I was very impressed with a friend who called on his cellphone when he got lost on his way to visit me recently in suburbia. “I was travelling north and then I turned into this little side road and now I’m going south-east. Am I heading in the right direction?” he asked.
I told him these compass directions had little relevance in the city and asked him to give me the names of the streets he was travelling along. But even as I reeled him in towards his destination, he continued to make remarks like, “oh, so I turned left at the robots and am now going west”.
I assumed his directional savvy was due to the fact that he had grown up in rural areas in Limpopo province. An important man nowadays, when he finally arrived in his fancy car and I told him how impressed I was that he could tell north from south-east in the confusion of the city traffic, he smiled and did not say anything to enlighten me.
But I have discovered his secret. It took a trip to the remotest corners of the Kruger National Park in the most luxurious vehicle I have ever had the privilege to drive to make me realise that his smartness had little to do with native intuition, and everything to do with modern technology.
Land Rover SA lent me and a handful of other journalists three of their top-of-the-range off-road vehicles to undertake the Lebombo Overland Eco-Trail, as the 4X4 trail in the Kruger is officially known. Land Rover is a sponsor of the trails, and the lead vehicle driven by a Kruger guide comes from their stable. For the media excursion, they provided two Discovery TD5s – one automatic, the other manual – and a Defender.
I got to drive the real beaut, the Discovery TD5 automatic. Soon after taking the wheel, I noticed a little figure in the rear-view mirror that changed every time I turned a corner. It didn’t take long to realise this was my friend’s secret: a “compass mirror”, which displays the car’s direction of travel. According to the car’s manual, “the display changes whenever the car direction changes by more than 22,5% from the midpoint of each compass segment”.
There may not be a whole lot of use for such a gadget in the city – except perhaps to impress your friends – nor was it entirely necessary on our Lebombo bush trail. But we saw the possibility that it could be useful when our guide took a detour off the usual routes one evening and we got to camp a lot later than we had expected. He had a satellite tracker and a map, so we didn’t need the compass mirror – but you never know — Of course, one could also get un-lost by observing the southern cross, or by charting the course of the sun, but that takes a lot more time and patience.
Like so many of the other frills and gadgets on our Land Rovers, the compass mirror was a luxury – the kind that one grows to love very quickly.
Take the “hill descent control” function. Push a bright yellow and red button, and you can take your feet off the pedals while the car goes into cruise mode down steep hills. We had great fun playing with that one.
Getting lost – or stuck – is not the point of the Lebombo Eco-Trail through the Kruger. Particularly in the dry season, there are few really tricky sections to drive. Nor is seeing the “big five” the main objective – although we did see them, in addition to lots of other game.
“The trail is more about experiencing the wilderness and getting to see the wonderful scenery in this part of the park,” explained our guide, Andrew Desmet. Like all the Kruger’s trail guides, Desmet has a wealth of knowledge of the natural world that he shared with us at every opportunity. We stopped often to discuss tracks, vegetation types, rock formations, animal behaviour. This communication is normally conducted by radio, but we did not have the set with us on our trip.
The Lebombo Overland Eco-Trail lasts for four nights and covers some 520km along the east of the park, from Crocodile Bridge in the south to Pafuri in the north. Opened to the public in April, it has proved so popular that the Kruger is thinking of starting a second trail each week. At the moment one trail sets off weekly, comprising a maximum of five vehicles, with up to four people in each car.
You travel through areas that other tourists never get to see, and that were closed even to rangers until about 10 years ago. Sometimes this means travelling along the ugly eastern boundary fence with Mozambique – not more than 25% of the time, in our experience, and when the Great Limpopo transfrontier park comes into being, this reminder of past divisions will be even further reduced.
“At the moment only 6% of the Kruger park’s total area is being used by tourists. This kind of venture is helping to make use of the remaining 94%,” said William Mabasa, the Kruger’s communications director, who joined us on the trail. He was responding to concerns that efforts to commercialise the park may mean its wilderness areas become over-utilised.
That night, Mabasa crept out of his tent to relieve himself at about 2am. He was in the middle of the process when he suddenly noticed an elephant quietly browsing on a tree about 50m away. “It’s a little difficult to suspend the operation in mid-stream, so to speak. All I could do was watch the elephant while I finished my business,” he told us the next morning.
This is part of the experience: living out under the stars in unfenced camps in one of the world’s most famous game reserves. Snug around the fire or in your tent, you fall asleep to the sounds of hippos snorting or lions roaring in the distance. Most traillists set up their own camps and cater for themselves, but this service can be supplied by outfits like Getaway Tours if you want the kind of spoiling we had.
In the fading light of our last day on trail, we took a walk along the ridge of the Lebombo mountains, which hug the eastern boundary between South Africa and Mozambique. Home to the endemic Lebombo cluster-leaf trees and the statuesque Lebombo euphorbias, they also house all kinds of yet-to-be-explained artefacts from ancient civilisations.
If you look west from that remote ridge, there is only unspoilt Kruger wilderness for as far as the eye can see. To the east is Mozambique – the bush doesn’t look any different, and if you squint you imagine you can see the Indian Ocean on the Mozambican coast. One of these days the fence between the two countries will come down, from the Limpopo River in the north down to where the Olifants River flows into Mozambique. Then it won’t matter which country you are in when you drive the Lebombo Overland Eco-Trail. But if you are lucky enough to be there – and particularly if you are in a fancy Land Rover – you could take a look in your rear-view mirror just to make sure.