MOLOPO SURPRISE
This remote reserve on the Botswana border has an extreme climate, undrinkable water — and delightful isolation, writes Gigi Gottwald
F OR most of the year, the blackthorn acacia is just another of South Africa’s many thorny acacias, but for one brief week in early spring, its masses of creamy-white powder-puff blossoms transform it into a sweetly-scented cloud.
As luck would have it, when we visited Molopo Game Reserve in North West for a few days of camping, blackthorns were flowering in profusion, and when the fierce golden sun went down behind the camel thorn trees, the silver full moon rising almost simultaneously in the palelilac sky turned the arid landscape into a fairy garden of blooms.
The 24 000ha reserve on the Botswana border is remote, the facilities poor, the water undrinkable and the climate extreme, so it’s not exactly overrun by tourists. We found only two other parties of campers, and they were camping so far from us they were out of sight and out of earshot. It felt as though we had the place to ourselves. Our only visitors were birds that flocked to the shallow dish of water we put out for them: mostly sparrows (great, Cape and grey-headed), chat flycatchers, Kalahari scrub robins, glossy starlings and a crimson-breasted shrike.
Late at night, from a hide overlooking a water hole, we watched eland and zebra coming down to drink; the eland stately and dignified, the frisky zebra merrily frolicking in the moonlight. Other than at the water holes, we did not see a lot of game and the animals we did see seemed particularly shy and nervous. My guess is that there is a fair amount of poaching going on. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to have a main road to a border-post running through a game reserve.
There are none of the Big Five which means one can walk around everywhere. Nor were we the only walkers. Imprinted all over the sand were fine seams of tiny spoor, made by birds, mice, millipedes, geckoes, ground squirrels … who knows? They are the hieroglyphs of the wilderness, and I for one can only read a very few of them.
As the day’s heat began to lessen, with the last rays of the sinking sun still burning our shoulders, we’d walk into the gathering darkness along the white sandroad with a yammering chorus of jackal going up in the distance and somewhere a Mozambique nightjar beginning its monotonous buzzing. From all sides we’d hear Barking Gecko calling out their fivesyllable invitation to any passing female: “Tick tick tick tick tick! Come and be my bride!” We never managed to see any of them, they are that well camouflaged. And always the perfume of the blackthorn enveloped us. That is what I’ll remember about Molopo, that and the showers.
Those two masterpieces of modern plumbing were housed in two enormous drums with a “donkey” arrangement on the outside to heat the water. The hot water was a welcome luxury on a cold evening. Inside each drum there was a single hook on which one could hang towel, clothes, toiletry bag, watch, glasses and headlamp. Alternatively, one could leave things on the rather gritty floor. It didn’t really matter where one put what: everything would get soaked anyway.
The trouble with a headlamp hanging on a hook is that it shines downwards and illuminates only a small patch of floor directly below. So one actually showered in near-darkness, with the soap clamped between one’s teeth seeing that there was no soap-holder. This gave the phrase “foaming at the mouth” a new meaning.
Every so often, a gust of wind would blow the door wide open. That was rather unpleasant, because although I am not particularly shy to have a passing wildebeest gaze upon my naked form, the icy wind would blast me with needle-sharp sand — greetings from the Kalahari.
One evening, the Man called me over to his tank to see the shower companion he had discovered in the feeble light of his headlamp: on the floor sat a scorpion. I sprinted for my camera but by the time I returned the scorpion was already making a hasty getaway through a chink at the bottom of the drum. I never got a decent picture. But the Man has a new name now: “Showers-With-Scorpions”!