faint-hearted. We had been several times before, but they had been trifling little excursions compared with what we were about to do. Those previous trips had been holiday jaunts, sometimes to the tourist-laden South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, another 300 kilometres to the north. That sector of the park spoilt us with its amenities and comforts. Amanda and I had also been far to the north of the Kalahari, to the palm-lined Okavango Delta and Chobe River. Once, before I met Amanda, I spent a couple of nights at the huge Makgadikgadi Salt Pans right in the centre of the Kalahari. That was my sum total. Now things would be different. There would be no rest camp with running water and ablutions, no fences to protect us from the wildlife and, according to the road map, there appeared to be nothing at Farini’s coordinates – not even a track, let alone a road. This was going to be a serious expedition.
My vehicle was powerful and designed for hard labour, not comfort. It was the kind of thing built with the transportation of livestock in mind – a genuine farm workhorse with a tiny single cab for a driver and one passenger. There was no air conditioning or radio. It had a bench seat that didn’t recline and the suspension was so primitive you almost needed to wear a back-brace to prevent putting your spine out when jolting over uneven terrain. Fixed permanently on its roof was a fold-out two-person tent, which, as we had discovered from previous outdoor experiences, wasn’t very comfortable. The tent was claustrophobic, and if the vehicle wasn’t precisely on level ground, you could find yourself squashed by your sleeping partner, or vice versa. Thankfully, Amanda is quite petite. The vehicle’s only advantage was a spacious bak behind the cabin with a canopy that would carry almost anything from jerrycans to camping tables. When travelling on dirt roads, the vehicle had a penchant for funnelling half the dust kicked up by the tyres into the canopy so that, when we arrived at Augrabies, everything – our bags, bundles and boxes – was covered in fine sand.
During our stopover at Augrabies, while Amanda rather pointlessly set about dusting everything down, I organised our supply of water. When you enter the deep Kalahari alone, as we were doing, water becomes the most essential thing in your vehicle. We were going to need a lot. I collected more than 100 litres, using four 25-litre and two 15-litre plastic containers – enough, I hoped, for drinking, cooking, and washing. The last would be reduced to a cupful a day. Satiating our thirst obviously took precedence over hygiene, but by the end of the trip the inside of the cab smelled like the lair of an old hyena.
We did arrange for some comforts. Almost as important as water was the supply of wine. Life without wine, even for a couple of weeks, is not worth living – even in the depths of the Kalahari. Amanda and I are unashamed wine snobs and won’t hesitate to open an expensive bottle of Burgundy on a whim. However, bottles of expensive elixir in a hot, bouncy, off-road vehicle were impractical. We had to make do with five-litre boxes of cheap wine, ten of them to be exact, that I bought from a co-op along the Orange River, an area famous for producing gallons of cheap wine. Amanda and I settled on the mantra that bad wine is better than no wine. Surprisingly, the bulk wine of the Orange River was pleasantly quaffable, and took up minimal space, especially when the papsaks were removed from their boxes. We did take one glass bottle though – a local Orange River brandy, kept for ‘emergency’ purposes.
Diesel came next on the priority list. My vehicle had a whopping 180-litre fuel tank, but the big engine, combined with the deep sand, would guzzle fuel faster than the two of us took in wine, so for extra precaution we carried another eighty litres of fuel in jerrycans. In total we were carrying almost half a ton in liquid alone. This was on top of the weight of two spare tyres, a tent, camping table, sleeping cots, gas bottles, cameras, notebooks and food.
The following day we nosed the heavy vehicle northwards, roughly following the course of the Molopo River until we crossed over into Botswana, passing the forlorn dusty village of Tsabong. We were now in the real Kalahari. The road became a channel of deep red sand, making progress agonisingly slow. There was nothing graceful about our progress. The truck strained through the fine powder; the road rutted by previous vehicles passing on their way to and from the remote Kgalagadi villages. The rear end bounced to and fro like the buttocks of a grossly overweight belly dancer. We were limited to a crawl of less than twenty kilometres an hour.
The deep Kalahari sand tests both driver and machine. I had dropped the tyre pressure so they were almost flat when we left Tsabong. Lower tyre pressure meant an increased surface area making contact with the sand. It prevented the tyres from ‘digging’, which might get us stuck. Momentum is the key; the vehicle must move over the sand with a constant speed while the gear changes. Inconsistent accelerator action or incorrect gear selection will also get you stuck. I had no intention of wasting precious time digging out a bogged-down vehicle in 40ºC temperatures, so I focused on nothing but driving, while Amanda clung doggedly to her seat. We had no time to appreciate the scenery until we came, with some relief, to Lehututu.
As we approached the villages there was a notable change in the vegetation. The soft yellow grass, so prevalent since we left Tsabong, was gone. Only red sand interspersed with stunted thorn trees remained. The reason, we soon discovered, was cattle. In his presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, Farini was correct in his assessment about the Kalahari being ranch country – although with the beasts having trampled and eaten every blade of grass and camelthorn pod, I had to wonder how they still survived. Did the herdsmen have to feed them on grass trucked in from elsewhere, or were these cattle given to browsing the thorny acacia bushes? How the people sustained cattle herds out here was beyond me, but the baKgalagadi seem to be able to do it. The cattle were healthy and abundant.
After the villages, the road became a set of parallel tracks. The grass grew tall and thick on either side, and between the tracks too. This middle section of grass was a problem. As you drive over it, the fine seeds disperse in clouds. If not prevented from getting into the radiator, they clog it, causing it to overheat and, before you know it, the engine seizes. I covered the entire front and underneath of the vehicle grille with ground sheeting, used as makeshift gauze to create an industrial-strength mosquito net. But that wasn’t the only concern with the seeds. They collected under the chassis and around the hot exhaust, forming a thick film of what basically acted as dry tinder, making our truck one big rolling fire hazard. We constantly had to stop and check underneath. Just in case, I carried a fire extinguisher under the seat. Many Kalahari off-roaders have had their journey unceremoniously and permanently halted when their vehicles spontaneously combusted in the desert. We came across a number of charred remains along the way. It would be a common sight with almost all subsequent expeditions we would undertake. When burnt, the aluminium bodies of Land Rovers simply melt away into the sand like water, leaving only a steel chassis.
Closing in on the coordinates, the tracks passed a series of bright white pans before we were forced to turn away from them, onto rough terrain. It was tough going. Sharp dead branches that could cause a puncture at any moment cracked and snapped under the tyres. Holes dug by a menagerie of burrowing animals were another obstacle. Perched on the edge of her seat and craning her neck, Amanda instructed me to swing left or right. If we were to get stuck in a deep burrow, there would be no way of getting out alive, as there was not a single human being within a fifty-kilometre radius to help us. Less dangerous but creating endless annoyance, was a shrub common in these parts called a three-thorn. As its name suggests, the dense cluster of branches taper into a trident of three long thorns and it’s impossible to avoid them. The hard thorns scrape with a jarring shriek down the paintwork of the vehicle, like fingernails running over a blackboard. They leave behind a roadmap of criss-crossing fine lines all over the truck.
Finally, when exhaustion, irritation and the heat were becoming unbearable, we arrived at the coordinates. Unsurprisingly, there weren’t any ruins. There was just the endless red sand, clusters of acacia trees and three-thorn bushes, and the sea of tall yellow grass blowing gently in the hot late-afternoon breeze. In Farini’s own words this was a lone and desolate spot. He was right, but this wasn’t the spot. It was clear his coordinates weren’t precise. Yet they needed to be pinpoint-accurate because, even if Farini were out by half a degree, finding the ruins in this landscape would be like looking for a needle in a prairie-ful
