To get here, you must follow the longest and largest river in South Africa for 1 000km. Your guide in this dry wilderness is a water source. The river is the Gariep, as it was called by the KhoiKhoi who lived on it, long before it became the Orange.
From Joburg, you go west on the N14 passing through Ventersdorp, Coligny, Delareyville and Vryburg. Past windmills, poplars and black birds with long drooping tail feathers that are borne by the wind. Guinea fowl run onto the tar, perhaps for the freshly dead insects, victims of the windshield.
Then, at Kuruman, you're in the Northern Cape and the landscape changes - no more dusty fields and tractors turning up sods; now, there's red grass and thorn trees; dorper sheep and mining and fair weather cumulus clouds; larks and crows and raptors and the huge straw nests of the sociable weaver.
The roads, which are single lane country roads, not highways, are quiet but for the trucks, many of them transporting livestock. Kuruman leads to Kathu and then Olifantshoek, Upington, Kakamas and Pofadder.
It was in the remote Northern Cape and on the banks of the Orange surrounded by the desert that the KhoiKhoi were able to defend their independence for the longest. In the Cape, the population was decimated by smallpox, which came ashore with the laundry of a Dutch ship.
It was a lean life then and it's lean now for those who live in these small towns that hanker for the rain.
Blue eyes, light skins and Afrikaans remind anyone passing through towns like Kathu it was to these parts the trekboers fled in the 1820s; anarchical, rebellious of authority, they were people like Conroed de Buys, whose wives and concubines - either KhoiKhoi or Xhosa - were the people who created what Noel Mostert in Frontiers calls the shadow people.
During apartheid, the San were conscripted as trackers. With the transition to democracy, they lost their jobs and were relocated to the Northern Cape and placed in government-built camps.
The society still seems disowned and disinherited.
There seem a disproportionate number of off-licences for these people on the fringes of existence, for these people killing time.
Then there is a wariness of the English-speaker. At a cafe that sold yesterday's newspapers discounted, up from the Pofadder Hotel, the old man behind the till rang up our purchase. But as he reached over to give us our change, my husband, who has an excellent command of Afrikaans after a lot of chenin blanc, but is otherwise wretched, engaged him in conversation. The shopkeeper (realising my husband had not been drinking chenin blanc) placed the change on the countertop.
Through Namaqualand, there are flat plains and mountains. There is veld, buchu, vygies, some daisies, not many. Towards Springbok, Steinskopf and over the South Africa-Namibia border at Vioolsdrif, it is starker and rockier, with fewer bushes, fewer tufts of grass.
The SAP stationed at the border said mid-December temperatures reach 50. At that heat, the air-conditioners don't work, it's like standing beside a fire.
A mistrust of visitors seems to afflict the Namibian customs officials and perhaps they cannot be blamed.
Perhaps, if I'd observed them longer, I might have said it was a remoteness caused by the melancholy of the desert. Driving northward into that emptiness, I felt a horror at the landscape, I wanted to turn around, to seek refuge from an environment so wasted.
The desert scene immediately over the border is not soft red sand dunes and blue sky, but gravel and lava plains, earth that looks like it has been scalded, hills burnt black by the sun. It resembles a battle scene from a sci-fi movie.
Dotted about are small plastic-covered dome huts. Not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass in this extreme aridity. The sand isn't fine or flowing, it's more like mountain detritus, like a hot missile has blown rock into thousands of small pieces and scattered them like ash.
But instead of like in Dune, this is a place of the ancient past, for its geological history stretches back 2 000-million years almost half the age of the Earth. The original rocks were formed by volcanic action and worn down by years of erosion, then more volcanic eruption and the persistent washing away of a river intent on reaching the Atlantic Ocean.
And the Tatasberg Pluton, the huge granite mountain in this place, is slowly decomposing.
Interest in the Orange has been dominated by diamonds formed 17-million years ago in river terraces 60 metres above the present level of the water.
Indestructible and mysterious
Fossils dating back the same number of years have been found near the mouth, such as that of the giant hyrax - a kind of impossibly large guinea pig. Our guide told us there were no crocodiles in the Orange. Crocodiles didn't live, he said, in westward running rivers. That's because rivers flowing west are too cold in winter. I don't know if this is so, but in Lesotho, where it rises, the river is known as the Senqu and parts of it freeze in July.
Though the Orange was once home to hippo, those have disappeared, and so, for the lack of dangerous animals, the lower reaches of the river are rafting friendly.
Our two guides, a generous number for our group of six, we found dispirited on our first night at the base camp, a short distance from the border and on the banks of the river. Later, we understood why.
At this time of year, late spring, the rainfall, the little you can expect (evaporation greatly exceeding precipitation) has past and the thunderstorms have not yet arrived, and as the discharge of water from the main dammed stream of the Orange is unreliable, the water levels are correspondingly low, making slow the rapids.
Each day on the river, is more or less the same. Setting off after nine, in a two-person inflatable raft - more comfortable than the rigid fiberglass Mohawk, but not as fast or maneuverable and more difficult in a headwind, we paddle gently downstream.
The temperature climbs to the mid-30s in November, but the water takes the edge off a heat that would otherwise be stifling. Sometimes rowing, sometimes drifting, sometimes swimming through this rugged expanse, really is relaxing; it empties the mind. And after my initial shock at how hard this landscape is, the winding oasis that has fretted away the cliffs is a relief, for the water brings life. As I become accustomed to the repetitive groove of our days, I appreciate the calm that can be found here.
We pass through narrow parts of the river in single file. In other parts, we paddle abreast. In the shallow parts, we scrape against the rocks. You need cover less than 20km a day, or spend about six hours paddling, and even when the river is fast flowing, the rapids are easy; it's not a whitewater adventure, to expect that will be to be disappointed.
We pass nguni cows grazing on the banks or suckling their calves, egrets on their backs. No farmers are to be seen though everywhere there is evidence of irrigation.
The river is used for watering crops such as cotton plants, Lucerne, grapes and sultanas.
The banks are luxuriant, but 20m back from them, there is only scrub amid bare stones, lifeless looking bushes, a handful of quiver trees and then barren cliffs, folded mountain ranges horizontally striated where newer rocks have forced themselves into the cracks of older suites, not brilliantly coloured, but brown, buff. Every now and again, a monolith rises out of a sandstone ridge.
There was a stretch where we rowed through enormous black dolomite boulders, as smooth as previously the rock had been jagged. In some places, they resemble Henry Moore sculptures, those places where a small boulder has become trapped in a basin and with the movement of water slowly abraded through that basin a hole, often polished to silken and perfectly round.
Every now and then you can catch the echo of a goat crying to be united with the herd in the steep crevices or stony valleys. Malachite kingfishers watch us from the trees on the banks, a goliath heron fishes next to the reeds and a comorant dives under the water and after too long, resurfaces. Vervet monkeys and baboons eat the wild fruit on the banks.
It is on these sandy banks, in the shade of a weeping willow or a clump of acacias that we stop for lunch and lie on our backs and sleep. In November, in the afternoon, a desiccating wind comes up, so it is best to make tracks towards your night camp early, rather than turn a holiday into an endurance test. It is also on these sandy banks that we camp overnight.
The guides collect wood and make a fire while the guests watch the golden light fade and the sky darken. The wind is still high and the temperatures still in the mid-20s. We talk and describe the sky: The Pleiades, Orions Belt, the satellites and the shooting stars - clusters, constellations in the desert so beautifully clear to the unaided eye.
In the end, the quiet and rest were wonderful. I didn't think about work, the days felt free, the air was clean; but the trip was not without difficulty and challenge. I wished the rapids had been more exciting and the food simpler. Our guide told us of the maize bread, black bean and peanut dishes and of the sweet melon he grew at home. I longed to try these things.
I still wonder about my initial unease in this desert.
Africa is a continent "full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and lost races of man, of mysteries wrapped in doom..." writes Henry Miller in Tropic of Capricorn.
Was it this that I sensed or was it because the desert is indifferent to us? The desert is a paradox: it suffers, and, at the same time, it is serene and accepting. It is hard for things to survive, it is a triumph when they do, and it is easy to die there. And this place is in the end, indestructible; it will continue after we have gone. Somewhere, sometime, moisture will fall, a seed will germinate and nature will revive herself.
If you go
- TOUR OPERATOR: Bundi, www.bundi.co.za, 021-975-9727.
- VISAS: South African passport holders don't need a visa.
- ACCOMMODATION: It's a long drive. It took us between 14 and 16 hours, so we slept over at the Ga Segonyana caravan park, the municipal caravan park in Kuruman, [email protected], 053-712-1479.
- GETTING THERE: The road trip was a highlight of the holiday for us. Follow the N14 west until Springbok after which you take the N7 north. Alternatively, you can fly to Upington and hire a car from there.