on his own. And Botswana. And the high mountains of Lesotho.
And when Miranda said “Go look for him”, I did as I was told.
And never returned myself.
Angel
She came walking towards me through the sand in the moonlight. I thought I recognised her. She was wearing a long, flowing dress, and a straw hat pulled deep over her eyes . . .
It was a quarter to three in the morning and I was lying in my sleeping bag somewhere beside the lower Fish River in Namibia. I did not feel well – in actual fact, I felt extremely unwell. I knew from experience what was wrong – I was dehydrated. The desert sun and the gruelling days of hiking unremittingly over skull-shaped rocks, sand and boulders had taken their toll. My worn-out body, which I had systematically been reducing to ruin over the years, was protesting.
Once again we were in the middle of an inexplicable adventure. Once again we had tackled the near-impossible. The idea had been to start at Seeheim and walk along the banks of the Fish River, through the canyon, to where it joined up with the Orange River – a distance of 300 kilometres. Even worse – all this had to be done in only ten days, in other words at a rate of 30 kilometres per day. Crazy . . .
It was day nine, we had another 40 kilometres to go, and it looked as if the hike was over for me. I was losing fluid in every possible way. From the top, the bottom and even the middle. We had already lost Daan, and my comrades Kalie and Mario were anxiously trying to fill me up with fluids, for in that desert region they would either have to carry me out or cover me with rocks – no humans ever came there.
I watched her approach through narrowed eyes. Was it time to be fetched? I thought I recognised her . . .
My mind wandered . . .
I saw her for the first time when she grabbed my hand somewhere on a cliff in the Witels. I was on my own, jumping, climbing and swimming to Ceres, doing what is known as “kloofing”. I had left the group behind. We were behind schedule, as we had been snowed in in the Hex River mountains. An urgent appointment had made me act irresponsibly. On a rocky ledge fourteen metres above the river a stone had become dislodged, my backpack had pulled me over the edge, but suddenly there was a handhold.
I think she had brown eyes when she laughed.
My bakkie had broken down somewhere between the Ugab and the Brandberg. My technical know-how is limited to fuel supply and spark. I’m buggered, I thought, I won’t get out alive. No one knew that I was there alone. Dejectedly I sat down on a rock, while she fiddled under the hood. With a laugh she shook her brown hair back, a greasy smudge on her nose.
The mission hospital at Ngoma in Malawi had crawled with the sick and deformed. Malaria was consuming me piece by piece. I was pissing blood. Black water fever? it flashed through my mind. The bouts of fever came and went with monotonous regularity, and I felt that I was slowly becoming detached from reality.
“Have you come to fetch me?” I asked her as she sat down at the foot of my bed.
“Not yet,” she answered with a sad smile, one eyelid drooping slightly.
This hike had been one of the toughest of my life. The terrain was merciless and the heat blistering – it descended from above just to be hurled back from the ground. We tried to get most of the walking behind us in the early morning, when the air was cooler. At noon we searched for any bit of shade that rock or boulder afforded, and continued later in a gentler sun.
This river and its canyon remained one of the most remarkable places on our planet, and we found pleasure in knowing no one had ever tackled the route in this way before. The age-old rock walls and formations towered vertically around us. A small herd of Hartmann zebra looked inquisitively at the strange creatures hurrying through their world. We were ecstatic to discover that Namibia had another finger rock that no one knew about!
The evenings were the highlight, however, when we threw down our rucksacks, lit a fire and poured a stiff drink. With the pleasure of camaraderie, we joked about the day’s hardships.
But now I didn’t know – another hot day like today was going to break me. So near yet so far. Had I overplayed my hand at last?
She knelt beside me.
“It’s all right. Things will work out,” she consoled me. She took me in her arms, kissed me on the forehead and cried.
And when the day broke, it was overcast and raining in the desert. And I walked to the bridge at the Orange River – “One-two-three, block myself” – and wondered if it had been her last visit . . .
Calculate the cost
One moment we were struggling down the dry river bed and forcing the vehicles back up the bank. The next moment we were racing across a gravel plain to avoid a bend in the river. When we approached the river bed for a second attempt at crossing – a seething mass of water lay in front of us . . .
Men like Hillary, Amundsen, Speke and Burton had captured my imagination from an early age. Westerners who had been brave enough to discover unknown parts of our planet. But Hillary had stood on top of Everest three years before I even saw the light – in other words, by the time I had grown up, there was absolutely bugger all left for me to discover.
It had become an obsession to go in search of places where my neighbours and their families had never been and would never want to be. I had often succeeded, but here in South Africa there had been an annoying turn of events. I call it “the Getaway syndrome”. All my old playing fields were being tamed by the publication of articles that attracted a swarm of “adventurers”. It had developed into a race: I tried to get to an exceptional place before them, and briefly made it mine.
“Boeta, I’m inviting Kalie and you for a visit,” the invitation came.
And a dream I’d had for years took shape. A dream to stand way up north, at Angra Fria on the Skeleton Coast. Up to now it had been no more than a dream, for ordinary people are not allowed to enter there.
Luck plays a considerable role if you go in search of the lesser known, for the man who had invited us was my own brother Chrisjan, who was managing a concession area in the Skeleton Coast Park in Namibia for Wilderness Safaris.
It was early morning when we pushed the nose of the Land Cruiser northward and crossed the Piekeniers Pass to Noordoewer. A hell of a distance lay ahead, but our plan was to find our way to the rendezvous with Chrisjan in Oom Japie’s pub at Kamanjab unhurriedly, travelling along the back roads.
The first starry night found us lying in bed rolls beside a blazing fire at the mouth of the Gamkab canyon, on the banks of the Orange. Before the “G-factor”, few people had known about this isolated spot. We cracked a bottle of Bonnies and drank to what lay ahead . . .
Between Aus and Helmeringhausen our GPS pointed out “an alternative route” and we knew the G-factor had not discovered it yet, so we took it . . . It was the most beautiful time of day. Bat-eared foxes romped and raced across the red dunes, the bushman grass was tinged by the late afternoon sun. We were alone – there were no other tracks in the road. Friend Kalie and I drank a toast and grinned broadly.
At
