An African Christmas... and other tales from the land God made in anger

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Christmas abroad rocks! This was my third, and on yet another different continent. I didn’t know what to expect, although my Christmas cards and emails described my hope that at least part of the time would be spent in the company of the elephants I have got to know over the last few years. A couple of weeks’ earlier, this looked like an empty wish: the heavy early rains in Namibia had caused the ephemeral rivers of Kaokoland to flow and effectively prevented access to the research area. It was also possible that the animals would have dispersed, relishing the fresh, new vegetation and more plentiful water sources.

Ever since my sister’s self-imposed and self-maintained exile from the family after a particularly tumultuous Christmas a few years’ ago, I’ve been pursuing a mission to spend the festive season abroad. Don’t get me wrong: I love my family and UK-based friends dearly, but I hope they can accept my absence at this time of year. After all, it really is a time for kids, watching the excitement of Christmas’s approach and mystery in their eyes. But my nephews and nieces are rapidly growing up. The main reason to spend the festive season in the UK over the last fifteen years is therefore evaporating.

For me, the main attraction of Christmas abroad is the unknown. There are no family traditions to follow, no rules, no guarantees. In 1993, Delia and I spent Christmas Day completing our PADI dive course in the murky waters off Phuket. Christmas lunch was cold glass noodles, and the weather was muggily overcast. Come the evening, we each called home, but the echoes and time-delays of the island’s phone-lines made us feel homesick, so we consoled ourselves with pizza and Baileys, and soon forgot about folks back home. Hogmanay that year was spent in Bangkok’s Hard Rock Café; I have only hazy memories of the evening, and the feeling that we walked back to the youth hostel in the not-so-wee sma’ hours, even though it was the best part of five kilometres across town. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Last year, I took up a longstanding invitation from my Australian cousins to join them in the Southern Highlands, a couple of hours southwest of Sydney. Here there were family traditions, but they were new to me. The big meal was on Christmas Eve, a jolly affair that reached its climax in the snooker room with John reliving his days as a DJ in Sydney in the early seventies and spinning the disks for us. With the snooker table taking up most of the floorspace, we strutted our stuff a touch precariously on top of the bench-seats which lined the walls. Christmas Day started suitably late, with a brunch of Irish smoked salmon and scrambled eggs to combat assorted hangovers before the present-opening began. Hogmanay was a quiet affair, another delicious meal, this time hosted by my younger cousin and her boyfriend. Replete, we sank into comfortable chairs for several episodes of “Black Books” before rousing ourselves to toast in the New Year.

But what would an African Christmas be like? Well, to cut a long story short, I got my hoped-for elephants… at Hobatere Game Reserve, a lone male on Christmas Eve (both in the late afternoon and on a night-time game drive) and the extended breeding herd (approximately 26 animals, including some new-ish calves) on Hogmanay and New Year’s Day, and, in Kaokoland, 21 elephants over the three days in the river between 28th and 30th December. Until mid-December, it was uncertain where we’d be spending the actual festivities, although we hoped that the rains would allow us back into Kaokoland in the period between Christmas and New Year. To our delight, we were invited to join Steve and Louise Braine, the outgoing managers of Hobatere Game Reserve and long-time supporters of the elephant project, as they diluted their paying guests with friends and associated hangers-on. Louise’s catering was superb, Steve’s hospitality generous and limitless, and the recently-rescued genet cubs were unexpectedly cute and hilarious, soundly beating the old Christmas afternoon favourite, an ancient Bond movie, as relaxing entertainment after the festive excesses.

After a somewhat difficult few months back in the UK in August/September/October, I had booked a ticket back to Namibia without thinking much beyond a desire to leave the cold, grey and increasingly dark London. Landing in Windhoek, I found myself encountering African red tape for the first time since my lively efforts to get into Angola in mid-2006. The all-too-alert official at Hosea Kutako Airport spotted that I had already spent a fair amount of time in her country that year - 81 days to be exact - and refused to believe that I was not working there. I had brief visions of frog-marched onto the next plane back to the UK, but she relented and granted me ten days in the country. My first priority at the beginning of the next working week was to apply to the Department of Home Affairs for an extension, supplying them with as much evidence as I could muster of my finances and my already-booked return flight at the January. Nothing happens quickly in Africa, and I spent the next three weeks wondering each day if I was going to be booted out. Mind you, I wasn’t lacking in Plan Bs… But someone somewhere in the right place believed me, and I was eventually granted the requisite extension. I found myself almost disappointed…

Meantime, my host was facing bureaucratic red tape problems of his own, and the combination kept us in Windhoek for most of November. Only at the end of the month could we finally get away to check up on the elephants and, incidentally, to road-test a new single-cab Land Cruiser bakkie of which he’s been dreaming for years. Pushed for time, with commitments back in Windhoek in early December, we nevertheless managed a few days in the Hoanib. There we found enough elephants to keep us busy (including the dominant bull who produced a record 35kg defecation, clearly a load off his mind and elsewhere…). We also found significant amounts of spoor belonging to a large male lion which ensured that we camped with even more caution than usual.

In early December, an old friend’s first trip to Africa gave us the excuse to hit the road again. Don’t underestimate the diminutively-built Ramona, aka the carnivore biologist for the Yukon. Yes, she may be only 45 kgs, but this girl hangs out of helicopters and darts polar and grizzly bears for a living! As you might expect of a woman in a very male-dominated profession, she has bags and bags of character, as well as a brain the size of a small galaxy, and travelling with her was both a delight and an education. Unfortunately, weather conditions did not play ball and the one animal she did not see in a fortnight’s travelling around the northwest quarter of Namibia was an elephant. It was some compensation that we had a spectacular white rhino sighting in Etosha National Park: a large male shambled across the road in front of our vehicle, turned round and pottered back, and then mooched around in the bushes beside us, giving us a good half hour’s viewing. We also saw a secretary bird kill a couple of large toads by stamping on them, very distinctive behaviour which I had never seen before. Lizards were out in force, from colourful rock agamas to the irately-black chameleons which we regularly found in the road. At Cape Cross, we treated Ramona to one kind of animal she knew from home - seals - and found the colony overrun by barely month-old nearly-black pups. We covered approximately 3,000km in a little over nine days, and enjoyed stunningly green countryside almost everywhere we went, the benefits of the heavy early rains already clearly visible.

For me, the geographic highlight of Ramona’s trip was the new-to-me Epupa Falls on the Kunene River. We stayed at the Epupa Community Campsite which - to quote Ramona’s guidebook - “would have to be in the water to be closer to the falls”. It was idyllic: the white-noise roar of the falls, invisible to us except as suggested by the abrupt end of the flowing water and the wind-blown mist of spray above; the urgent chattering of the weavers nest-building on the tall-grassed islands in the middle of the river; the fronded sunlight-and-shadows under the palm trees; the pale blue of the early morning skies; the surprisingly close rolling hills of Angola, burnt palms at their foot lining the far bank of the river; a light breeze, barely perceptible, cooling my face briefly as I scribbled my diary on the sandy-gravelly river bank; the jewelled heavens of the star-scapes at night. We treated ourselves to a day off, and drank in the atmosphere. When the day cooled sufficiently, we walked along the top of the falls, impressive even without, yet, the benefit of this year’s rains, and then on downstream, enjoying the rare sight of baobabs in leaf, swallows and kingfishers busy around the water, majestic fish eagles distantly surveying their empire from the treetops, and even a lone crocodile basking in the late afternoon sun… we decided not to go for a dip.

Between Christmas and New Year, we visited a friend’s game farm in Damaraland and then set off for the Hoanib, hoping that the water levels would have subsided to allow us into the river. We were lucky: the Hoanib and a couple of its tributaries had run, but were now dry, the mud already caking and cracking. We could find out what the elephants were doing with this unexpectedly early surfeit of food and water. One of the bulls was in musth, not yet aggressively so, but still protective of the females he was with. The younger bulls were clearly treating him with some caution. Accompanied by friends, we remained mobile, packing up camp each day in order to have more flexibility in our movements. There was no lion spoor in evidence and we camped each night well away from the main river so that we could sleep out under the moon-less starry night, which I still find thrilling and energising. This time, the scenic highlight was the challenging drive through the Khowarib Schlucht, a stunning gorge carved by the Hoanib that takes the river from the wide open expanses of the Klein Serengeti to the Seisfontein/Anabeb plains. Each turn in the track, each rocky path climbed, brought us to yet more spectacular mountains and valleys until the culmination, at the eastern end of the gorge, with the incredible red cliffs of the “amphitheatre”.

After the New Year’s hangovers had subsided, I had the chance to see Kaokoland from a different perspective. Steve and Louise’s younger son, Dayne, has his pilot’s licence and is always keen for an excuse to accumulate more flying time. It didn’t require much persuasion to get him to take me and a couple of friends for a two-hour flight down the route of the Hoanib river. The previous night I had not slept well. No, it wasn’t another hangover developing, not this time, but, rather, the noises around me: the distressed beat of an enormous mopane moth’s wings, and the grumpy half-roar of a not-so-distant lioness. I felt guilty for even thinking to complain about such causes for a poor night! Halfway down the airstrip we found one of the culprits, a lioness with her half-grown male offspring, playing lazily in the early morning son. If the Khowarib Schlucht had been impressive from ground-level, it was even more stunning from the air. West of the Schlucht, we continued to follow the Hoanib to the stretch downriver from the Gunamib river that I know well, spotting a few elephants en route, and further, past the incongruously green floodplains, over the dunefields and out to the ocean. There we slowly turned and headed back. Apart from a perturbing few minutes when I thought I was going to disgrace myself and so fixed my sight rigidly on the horizon in an effort to persuade my insides to rearrange themselves, I enjoyed the flight enormously. It was a unique chance to see this stunning country from the air.

In mid-January, we made a final (for my time in Namibia this time, at least) trip into Kaokoland, and this time we headed further north, to Purros and the Hoarusib river, before returning to the Hoanib. Unlike the Christmas/New Year period, there was almost no tourist traffic around, and we had the rivers to ourselves. I “met” the newest surviving calf, now nearly a year old and extremely entertaining to watch with his mother and brother, and we found a recently-bereaved cow, an elderly elephant who presumably had not been able to sustain her new calf for more than 2-3 months. Its corpse had been reported to us a few weeks’ earlier. Also in attendance was a new-to-me bull that had not been seen for a while. His magnificent ivory was now a little deficient: he’d broken one of his tusks and looked somewhat lopsided. The remaining tusk was clearly still quite heavy and we saw him balance it and his trunk in the fork of a dead tree when he was resting. He was also in musth, but we will have to wait a couple of years to see what success he has had, elephants’ gestation period being 22 months. But it wasn’t only elephants who intrigued us on this trip: we saw a pair of young male cheetah near the road on our way through Damaraland, found a recently-dead spotted hyena - likely to have been killed by her cohorts in a battle for dominance - and noticed a couple of honeybadgers busying themselves around the roots of a makalani palm in the cool early hours of an overcast morning. This was the furthest west that Keith had seen either spotted hyena or honeybadgers, the first time I had seen spotted hyena in Namibia, and the first time I had seen honeybadgers in daylight.

In the Hoanib, we found the extended breeding herd. Three of the four females in this group tend to come and go with their offspring, and it’s always fascinating to watch the interactions and dominance-assertions when they come back together. There was no sign of the record-defecator and, frustratingly, his GPS collar is no longer working, so we can only make assumptions based on previous years’ movement patterns as to where he might be.

Back in Windhoek, I only had a few days to say my goodbyes and pack up, in preparation for leaving this oh-so-welcome bolt-hole, the escape from my own reality. Back in the UK it would be cold, bitterly cold with the country suffering from an unseasonably bad winter, the days would be short and dark, and an assortment of problems awaited my attention. In a moment of pathetic fallacy, the clouds began, once again, to gather in Namibia, working up to the second onding of the wet season. But there was a braai or two to have first… Namibia draws together all sorts of people, of all backgrounds, and this eclecticism was emphasised in that final braai which brought together people who in previous lives had been, variously, an Olympic middle-distance hopeful, a drug addict, a Ritz chef, a member of the Security Services and a nursery gardener, not to mention yours truly, the ex-lawyer. Now, here we were, in this kooky country of few people, vast spaces and stunning scenery, European efficiency and African bureaucracy, with one common aim: the conservation of its wildlife.

I won’t be back there for a while, intent this year to get back to Serious Travelling, from which a combination of family stuff and elephant work kept me for most of the twelve months. No complaints, of course, at least about the elephant work, but there’s a lot more of the planet yet to see…

You have been warned: the frequency of blogs may increase this year…

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Photos

don't you want one too?
playing with a genet cub at Hobatere Game Reserve

the grass is always greener...
calves explore the grasses around the workings of the Mudurib waterhole

Damara hat decoration
cross chameleon

white rhino in Etosha
OK, so who's going to ask why the rhino crossed the road?

the weight of a tusk and a trunk
WKM-16 hangs up the heavy bits while he rests

the Epupa Falls
(our campsite is in the distance, under the makalani palms)

Comments

[otto]

Lovely
As always - fantastic pictures and a great story. Hope you're well.

[Lynn]

Jealousy!
your descriptions are so vivid that I feel that I am right there along with you! And I wish I were. I can see why you spend so little time back here in Greyland! Stay away, stay away and keep regaling us with your amazing adventures!