In the filling station/market in the tiny town of Gruneau there is an interesting choice of meat pies – it is 11am, time for second breakfast, and we cannot resist the Gruneau special. It’s delicious; mince meat wrapped in a fresh pastry, not too sweet or greasy. I’d go back there for another one of those. Sometimes it’s ok to eat food at the gas station.
Food at grocery stores is pretty much all the same. No specialty breads available, only a plain white or plain brown – a bit of wheat flour added to the white. Most everything is heavily sugared, salted or fried. Rice is white. Pasta is semolina. We are obviously not in Cape Town anymore.
Vegetables and fruit are the real treat if you can find them. The citrus is particularly beautiful and delicious. And grapes, of course. Bananas taste like bananas should. The pears are so good we spring for a big bag. I don’t know if the potatoes are the Yukon Golds we have at home but they look the same and are delicious. Salad greens are limited. To store all this, we had add a soft-sided cooler to the mix of freezer and fridge. We aren’t going hungry. Yet.
Having a beer at the bar adjacent to our camp (nice place, really), the proprietor explains that he raises and processes game meat – would we like to take some? Oh yeah. Meat is on the table these days and we buy oryx borewores (game meat sausages), lamb steaks, and venison patties. The proprietor was funny – he says chicken is just for emergencies in Namibia.
One-pot meals are the goal. We have a “slow cooker”; it’s a fabric bag carefully filled with insulation and you put your pot of beans or rice or whatever in it and the bag will keep the food cooking as long as needed, just like a crock pot at home only you don’t need electricity. I leave food in it to cook overnight and so far that has been successful. A 10-inch flat bottom dutch oven and a smaller lidded saucepan (good quality) are essential utensils. And the coffee press. There is instant coffee for lunch stops; to make it more drinkable there is cold sweetened condensed milk to add. We can detox when we get home.
Sociable Weavers are inconspicuous birds with sweet little dusky blue beaks. 
Except for their chatter, you might miss them – but for sure you would not miss their nests. These nests are as much a part of the Kalahari landscape as the red sand; the nests are an engineering marvel.
The birds band together to create these bird condos. Each pair of sociable weavers has their own room and there is no common area within – a huge nest might hold as many as 500 birds. Sociable Weavers eat grass seed and bugs and there’s plenty of both around so they are thriving. Pole after pole after pole contains a nest.
And yes, those are real, useable power lines the birds build nests upon, for the most part. The power lines and phone lines seem to be the perfect design for the nest foundation. Most of these lines serve communities out in the boonies – it isn’t like there are any extra lines in case the birds bring the poles down.
That’s exactly what happens. The nests become enormous and the pole falls over. Poles are left to lie on the ground with the wires intact and still running through the weaver nests. Doesn’t this look like a serious problem? Or is it not? No one seems concerned.
What a hoot. I’m reminded of the telegraph poles put up across the central US prairie and what a marvel that was at the time. That is, until the bison began to use the poles to rub off their molting hair. After all, there weren’t many trees on the prairie but suddenly here are lots of poles and millions of bison. Telegraph companies decided that spikes driven into the poles would deter the beasts, but the bison liked the spiked poles even better than the naked ones. Tough luck for them, as we know. And on it goes.
Is anybody coming? I ask Jim as I drive onto the highway out of our first campsite in Namibia. Not in the last two days, he says – ha! Welcome to Namibia!
After spending the obligatory two nights in the Kalaghadi Transfrontier Park we are in a new country. We would have spend many more nights in Kalaghadi Park but it is no longer an undiscovered arid transfrontier park. There is no room for us here, the campgrounds and chalets are packed.
Which is funny as you can drive for half a day and only see one vehicle. It takes us 10 hours to cover the 110 kilometers from Two Rivers to Kalaghari Tented Camp, bumping along the track, seeing all sorts of creatures. Two of those 10 hours are spent parked at the 13th borehole. There’s a bit of shade and a good view. I download some photos, read my John Reader book, and Jim takes a nap. You cannot get out of your car. A wildebeest comes by for a drink. 
Birds come and go. I’m not nearly as frantic as in the past to identify every bird I see. We’ve got two years; we will probably see another one of those. How relaxing this is.
We know how lucky we were to have spent over three weeks in KTP in 2013 with Adrian and Rentia – the four of us traveled the length and breadth of it, from Rooiputs to Mata Mata, to Swart Pan and Mabuashahube, an experience not likely to be repeated. It is a fabulous green park this time of year and as a parting gift we have our morning coffee with a male lion lounging in front of us.
Mata Mata is a hot and sleepy border crossing. The South Africans take our firewood – even though it is Namibian hardwood. Go figure. The Namibian border guard is ok with stamping our carnet, but only after I point it out to him. The carnet insures that we will bring the Beagle back to South Africa instead of selling it in some other country. A substantial deposit was put down for the carnet and I’m not risking losing that because a border guard was too lazy to do the stamp. Sometimes you gotta insist. I’m sure there will be more adventures at border crossings.
OK, for the record, nearly all of the Mesosaurus remains found on Dr. Geit Steenkamp’s Spitskop farm are not fossilized bone but are the imprints of bodies laid down in the mud of a shallow sea that stretched from Africa to South American. Break open the right piece of grey slate rock and you may find a perfect impression of this primitive animal when it died and was covered in a layer of fine ash 250 million years ago.
Mesosaurus in the billions lived and died in the muddy sea and they have become the primary evidence that the continents were once joined and then split apart. Mesosaurus fossils and imprints have been found in Brazil and here on Spitskop farm, and they are exactly the same.
Believe it or not, it has only been since the late 1940s that science concluded it wasn’t just coincidence that the western coastline of Africa and the eastern coastline of South America were matched pieces of a puzzle. There is no coincidence in nature. Imagine Geit’s surprise when the strange rock his son found turned out to be more evidence of plate dynamics. He and his son lead entertaining tours on their property on yet another journey back in time on our trip through Africa.
Geit’s bush camp is rated highly and for good reason. It is neat, clean, has hot water and for a bonus, there’s a Sociable Weaver nest in the tree at our site. We follow him in the Beagle out onto the farm and stop at the grave of a German soldier killed in an attack by the indigenous Nama people in 1907 – another depressing story of colonial expansion in Africa. But I digress. The imprinted fossil remains Geit shows us are truly astonishing in their detail and we have a blast exclaiming over this one and that one. Paleontologists assume there are endless remains to be found here. Geit agrees with me that it is in the looking for them that lays the pleasure. At least when it isn’t blazing hot out.
Dolerite rocks are the other attraction on the tour. Lava that didn’t quite make it all the way to the surface cooled just below, and as time went on the ground above the cooled dolerite eroded and exposed the material. The gigantic stones were left carefully stacked on each other, a sculpture garden courtesy of time. We hang around after Geit plays a tune on the rocks – he is really a good tour guide – and try to capture the view of the rocks and Quiver Trees. With over 5,000 Quiver Trees on the property and who knows how many rocks (haha) I give up and instead focus on these crazy crickets – aren’t they cute?
Just writing the words “decomposed granite” has me thinking. DG, we called it in the landscaping business. The word “decomposed” does not begin to do justice to the time it took for this material to be reduced to the beautiful rich red crumbles that homeowners put on their driveways and use to blanket their flower beds.
Jim and I hike the Dassie Trail out of our campsite at Augrabies. We take about four hours and spend all of it walking on rock that is so old it is difficult to comprehend. And it is stunning. In every size and shape, huge to tiny, dark black to sparkling pink, smooth and rough, it goes on and on. Good thing we are traveling light or the prettiest rocks would have come back with me, just like when I was a kid. In fact a small collection of minerals and stones has been gathering on the dashboard of the truck. It has occurred to me that these pretty rocks will turn into murderous projectiles if and when (more likely when) we slam on the breaks. I suggested Jim glue the rocks down to the dash to avoid that – I was half serious.
Granite was the light material that rose to the top of the magma to form the landmasses we live on. So yes, it is common. That doesn’t make it any less amazing. Robert Hazen’s “The Story of Earth” is a wonderfully readable book that explains how the forces of the big bang and the stardust it created came together to eventually form the beginning of life on our globe. Four billion years later, we are walking on that very material and picking up pretty pieces. It will never go away.
The many books we’ve read on animals, geology, history, paleontology and anthropology, and other fascinating subjects were mostly found at the free Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho. One of the reasons we found ourselves moving to Ketchum (30+ years ago) was for the Library. What we learned there is making our adventure so much more fulfilling. Along with books, the Library hosts brilliant speakers; we heard Dr. Donald Johanson talk about finding the famous Lucy fossil, and Greg Carr speak of how the restoration of Gorongosa Park in Mozambique is coming along. Gregory Curtis, author of “The Cave Painters”, brought to life the famous paintings of Cro-Magnon man and what has been discovered about them. If you’re ever in Ketchum, check out the ComLib. There’s always something interesting to read.
Augrabies Falls National Park does not disappoint. The water level at the falls is about 500 cubic meters per second when we arrive on Thursday evening. The granite canyon is damp with spray and the falls are respectably noisy. The layout of walkways and overlooks is impressive and we can stand above the biggest drop off.
The flow doubles to 1000cms on Sunday. Up and down the river it is known that the release is coming; there’s time to maneuver boats out of the way of the rising water and protect property. Sunday is a perfect day for the water to reach the falls; many people can come see it and many do. They are of all colors and life styles, a parade of Northwestern Cape people out for a day at the Falls. Black, colored and white, tourists and farmers and families; the day use area is full.
There aren’t many people camping. The campground is nice enough, with decent shade, but a bit ragged and dirty in places. There are patches of lawn that no one is suppose to camp on – the green-ish devil grass is to give an impression of coolness in this blistering hot landscape, I suppose. There are the Vervet Monkeys we’d heard about and baboons. Of course the signs that scream DO NOT FEED MONKEYS are generally ignored – the USA doesn’t have a monopoly on silly tourists.
The sound of enormous amounts of water falling far onto rocks has probably scared humans since the beginning of realization. It is intoxicating, frightening and beautiful all at the same time. Augrabies means “great noise” and it lives up to the name. Standing there right next to the big drop I can’t help but think of the one-armed Major John Wesley Powell and the men under his command who first put wooden boats on the Green River in Utah, and headed down the previously unexplored Colorado River canyon. No doubt the sound of the cataracts must have put the fear of god into them. Not being able to see those rapids – which were tremendous, frequent and unavoidable – how incredibly brave those men were.
No one is finding a line down the falls here at Augrabies. There’s first descents, and there is suicide. The charming Nadine, working at a camping supply store we frequented in Upington, told us that intrepid people explore the bottom of the big drop looking for diamonds (under the right conditions) and some diamonds have been found. Not exactly going to Jared’s for that special stone!
Upington is a good sized town and in the middle of it, right on the Orange River, is the Sekkie se Arkie camp. Peaceful and clean, it boasts a river boat for sunset cruises as well as an enormous yellow balloon thingy called a “fat boy” onto which very drunk people can jump from a high platform. Butt up in the river, the fat boy reminds me of a Trump supporter face-down in the kool-aid. Kind of tacky, but the rest of the camp makes up for it.
Theo is the manager and Alan from Malawi is the friendly groundsman. Boo-Boo and Zimba, huge mastiffs, apparently are security and we encounter no problems there. 
What a couple of brats they are. They get loud at times, lying under someone else’s tent trailer and barking at each other at dawn. Cheap entertainment.
Theo knows where to get whatever you need. He is a wealth of information about Namibia and is not shy to share. We wind up spending several nights at different intervals at Sekkie se Arkie and Theo is a welcome guest in camp. We meet a couple from the Netherlands traveling overland in a Toyota SUV, and a couple from Canada going around the world on BMW motorcycles. Heather and Dave are tough! They enjoyed an evening with us, especially sitting in real chairs. Turns out Dave is originally from Bellingham Washington and both of them have spent time in Stanley Idaho – small world, of course.
Then it’s time to see Dr. Du Toit.
There are bugs here and as we are essentially living outside, they are our constant companions. There was a infinitely small, bright green praying mantis on my shoulder while on a drive one day. 
There were the biting ants at the hot springs – we had to move the truck for them – and at the Indian/Atlantic Ocean site. Mosquitoes haven’t been too bad. No need for malaria meds yet, Anopheles mosquitoes are not in the Kalahari.
Witsand had some spectacular specimens. Why would a grasshopper be so brilliantly colored? Isn’t he all that much more obvious to predators? And check out the cricket, he has armor with spikes – how cool is that?
Campgrounds with lights really put on a show. The globe at Sakkie se Arkie had a halo of flying insects. 
A light on the outside door of an ablution block means running a gauntlet of grasshoppers in order to shower. One night there were scores of praying mantis in the bathroom, then I never saw them again. Where did they go? And why aren’t there more of them, there’s plenty of food.
Ants are getting in the truck and are likely impossible to dislodge completely. We are always seeking shade, and ants love trees. We will transplant them from camp to camp.
Nature Reserves are common here – many offer camping, chalets, bird hides, guided tours and even popular restaurants. We have noticed that NRs tend to be better cared for than the public sites. Private monies see to it that these places are built to last.
Witsand (White Sand) NR is in the southeastern corner of the now green Kalahari about 2.5 hours from Upington. Its extensive sand dunes start out red and are leeched to shades of light pink and white. The area has a long history with the aboriginal people and the more recent farmers and cattle grazers – and that’s because it has water. In the driest climate imaginable, Witsand is graced with a very high water table due to the dunes being nearly 70 km deep and able to hold the H2O. People could scrap a shallow hole and delicious water would come to the surface. Donkeys were used to grind larger ponds for cattle and the land quickly became a favorite of the Boers. Naturally the British wanted it as well and skirmishes gave rise to rock walls built for defense in the Boer wars. The water was worth any fight; it tastes fantastic, a delightful surprise for us.
We call ahead to ask about camping, no problem at 600R(rand) for two nights. When we arrive the receptionist says no, it is only 400R – the camping is free, we only need pay the conservation fee. Far be it for me to argue. There are electrical hookups, deep shade and even a swimming pool. It pours rain as we choose a sheltered spot and there is one other couple camping. We settle in for the weekend.
There are no large predators here, no lion or leopard or hyena. Elephant and giraffe once roamed but no more. That’s ok – there’s colorful insects, tortoise, 
monitor lizard, ground squirrels, springbok, oryx and other creatures. And we can walk anywhere – there is even an awesome bird hide. The other campers leave and we once again are all alone, even to where we swim naked in the perfect pool. It’s hot, why not?
Before we leave, we drain our water tank of the treated Upington water and refill it with the delicious Witsand water – we will miss it when it’s gone. And we’ll miss Witsand too, what a wonderful spot for the time frame we needed to fill. Now it’s back to Upington and the fateful dental appointment.
Encountering our first real set-back, we leave the hot springs for Upington, looking for dental care and a new communication device – we’ve lost our trusty and capable phone. That in itself is not an insurmountable problem but it will be a long time before we can reach the level of communication Jim worked so patiently to produce. Maddening but not life threatening. The toothache is a different story.
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