Stephen Gray
To the wilder north of the Aughrabies Falls is another reserve area, also with a complicated history, and at last opened for tourists of the hardier breed. This is no place for sissies in sedans, for there are no air-conditioned chalets with fine-menu restaurant, good shop and well- marked walks.
You should use a 4×4, fully equipped; the municipal lorry delivering cement we found stuck up to its axles. Take even your own water, as the Malopo River that runs through the reserve to join the Orange is a dry one – that means it flows only every second decade or so.
The area’s name is resonant enough: Riemvasmaak. The tourism officer there, Norbit Coetzee, had more than enough explanations for it. The scene – a lapa in a vast granite canyon; the time – after bucketing down trails through lunar landscapes hardly a traveller has ever seen – is the hour of the fireside tale.
One: the place where the rawhide thongs on the Witboois’s wagons were tightened, before ascending the tortured topography. Two: they were used by Bushman like harnesses, to lower their children down ravines to collect honey. (This has an alternative: nooses to hang renegades.) Three is the one I go for, as we have seen the engravings on the rock pavement at Gyam: tightening the belt once their stock of elephants and buck was shot out, a notch further with every drought and disaster.
The story of the sparse local community is an epic, like the one of Elandskloof (the basis of Roelof Temmingh’s recent opera, Buchuland). Since 1933, they had settled about a Roman Catholic mission, servicing a tungsten mine and one of the rose quartz that lies about openly in these parts.
They were forcibly removed as a black spot in 1974, for the 8th Infantry Battalion to take over. This canyon, in which we are the only human beings, echoing under the stars, was then reserved for officers only, as it hides the Northern Cape’s only mineral springs – a great place for lolling about. But nowadays even their secret weapons- testing sites are part of the attraction.
In 1995, from Namibia and from the Ciskei, their land restitution claim having gone right, they hunkered down in defence force tents and began planning big: ecotourism, hiking trails, a vehicle-testing terrain. May their remotest of days of black coffee and dry bread soon be transformed.
I asked Coetzee why they were shy to access their bank of that famous Aughrabies Falls. He evaded my question, but chaffingly came out with something about a great water snake. I thought he meant Riemvasmakers did not like to swim … But then I actually saw it, on a slithery rock under a camelthorn, raising its huge hood. The Cape Black-necked spitting cobra.
For the first time in pleasantly warm days, my blood ran cold.
For common-sense advice about tackling the Green Kalahari district, call Elizabeth Taylor on Tel: 082 926-0055 or (054) 332- 6064 at the Kalahari-Oranje Museum complex in Upington. This is a sensible rallying point for planning how best to visit the Orange River resorts, where they are getting used to catering for hunters, campers, canoeists, balloonists, horse- riders, wine-testers and even for those lazy livers who prefer just to flop into a friendly B&B