Open Features: 3 - In Namibia
"What are those black things on the desert?'' Isabel Bradley asked her husband, Leon. It was a herd of black-faced sheep, their bodies merging into the background, just their faces showing like blotches on the dun earth. The Bradleys are on their way to Namibia, a country they have always longed to visit.
The next town we passed through was Keimoes - a very pretty spot, where we stopped to photograph the water wheel. We spent Sunday night at a marvellous guest-house called Vergelegen, just outside Kakamas. The room was spacious and modern, with a wonderful bed. The restaurant was marvellous, with the most amazing menu and delicious food.
We ate dinner with a Dutch couple, Kys and Gemma, who were staying there for a few nights while visiting Augrabies Falls and other places of interest in the area. Breakfast next morning was wonderful. We left on the last and longest portion of our drive to Oranjemund, which is just over the border – the Orange River - in Namibia. We'd been riding roughly parallel to the Orange for almost two days.
Monday morning saw us driving through scrub desert, with more of the tiny yellow flowers at the side of the road. Leon spoke of the Mission Station at Pella on the Orange River - still many kilometres to the west of our current point. A German Catholic priest travelled to this spot in the middle of nowhere, over a hundred years ago. There he found a tribe, settled down with them, began to educate them in the ways of the white man, and built a church on the banks of the river. A year or two later, it was washed away in one of the periodic floods. He rebuilt his church, rather further from the high water mark, and it and the mission still stand and function today. Leon says the church is beautiful - sparkling white, and reminiscent of the churches of Spain. Perhaps another place to visit - when we're in a car that enjoys gravel roads!
We drove towards a dirty cloud-bank on this straightest-yet stretch of road. The weather report that morning said it was raining in Springbok – the town where we would take a right turning. Leon said that Simon van der Stel, one of the earlier Dutch Governors of the Cape - around 1800? (more correctly, about 1678, this must be a slip of the finger. Ed) - had mined copper in and around the Springbok area.
Donkey-powered trains - on a properly-laid, narrow-gauge railroad – pulled the ore wagons all the way to Port Nolloth. At regular intervals along the journey, there were resting points, where teams of donkeys were exchanged. Several of the twin-towered resting points were visible from the road – much later on - as were the remains of the railway itself. Poor donkeys. (In Upington, on the banks of the Orange River, in the grounds of the Dutch Reformed Church, there is a simple commemorative statue. It has the inscription, “to ‘the donkeys, who helped to build this area”. A nice way of saying ‘thank you’ for their many years of silent, dedicated service.)
The landscape on either side became increasingly bleak - occasional tufts of dried grass on sand. "What are those black things on the desert?" I asked Leon. It was a herd of black-faced sheep, their bodies merging into the background, just their faces showing like blotches on the dun earth. The clouds became ragged and untidy, dragging under the sky, heavy and muddy. Twenty minutes or more would go by between sighting another vehicle.
The road surface was excellent. It was straight, it was boring. On the wide, flat country around us were occasional hills and mountains dotted on the barren landscape. Ahead was a range of ragged mountains, which the road gradually rose to meet. There were odd formations like huge cairns of black stone, some with one or two large rocks balanced precariously on top.
Thousands of years ago, they'd been outcroppings of solid rock, which through the centuries, with the rain, the wind and the extreme temperatures of this desert climate, gradually fractured into the many pieces we saw that day. Leon said he'd once driven this way with a colleague, and casually mentioned that the farmers around this area worked really hard to get all the rocks together and make such huge piles. His colleague believed the tall tale for a moment or two!
(Some years ago, travelling through this area down to Springbok on the West Coast to see the Namaqualand Wild Flowers, our guide said [in Afrikaans] that the area looked like a moonscape, and that any minute one expected to see a flying saucer land and little one-eyed men climb out!)
Amongst the rocks, the occasional patch of scrub, the sand and the sparse and yellow grass, we saw one or two lone farmhouses, stark and white, each with their metal windmill, blades turning in the wind. The land looked tired and worn. It was hard to believe that this is the famous Namaqualand where every spring - after "good" winter rains (about seventy millimetres for the year) - the wild flowers cover the landscape with a carpet of colour. Something I've never seen. It won't be this year that we make that trip, either!
