Long Street, Cape Town
“The average age on this tour,” the organiser said, “is 24,7.” I guess my 41, Kate’s 33 and the “Spanish woman with an unpronounceable name” must have raised the average of what looked like an abundance of 16-year-old boys considerably.
We were at a pre-departure briefing for Nomad Adventure Tours: Cape Town to Victoria Falls. At Vic Falls one could experience the world’s third-highest bungee jump. But Kate and I would be hopping off midway at Swakopmund.
I watched with fascination as one of the teenage boys proceeded to eat an entire Swiss roll, unsliced, during the first five minutes of the meeting.
“All the trucks are named after burnt-out rock stars,” the organiser continued. “You’ll be travelling in Tommy.” No one could think of a burnt-out Tommy.
“The deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure played a mean pinball?” I suggested. They stared at me blankly. Before their time.
“The truck will be your home for 20 days. Keep it clean,” the organiser said. “When we get to the border posts, sunglasses off and clothes on. Be polite. And have the correct amount of money, or he’s going to think it’s a tip. You’re not going to get change.
“No drugs,” he warned. “Not because we have a value judgement about it, but because you don’t want to end up in an African prison. The embassy will say ‘not another one’ and they’ll lock you up and throw away the key.
“If I’m scaring you, that’s good. Take your Lariam instead,” he added as an afterthought, referring to the notorious malaria drug, blamed for everything from your common or garden hallucinations, to the Washington DC sniper attacks.
Thankfully Kate and I would be flying back from Windhoek before we entered malaria territory.
“Bring tapes for the road,” he reminded us on our way out. And I wondered with some trepidation what 16-year-olds were listening to these days.
We were two of only three South Africans, excluding the guides. South Africans who travel, it would seem, all have their own 4x4s. Or maybe they just prefer overseas. The rest of the party was made up of 11 Brits, one Scot, one Basque, one Australian, one Canadian, and one Tasmanian. That was how they introduced themselves.
Day 1, in view of Table Mountain
On the morning of our departure, I was delighted. “A bus!” I laughed, relieved. My earlier memories of travelling overland on the back of my friend’s truck to Botswana, were of something much less comfortable. We didn’t have a roof, for one thing. And no seats either. But roughing it isn’t what it used to be, since the introduction of organised tours aimed at the international backpacking market. Thank God!
“It is not a bus,” Jan, our guide, said sternly. And with emphasis: “I am not a bus driver. It’s a Mercedes truck.” When he started the engine I could tell the difference.
The 16-year-olds, well, 18 actually, had just returned from volunteering as teachers in Botswana for three months, while taking a year off, before heading off to Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Bristol. One of them, directly opposite the aisle from us, Matt, was reading Karl Marx. I was impressed. I knew of many people who spouted Marx, but had never actually seen anyone read him.
In front of him a boy was reading a very thick book. We took bets on it being The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it turned out to be War and Peace. Bright kids these! Or maybe they’d been reading veteran traveller, Tim Cahill, who recommends War and Peace, or any “big classic book I should have read long ago”, for the boredom of a long journey.
Kate recalled her trip through Europe years earlier, and how they tore the pages out of their novels as they went along, to make their packs lighter. The thought of this filled the bibliophile in me with horror.
The kids’ taste in music wasn’t as sophisticated as their taste in literature. And when they admitted sheepishly that the tapes they’d brought were “kind of cheesy”, we breathed a sigh of relief. Abba any day over Limp Bizkit. In a toss up between noise and heat, I opted for sitting under the speakers in the aisle, and Kate got the tanned right arm. “Drink two litres of water a day,” we reminded ourselves as we dozed off.
Day 1, Cederberg mountains
On a rooibos farm in the Cederberg, camping among the little red bushes that look exactly like their name, Jan and Arno, our guides, had the opportunity to introduce us to their cowboy cooking wizardry over the campfire. A good thing, since I was reminded of how much 18-year-old boys can eat. The chefs were well prepared though, they weren’t much older themselves, and nobody went hungry.
After dinner, and dishes — the only thing we had to do on the “limited participation tour”, apart from put up and take down our two-person tents, which wasn’t as hard as I remembered either — the farm manager pointed out the constellations to us.
“No light pollution here,” he said, as we looked up at a sky as clear as the one I remembered from a show at the planetarium, about the sky on the night of Jesus’s birth.
It was an uneasy and extremely cold night, with strange dreams disturbed by a wild animal not far from the tent. On waking this turned out to be Australian Steve, two tents down, with his ferocious snoring.
Kate and I speculated if Steve would manage to persuade South African Shelley, sharing his tent, to marry him: the purpose of his trip, she had confided in us over drinks. She, however, had come armed with a nail file and facial wipes, and seemed rather disinterested, in him and the trip. Now we thought we understood why. And we resolved to pitch our tent further away in future. But this still left the question of what to do about the cold.
I was rescued by Jan’s suggestion, and the predictably reliable Pep Stores, in Springbok, where I bought a blanket and a beanie. (It’s true what they say about heat escaping out the top of your head.) Those with a more aesthetic fashion sense bought their beanies from Mr Price.
Day 2, Namaqualand
Back on the road. Unfortunately we were too early for the explosion of colour of the Namaqualand daisies in September, so the kids swopped their thick novels, while Kate and I alternated between gossip and being hypnotised by vast stretches of uninhabitable scrub passing slowly outside the window. Washing lines with towels and various garments sprang up at the back between the aisles. The heat intensified, and so did the encroaching smell of feet.
Day 3, Orange river
When he was alive, my father used to have a saying that went: “Love many, trust few, and learn to paddle your own canoe.” This came to mind as we signed the indemnity forms Jan handed us before our 30km journey down the Orange river.
We would be canoeing in pairs, with just what we could fit in a plastic sealable bucket, to spend the night sleeping on the bank under the stars. But first we had to get ourselves there, and the form stated that Nomad would not be held responsible should we accidentally drown. I thought with regret about how I’d neglected to take care of my will.
We decided on Kate’s muscle in front, and me steering from behind, and more of my father’s sayings, such as “pull your weight”, “keep both oars in the water”, and “don’t rock the boat”, popped into my head.
We ended up on the rocks for a while, but with the assistance of some strapping young men — who were only too happy to show off their muscles and their expertise — we managed not to capsize the canoe. Later we discovered we had made it through Dead Man’s Rapids; we had got our yellow belts in canoeing.
As we lay in our sleeping bags that night, looking up at the Southern Cross, the voice of the rather loud-mouthed Canadian drifting over to us from the remains of the fire notwithstanding, it all seemed worthwhile.
I dreamt I was climbing up a steep staircase without any banisters. In anticipation, no doubt, for the highlight and the purpose of our trip: Sossusvlei, and climbing the dunes.
Day 6, Sossusvlei Dunes
We rose before dawn, for our ascent up the legendary Dune 45 — the one on all the famous postcards of the Namib — to watch the sun come up from the top. One hundred and fifty metres high, and yet strange to think that we were not walking up anything solid, like a hill, or a mountain, but just millions of tiny grains of red sand piled one on top of the other. I had visions of myself tumbling down the side.
The climb was a challenge to my vertigo, and my lungs, but I focused on placing one foot in front of the other. I discovered it was easier following in someone else’s footsteps, and kept behind Annabella, one of the British girls. Finally though, she began to get smaller and smaller, and I was on my own.
The desert appears empty, and yet there are dozens of species of life making a home in the dunes. For this reason, though there are dunes dotted all over, all but Dune 45 are out of bounds to people. When I eventually got to the top, our party was chattering away, and snapping with their cameras.
Hanging back as the others descended, and looking out at so much space I could think to the end of my thoughts, the stillness was palpable, and I finally knew the meaning of the word alone. It was breathtaking, and sobering.
At Sossusvlei, Boesman was our guide. “A bit pretentious,” whispered Teddy — Theodora, the other girl in the British group — to Marxist Matt. Granted, Boesman was white. Of German decent. Though he had lived in the area all his life, and he walked in the desert without shoes. Come to think of it, so did Jan, from Tygervalley, who didn’t wear shoes the entire trip.
The most important thing for a Bushman child to learn, Boesman told us, was to identify her mother’s footprints, because in the desert you never knew when you would see someone again. It was possible to lose track and not see someone for years.
Though the only people we encountered who were obviously of San decent, were outside a one-stop shop on the road between Sesriem and Solitaire. Seeing the vacant look in their eyes, I wondered what it must be like to have come from generations of people constantly on the move, and to finally grind to a halt next to a bottle store on the pavement in between here and there.
This encounter caused some tension between Matt and I, since they were a group of women begging. “We were told not to give them anything,” he said disapprovingly.
Was this the “it’s better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish” theory? But what if I only had time to give?
And then the real concern emerged. “You make it difficult for travellers coming after us,” said the Canadian.
We reached the interior of Sossusvlei crammed on to the back of a jeep, with gutsy Theodora on the front hood. Hanging on for dear life, but composed, she looked like a blonde Cleopatra.
The strangely beautiful Dead Vlei, a salt-encrusted dry lake, with its skeletons of 500 100-year-old camelthorn trees, looked like a set for Mad Max. We were told they had actually shot the opening sequence for The Cell here, but Jennifer Lopez had been flown in by helicopter for the shoot. We, however, had the pleasure of a four-hour hike to appreciate the view.
Days 7 & 8, Swakopmund
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Namibian coastline, is the way the desert flows into the sea. It seems it shouldn’t be like that, the dryness should gradually become moist, but suddenly there we were. After days of dust and hiking, what a pleasure to walk with my tired, sore feet in the icy water.
Swakopmund is a German enclave left over from the colonial era, and Namibia’s second-largest town. Like many small towns, its length and breadth can be covered in about an hour. And then you feel like you’ve lived there for a long time. We were staying in A-frame houses for two days at the “rest camp”.
In the evening we all cleaned up well (Jan put on shoes), and went out for a night on the town. At the Blue Whale we enjoyed the “catch of the day” and the novelty — for the South Africans — of being able to smoke in the restaurant. Then the kids went on to the local disco, and Kate and I went to bed. Real beds!
We awoke to the dramatic change-of-season sandstorm that, through the window, looked deceptively like Cape Town’s mist, or San Francisco’s fog. But this was not moisture, it was the fine red dust from the dunes, which tortures the eyes and throat.
Everyone else was still asleep after a hard night’s drinking. We caught up with the stories of who had flirted with whom, who had passed out, and who had thrown up, later in the day — after the skydiving. Theirs, not ours. And maybe, we concluded, it is better to go skydiving with a hangover.
The “optional extras” (skydiving, sandboarding, quadbiking) are charged in United States dollars, and geared to the tourist market. Expensive. This was our excuse, anyway, as we went off instead in search of an old-fashioned English breakfast, which turned out to be cheaper than anywhere in South Africa. The German tourists at the next table in the hotel were on their first mugs of beer for the day.
Sitting safely behind glass, with the wind and waves raging outside, it was easy to see how the Skeleton Coast got its name. After breakfast, we battled with the wind for a few metres more, to get ourselves over to the museum, and find further shelter from the storm.
“How long does this go on for?” I asked the woman behind the desk. “Drie dae [Three days],” she said, with German precision.
Though she had a German accent, Afrikaans seemed to be the lingua franca in Swakopmund. It was spoken also by the black waiters, who struggled with English. At the change of season, she said, there is a customary three-day sandstorm, after which everything clears up and returns to normal. Our timing, in mid-May, was spot off.
On the way out of the museum, I bought a book about the bushmen, and discovered later that it was available from the CNA for half the price.
Five months earlier
“Let’s go see the dunes,” Kate had said to me, when the rand was at an alarming 14 to one to the US dollar, and the prospect of going anywhere in the future — including our own continent, charged for in dollars — seemed sinisterly remote.
Now the rand was in recovery, and Kate and I had discovered that we were physically and socially fitter than we had imagined.
We were still not quite sure, though, that our friendship would survive competing as a team in The Amazing Race.
The lowdown
Nomad Adventure Tours have trucks leaving for the Cape Town to Swakopmund nine-day tour, or Cape Town to Victoria Falls 20-day tour, every Sunday and Wednesday at 8am from the Nomad Adventure Centre, 204 Long Street (corner Long and Bloom streets), Cape Town. The Swakopmund tour costs R3 250 and the Victoria Falls tour costs R6 450. Prices are valid for 2004 only. To find out more contact Tel: (021) 426 5445, e-mail: [email protected], or visit www.nomadtours.co.za.