Sailing the red Kalahari sea

Justin Fox visited six wilderness camps on the South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and found enough wide open space to swing a cat . . . and more big cats than tourists.

A stiff northerly twists sand devils into the sky. The day has grown unbearably hot, the vegetation brittle from months without rain. In the south, the sky grows dark as towers of cumulonimbus boil above. There’s a splinter of lightning and thunder rolls across the dunes. The lioness lifts her head, flared nostrils tasting the air. That smell… like no other.

Veils of rain march across the southern sky and from every corner antelope trudge, heads down, towards the horizon’s promise. Not far off, thinks the lioness, calculating how far the cubs can walk. She stands up, stretches and moves out. Behind her trail the younger lionesses and a handful of cubs who follow, playfully swatting the tips of the bigger cats’ tails.

Ahead of them the rain squall is already transforming a patch of Kalahari earth, creating a green island. Within days the antelope will be savouring succulent grass, annuals will have exploded in abundance, flowers sprung from dust, insects in pollination overdrive and the cats will have their day. Summer has come to the Kalahari.

Spirit of the desert
Dim pre-dawn. You’re woken, heart in your mouth, by a lion’s roar just beneath the chalet. After shivering your timbers, the cat moves a few metres away to a dune from where he can survey the waterhole. He’s a handsome, black-maned gent, king of this corner of the Kalahari. The sun peeps over the horizon and dips him in red ink. He locks you with his golden eyes and you shrivel into your own insignificance. At the waterhole birds are swarming. First come clouds of turtle doves to adorn a camel thorn (Acacia erioloba) like over-abundant Christmas decorations, before dropping down to drink. Then gusts of queleas and Namaqua sandgrouse thrill the air with excited wings.

Later, under a midday sun, the desert stretches wide at Bitterpan, swimming in heat. It’s 47C in the shade. Each zephyr is a blessing, albeit the breath of a dragon. Creatures huddle in pools of shade. A thousand cicadas invade your head: their sound and the heat merging as one sensation. A liquid gemsbok shimmers into view, head bowed, distorting with each step. Unthreatening cumulus build in sky castles over Botswana to the east: promises, promises. You drive over the green and ochre swells of a sand sea, mesmerised, until your Nissan breasts the lip of a dune to reveal a dry riverbed lined with acacia, verdant from summer rain and teeming with herds of springboks and wildebeests.

Some trees bear the weight of aerial haystacks – enormous sociable-weaver nests like outsize hairdos. In other treetops sit raptors: martial and tawny eagles, pale-chanting and gabar goshawks, all scanning the duinriet grass (Stipagrostis amabilis) and driedoring bushes (Rhigozum trichotomum) for tasty morsels. The ground squirrels and yellow mongooses are on high alert, standing on hind legs scanning the sky.

In the late afternoon, you finally arrive at a wilderness camp. Below the stoep, and backlit by a low sun, ostriches are having a dust bath and a hundred springboks pronk about, kicking up puffs of orange dust. A chorus of barking geckos sit in the mouths of their burrows, filling the air with eerie clacking. A hyena whoops, its call echoing across the dunes. You sense the eyes of owls, genets and jackals taking in your every move.

The boerewors sizzles and a bottle of Oranjerivier Sauvignon Blanc is half sunk. The Milky Way has sagged so low it looks in need of a tent pole or two to keep it propped up, but you worry this might puncture more stars in the night sky and my goodness, there are more than enough.

What’s more, previous guests have left a nasty tear in the west – or is it a comet? Yes, you remember now, it’s a comet: McNaught’s. So close you can almost slide your hand into the gap.

Close too are the ghosts of the ancient San and Kgalagadi people. You can feel them there in the wind’s whisper, in the names of dry places whose glottal stops and plosives evoke long stretches of time: Gharagab, Cubitje Quap, Kannaguass, Kij Gamies. You’ve driven for days through an unpeopled land, but their presence is palpable, their ancient footprints still fresh in the sand. You can almost hear the chanting of their gemsbok dance, round and round the campfire, leg rattles rustling like the wind.

Most people fall for the Kalahari on their first encounter. Invariably they fall hard. You can stay away for years and it lies dormant, this feeling for a landscape that is like no other. Like a desert seed waiting for rain.

When we went again this January, we thought we’d be brutalised by the heat. We were… but fell just as hard.

The marriage of two parks
Officially opened in 2000, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is an amalgamation of South Africa’s former Kalahari Gemsbok National Park and Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park. It was Africa’s first ‘peace park’ and its success has set a benchmark for other transfrontier reserves. At about 3,8-million hectares (twice the size of Kruger), it’s one of the biggest conservancies in the world. Often called a desert, it’s only in a few areas that the Kgalagadi matches its parched reputation. A better definition would be ‘wilderness’ or ‘arid savanna’. It’s a land of rippling dunes, grasslands, saltpans and dry, tree-lined watercourses.

Many South Africans are familiar with the three main camps of the former Kalahari Gemsbok National Park: Twee Rivieren, Nossob and Mata Mata. These remain excellent bases for exploring, but the exciting options offered by six wilderness camps and a number of 4×4 routes have added tremendous diversity to a park holiday.

On this trip, Getaway focused on the six new additions. Apart from Kalahari Tented Camp, all comprise only four units, sleeping two people each. So, including the ranger, there are never more than nine people in camp. This is exclusive, utterly remote Kalahari at an affordable price. Book yesterday.

In the past, a Gemsbok Park visit normally meant cruising up and down the Nossob and Auob riverbeds – both great for game viewing. The inclusion of wilderness camps and 4×4 trails allows for a more intimate engagement with remoter parts of the park that were formerly out of bounds. And you’re unlikely to see another vehicle for hours.

While a normal sedan will get you to most of the camps, access to Bitterpan and Gharagab is via restricted 4×4 routes through the dunes. The isolation is almost overwhelming. Just switch off your engine and listen to the soft, comforting, deadly breathing of the desert.

Mid-summer is a time when heat takes on the demeanour of a predator. Tackling the Kalahari in January, when temperatures soar into the high 40s and the ground sizzles above 70C, may seem a bit crazy. But there are many rewards. It’s a time of broiling skies, green dunes and babies galore. And on the hottest days, the game concentrates around waterholes in large numbers.

Where summer rain had already fallen, we found the ground creepered in yellow devil’s thorn (Tribulus zeyheri) flowers and the gifbolle (Nerine lacticoma) showed off their pink blushes. Camel thorn trees had shed their blossoms and were sporting branches laden with pods. Avian migrants were everywhere and eye-catchers like the gorgeous swallowtailed bee-eaters and Marico sunbirds were in noisy abundance.

Kalahari comes alive
Many predators had young. Lions were tormented by their cubs and baby jackals which had been left out of sight by their mothers couldn’t contain their inquisitiveness when a car passed. Suricate kids, adorable beyond belief, played on the porches of their subterranean manors.

Antelope, too, had dropped their babies, and the Nossob and Auob riverbeds in particular contained large nurseries. Rounding a bend, we came upon a wildebeest mother which had just given birth in the middle of the road. The baby, still wet, was trying to stand on wobbly legs that looked like they were made of Plasticine. It was desperately trying to suckle, but was having balance issues. Each time it took a tumble, either its mother or one of the sub-adults would nudge it back to its feet. The next day we passed the same herd and baby was already indistinguishable from two dozen other gambolling young ‘uns.

I’m not a big-cat diarist or cat-count fanatic. And it’s best not to be when you’re in the Kalahari, as sightings can be rare. On my last (winter) visit I saw nothing even vaguely feline. So we went with expectations suitably tempered. Well, by the end of the trip, cats were getting only a cursory glance. You can’t blame us: 26 lions is a good score, even for somewhere like Kruger’s ‘cat run’ at Satara.

Cats for Africa
It started with three lionesses and two fluff-ball cubs flaked out in the shade next to Houmoed water hole on the Auob. Then came two adults taking a shower under a pipe that dribbled water. Later we watched three lionesses stalking a group of wildebeests, but all they came up with was a mouse, which they had difficulty sharing, even as an appetiser.

Each game drive produced lions, but the most exciting was a standoff between three young males and three hyenas, directly in front of our chalet at Urikaruus. A spring hare tried to mediate, but seemed to lack authority. After much growling and whooping, the hyenas backed off and the cats sauntered over to watch us braaing from a discreet 20 metres.

Which meant our meal was not given the undivided attention it was due and an unpierced gem squash exploded like a cannonball, sending tinfoil shrapnel tailing into the darkness like McNaught debris.

Lions weren’t the only kitties. At Grootkolk a leopard wandered right past our tent on its way to drink at the spotlit waterhole. And the neighbourly genet at Kalahari Tented Camp was even more bold, jumping onto the stoep and trying to lick the hot braai grid an arm’s reach from our table. Most rewarding was a cloud of dust that materialised into a herd of fleeing springboks. When things settled, we saw an exhausted cheetah lying beside its prey, one paw resting nonchalantly on the bokkie‘s rump like an old, caring friend.

Ghostly desert voices
Our last night in the Kalahari was spent just south of the park at Molopo Lodge. Outside on the road, a few elderly San – some in loincloths – sold decorated bones, ostrich eggshells, bowand- arrows and bottles of red sand.

At dusk we heard the sound of music coming from over the dunes, warped, tinny and distant. Drawing closer, it sounded like a makeshift band was playing a strange hybrid of boeremusiek, kwela, Christian and San tunes. The songs had no beginning and no end, but the rhythm and shudder of the gemsbok trance dance was in there somewhere, competing with a woman’s voice wailing, “Vat my Jesus. O, Jeee-sus!“

The beat drifted across the dunes to where we stood on a rise, watching the icy tail of McNaught dip below the horizon. The sound was a modern, corrupted vestige of the old Kalahari. It carried a history that dwarfed the invaders, the Bantu and European barbarians who swept in, chasing the First People into these last Kgalagadi corners.

Despite the harshness, this desert and its park are immeasurably rich. It’s a refuge for plants, animals and humans whose survival here, despite the odds, is fragile and miraculous. This is indeed one of South Africa’s last great wildernesses.

DESERT TAKE-OUT

Two plants are vital to the survival of many creatures in the Kalahari: the tsamma melon (Citrullus lanatus) and the gemsbok cucumber (Acanthosicyos naudinianus). Both supply food and liquid in places where there is no standing water. They can mean the difference between life and death for animals (and still, in some places, humans). The cucumber ripens in summer and the melon in winter, providing almost year-round sustenance.

SUGGESTED STOPOVERS

As the park is quite a distance from most major cities, trying to beat the gate closing time in one day is a bit ambitious. Getaway suggests you break your journey outside the park and start fresh the next morning. We recommend the following:

$ Rea se Boskamp near Askham is a rustic Kalahari ‘house’ (it sleeps 11 people). It’s ingeniously built from local materials: driedoring bushes bound together for the walls and besembos for the roof. We had a family of spotted eagle owls as immediate neighbours. Cell 083-313-1044 or 082-675-7910.

$$ Molopo Kalahari Lodge has a decent restaurant and bar, cool gardens with water features and a (much needed) swimming pool. Accommodation is in rondavels and chalets. Tel 054-511-0008 or web http://www.molopo.co.za.