because she was too busy with the Saturday night crowd to take care of
my bill. She then said, “It’s not to
worry. We trust everyone in this
town. It’s not like Johannesburg here.”
Calvinia really isn’t and especially on Saturday night.
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