Day 8: Kudu, Cape Cross Seals and The White Lady

At Cape Cross

Kudu

 We have become Nomads.  Our tent is our home.  Each night we set it up and move in.  The next morning we are folding it and moving on to some place new.  We were once quite slow.  But now, in only a week’s time, we are experts and can make or break camp in about 15 minutes.  In the evening, our tent is erected, the bed is made, our belongings are set along one wall, and we are ready for a shower and change of clothes.  In the morning, our belongings are stored into their proper bag, the tent is folded, and all are stored in our truck’s compartments.  We have adapted so quickly that it seemed strange to sleep in a building for the two nights in Swakopmund.  In fact, the second night there, we brought in our sleep pads and comforter in order to feel more “at home”.  All that is lacking to make us true Bedouins, are the carpets for the floors.  Barb is starting to look for the perfect ones in the markets.

Our tent is named Kudu.  Other tents are called Baboon, Nyala, Leopard, Wombley, and No-Name.  The assignment of tents to the couple that shares them did not seem to have any correlation to the inhabitants, at least in the beginning.  But at the moment we are thinking that at least one of the inhabitants of Nyala is becoming dimorphic, a distinguishing sexual characteristic of that African animal.

A Kudu is like an antelope, only different.  It has two horns like an antelope, but not the same kind of horns.  It has four legs and hooves and runs like an antelope, but one look at a a Kudu and even I can tell you quite authoritatively that it is not an antelope.  But most of the time, I can’t tell you what it really is. 

In Africa, there are Greater Kudu’s and Lesser Kudu’s.   We can’t decide if the tent is Greater or Lesser than a normal Kudu, or if it is Lesser or Greater than the sum of its parts.  And the parts of this tent are African Safari STOUT.  These are not standard backpacking tents like we all have at home.  Grab one section of your modern aluminum, shock corded tent pole, hold it up and shake it, and the pieces morph magically into a single long pole.  You can’t lose an individual piece of the pole in the pack, and you don’t have to stare at it for minutes to decide if this one rod is like that one beside it or the other one over there.  Not the poles on our Kudu, though. These poles are steel.  One set of poles for a safari tent weighs as much as two entire tents at home.  But they are Brooklyn Bridge stout.  And the cloth of the tent alone is as heavy or worse than the old canvas tents we all had as boys.  This is the opposite of ultra-light camping.  When the tent and all its parts are packed together, it weighs about as much as your riding lawn mower, and is just about as easy to throw around. 

You have to be able to get along with your tent-mate, or it just can’t be erected.  Assembly of these tent frames requires a few complex dance steps that aren’t taught in the usual courses.  Dance ethnologists are currently applying for grant money to study the tent erection rituals of overland safari tribes.  The design of the poles requires that the poles first be assembled one rod into the other; then two pole ends are held by one person and two by the other.  And then on a count of three, you try to flick the middle up while pushing the ends closer to each other; and if your timing and motions are just right, the middle of the frame is now higher than the pole ends.  Each tent-mate then struggles to fit one of the pole ends into the tent corner socket.  There is no graceful way to do this, and innumerable clumsy and unsuccessful ones.

However, when the Djinn of all the Howling Deserts is throwing a Howling Sandstorm at you, this is the tent that you want.  It shakes and bends this way and that; the sides move as if they are going to collapse right onto you; but then it springs right back up like one of those children’s inflatable toys, Bozo-the-Boxing-Clown.  In the morning after the storm, Kudu and all tents like her are still standing, red dust all over her, inside and out.  But soon she is clean and folded, and just like us, ready to continue her nomadic journey.

Cape Cross Seal Colony

Cape Cross Seal Colony

LEON:  Leaving Swakopmund, we stopped at a historic site.  In 1486, a Portuguese ship landed here to claim the land for their king.  They named it Cape Cross to commemorate the cross they erected there for the occasion.  An odd piece of history and certainly not worth driving hours out of your way to see.  But it is also the site of the one of the largest seal colonies in the world.  Somehow that simple statement is enough to cause those infected with the Shutterbug virus to start reaching for cameras and lenses like Harry Potter and his friends for their wands.  Soon they are using arcane, possibly magical, terms such as Neutral Density Filter, ISO, F- Stop, as each one fumbles for their multiple bags of camera gear and tripods.  Surely such proper chants and motions will invoke the witchery required for the perfect blending of light into pixels stored by digits and mega bytes.

One can easily find the seal colony by following one’s nose.  The stench of decay from decaying remains of young seal pups left by the jackals who feast on them assaults the olfactory sense.  Extended exposure to this type of smell can leave one nauseous.  Seal pups cannot survive in the cold South Atlantic waters until they develop sufficient blubber deposits.  That takes about 11 days, and until then they are prey for the jackals.

Seal colonies are not easy on the auditory sense either.  The constant braying like a donkey and snorting and barking is a cacophony of sound worse than any barnyard mix of sounds you have ever heard.

The Big Guy

And then we get to watch them.  Most of them just lie around and do little or nothing.  Others are moving slowly but must cross the “territory” of some dominant male who refuses to let them pass in peace.  The makes are bellicose, puffing their chests, barking and snorting at the intruder.  Normally might makes right - the bigger male totally intimidates the smaller one.  And these big ones can weigh well over a thousand pounds!  Only occasionally is there an actual fight for dominance.  Many of the males shows signs of large and recently acquired battle wounds, typically skin ripped completely off down to the flesh below.  But Brett, our naturalist, explains that although the wounds look awful, the seals heal very quickly.

Soon, the stench of this colony of well over 100,000 bellicose, boisterous, bullying cape seals who seem to spend their time urinating, defecating, masticating, fornicating, and fighting is enough to drive non-Shutterbugs from their vicinity.  But our apprentice witches and warlocks of photographic wizardry are not yet finished.

Baby Seal

BARB:  I don’t know why Leon left so soon to go back to the truck.  Where else in the world could I have seen such a sight as this!  The baby seals were so darn cute and after awhile, you didn’t even notice the smell or the noise.  And after taking over a hundred photos, I’m sure that I have a few that are really good.  That is the way of photography...  click, click, click away, and hope that one sticks. 

The White Lady Petroglyphs

Justice, our Damara guide

Hike to The White Lady Petroglyph

LEON:  On tours, there are things that must be included because they are in all the tourist books.  Too often, these once important places have become so commercialized that they have lost most of their meaning or impact.  That has not been true of any of our major destinations on this safari.  The White Lady petroglyphs are mentioned in all the Africa guidebooks, and every description read to me like one of those places that was sure to disappoint.  But for the White Lady, you can’t drive within 100 feet, get out of the car, snap a pic, look at the trinkets for sale, and then drive away.  In order to get just to the trailhead, your double drive-wheeled, 4x4 truck, must take you down an awful road to the trailhead.  We are in the desert region known as Damaraland.  The temperature is 110 F. in the shade, and there is very little of that.  Our guide, called “Justice”, is a young Damara tribesman.  He is handsome and dark, 6ft 2 in tall, and very slim in body and face.  Dressed simply, with modern sunshades, he begins to tell us of his land and its people.  They have a language that uses normal sounds as we do, but also incorporating four clicking noises that cannot be reproduced by any non-native speakers.  The petroglyphs we will soon see are between 5000 and 2000 years old.  The rock art is attributed to the San people who once roamed these deserts.  Our hike will take two hours, total for there and return.  On the return, the scorching sun will be below the mountain ridge line, providing some relief as we hike out.

The mountains provide the background to all that we see.  Dominating all the others is Brandberg Mountain.  Its name means “burning mountain”, not for any fire, but for its distinctive bright red colors when it is lit by the light of the early morning sun.  The black rock which provides its other distinctive color is igneous rock, pushed up from the depths of the earth many millions of years ago.

Brandberg Mountain with ancient water flow rocks

Our hike begins, and very soon, we see something very unusual in this normally extremely arid climate - standing water.   Much of our walk will follow a dry creek-bed.  But in a few places along the trail, we will hop from rock to slippery rock in order to cross standing water.  Here too, it has been an unusually wet year.  Many of the rocks are worn smooth and it is easy to see where the water will flow when it is wet here.  Once, long ago, there must have been flowing water every year, and perhaps in all seasons.  Or, if it has always been desert, if the rain from the only occasional good year has smoothed those rocks, then this terrain has been here unchanged for a very long time.   And that is most probably the case, for we are told that this is the oldest of our planet’s deserts.

I will tell you now, that the drawings do not disappoint.  The location itself seems a special place.  And the drawings inspire complex emotions, perhaps just as they were meant to do.  Google them for pix.  Look them up in back copies of National Geographic.  But for the true import, you must hike for an hour in the desert temperatures, lead by a proud Damara tribesman carrying his short walking stick, and then stand before these drawings as their creators did thousands of years before.

Tonight we will camp very close to the “burning mountain”.  Wild desert elephants roam this territory.  There are rumors that these elephants have recently killed one or more people. The campground is close, but the better - graded and maintained - roads will take hours to get us there.  Instead, we take off four-wheeling across the desert, following old faint lines in the grass, crossing dry, rough creek beds as we navigate across this desert terrain.  Rocking and rolling, singing and laughing, we break out a six-pack of beer that is shared by all our weary overlanders. 

Girdle Lizard

BARB:  The trek into the petroglyphs was well worth the effort, even in 110 degrees with the hot sun beating down on us.  We took several bottles of water and drank every drop.  These are museum pieces, but available for us to see in their environment.  When we were in Cape Town, we visited the South African Museum and saw chunks of rock, protected by glass, with the same sort of carved art.  It was fascinating there, but even more so here.  We were able to see that Zebra, Kudu, Springbok, Wildebeest, and many more animals roamed this area thousands of years ago. 

Happy Feet at Brandberg Mountain