Take me to the river
Kim Harrisberg and friends take a hike along the Great Kei River
WE move like tarantulas in the night. Our massive backpacks have taken on the swollen appearance of the spider’s egg sac, our trekking poles have become her long, spindly legs.
For the past 30 days, our spiderlike tendencies have taken us through villages, hunting grounds, abandoned houses, cattle farms and family homes. And now, at the end of 30 days of trekking, we crawl along the highway towards Kei Mouth, greeted by friendly hoots from car drivers.
This is the final day of Expedition Kei. It took a year to plan the trek that snaked alongside the Great Kei River in the Eastern Cape, from source to mouth. We were told by farmers and villagers that we were the only ones crazy enough to walk the 450km length of the river.
The question we were asked most was: “Why?”
Our answers differed according to our audience, our mood or our environment. We wanted a challenge. We wanted to walk something that had never been walked before. And we wanted to attach some type of social initiative to the expedition.
Five of us, all university students, attempted to bring different elements of our studies: journalism, botany, psychology, environmental studies and medicine. We plotted the route and phoned farmers and chiefs of villages to get permission and advice about walking through their land.
We were careful and prepared. We did not want to be known as “those crazy kids who thought they could make it back in once piece”. We did a first-aid course and a mountain-rescue course. We trained hard — running, hiking, gyming, swimming and yoga. We packed our first-aid kit with enough bandages to make a mummy. We had a satellite phone, a GPS navigator and enough emergency contacts on standby to be airlifted by helicopter if needed.
We collected gear like squirrels foraging for winter — headlamps, water-purification pills, petrol cookers, thermal liners, inflatable pillows and insect repellent. Our meals lay in boxes in our apartments, built on top of one another like Lego blocks. The maps of the river became our wallpaper, filling the dining room with the highlighted puzzle pieces of the snaking Kei River.
Finally, we began. On average, we carried a load of between 20kg and 26kg. We’d arranged to have our food dropped off by family or friends every six days. This allowed us to eat our way through a weight of six days at a time, instead of 30. Dried fruit, nuts, crackers, soup mix, peanut butter, soya mince and two-minute noodles would become our manna over the coming weeks.
When family or friends met us at a drop off, they stumbled, vicariously, into our stories of helping farmers chase poachers at night, the cramps in our backs, the experience of attempting to explain our vegetarian diets to abattoir owners …
We would try to sell our food supplies to one another like doorto-door salesmen in an attempt to lighten our backpacks (“Have you tried these nuts? Absolutely delicious and incredibly high in protein!” The usual response: “I would love to try some nuts, but I must recommend this kilogram of dates, an incredible energy source for the uphill coming up”).
We set off, feeling the backpack straps rub derisively against hip bones, a foreshadowing of bruises to come.
As we walked, we collected water samples from source to mouth in small vials the size of paperclips. Adam West of the UCT Botany department and Kevin Winter of the Environmental Science department at UCT agreed to analyse the water content when we returned. We also measured the PH levels, electro-conductivity and temperature along the way.
With time, we realised that the conversations we had with the people were like samples too, telling a social story of complex racial and historical relations.
Each day would begin with the sun’s rays hitting the damp outer lining of the tent, us woken by drops of condensation on our faces.
We would let out the air from our inflatable mattresses, roll up our sleeping bags and pull on our not-so-fresh-smelling hiking gear.
The speed of our packing was inextricably tied to the temperature outside. A layer of frost covering the tent, for example, meant an extra-slow pack up, our corpsecoloured fingers fumbling with zips.
We would eat and set out, uncertain of what the terrain would be like that day, whom we would meet or where we would sleep.
Our second night, for example, found us camping alongside ancient rock art. The long-limbed Bushmen kept us company as with screeches and banging pots we scared off some baboons from atop the cliff. Apparently, they thought rolling rocks down the mountain was a good way of marking their territory. Taking note, we slept
The entire Milky Way had lit up for the occasion and the flickering stars felt like applause
with rocks alongside our tents.
Our seventh night saw us breaking in (with permission from the absent farm manager) to an abandoned hunting house. A slowly fermenting pigeon welcomed us into the kitchen, along with dustcovered, mounted animal heads.
About a week from the end of our expedition, it began to rain. The squelching socks, slippery rocks and spitting rain were enough to dampen our morale. On the advice of a farm manager, we had taken quite a scenic route — wrong and long. We now stumbled, soaked, through damp, yellowing grass that clung to our legs.
Had it not been for Dumile, smiling in his bright-yellow raincoat and guiding us to an abandoned house on the farm on which he worked, we may have turned to prunes in the taunting grass.
And so, we followed the Kei, fingers plotting routes on the map that our legs would later mimic.
We became expert river-crossers. With the sight of an unnavigable path ahead, we would tie our boots to our backpacks, roll up our pants and look for the most friendly-looking rocks to act as our trail.
Always, we would find a route. The river was low enough for us to find a makeshift pathway of rocks every time.
Except once. We knew this day would come. With no rocks in sight, we wrapped what we could in waterproof bags, took a deep breath and flopped like baby ducklings into the river, fully clothed. The cold took our breath away, our toes skimming the sandy river bed.
And so, after all this bundubashing, how is it that we ended up doing our final 20km alongside a highway? One word: Lantana. This alien bush became our nemesis, its serrated branches latched at our bags and skin. Once we had entered a Lantana cave, we were sometimes forced to crawl on all fours to escape its hooked thorns. To follow the river the entire way meant sacrificing ourselves to the Lantana. For that, we would have needed a machete.
Expedition Kei ended on a road that rolled out like a red carpet.
The entire Milky Way had lit up for the occasion and the flickering stars felt like applause from proud parents. Each step took us closer to the point where our beloved Kei merges with the ocean.
In the morning, we dipped our feet in the ocean and took our final water samples.
From behind me I heard snippets of conversation.
“What’s next?” was the last thing I heard before I dived under a wave. — ©