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 of haystacks. At that moment I was struck by the words recorded by consummate travel writer and author of non-fiction Africana Lawrence Green, who was also a Lost City enthusiast. Before he embarked on his expedition in 1936, another searcher by the name of Frederick Paver, who had gone before, warned him: “When you see the country, you realise that one could spend months searching the sand dunes without covering a fraction of the area in which the lost city may be situated.” Paver was dead right. Standing on the roof of our truck surveying the endless empty landscape, it was no mystery to us why these ruins had yet to be found.
At dusk we set up camp, lit a crackling fire and enjoyed a glass of wine. It would become the most familiar pattern of every one of our Kalahari travels. Spurfowl clucked around our tent like domestic chickens, and the ambient sound of a hundred toktokkie beetles tapping their armoured abdomens on the ground – tok-tok-tok – added to the orchestra of crickets. A hyena cackled in the distance, and a nightjar followed his lead with a quavering call. This empty desert was pure bliss, and even though our mission might be a complete failure, we were content. The pattern would repeat itself night after night, expedition after expedition.
We spent the rest of the days roaming about the area, just to make sure, but we knew we were wasting our time. We followed the full length of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park’s northern boundary and the entire area of the game park of Mabuasehube. For some strange geographical reason, Mabuasehube is elevated slightly from the surrounding desert. The rectangular shape of parkland seems incongruous with the rest of the Transfrontier Park. Originally it was a park in its own right and was officially incorporated into the Transfrontier