Namaqualand

Friday, we got on the tour bus at 8:00 a.m. for our new adventure. To see the flowers, it must be sunny and hot — or at least not cold. In Cape Town and all along the route it was quite overcast and cold; we were fearing the worst. But our hosts, Mike and Marne (read with an accent over the e), entertained us with stories about the area and swore that, indeed, we WOULD see flowers before the time was up. Sandy, as you know, I take that black jacket you got me on every trip — it is my salvation from the cold! But I was wishing I’d brought my jeans and a warm scarf for sure. I’ve already forgotten a lot (OK, most) of what they told us, but a few things stand out. Marne is very funny, with a great dry humor. We have now had perhaps the best lamb (Karoo lamb; we’ve already told you about that!  They eat “herbs”, a seemingly generic term, not as we know it) pie in South Africa, as promised.  We started seeing flowers around Clan William, I think.  We stopped for a while at what must be the last shoe factory in the Western Cape. The whole operation is financially marginal, but a bunch of workers are employed. I bought a very nice pair of “Fellies” — which is how your generally pronounce the proper word for shoes which is “Velkskoens.” We continued until pretty late in the day and ended up in Vanrhynsdorp (pronouned von rains dorp). The map is in Marita’s car, so we are a little uncertain as to spelling.

Here’s one of the important things we learned:  As background, there is a cheap store in SA called “Pep store” — ubiquitous.  It’s kinda like a Dollar General in the US.  Anyway, Marne told us that there are three types of living places:  a plekkie, which is a “place”, just a settlement of some houses, maybe a garage.  But it doesn’t have a Pep store.  A dorp is a town and how you know it is a town is that it has a Pep store.  A city, on the other hand, has a Pep store AND a KFC!  If it has one without the other, it’s not a city; if the KFC is outside of town, it’s not a city.  She has written the president of South Africa asking that, along with their zeal of renaming things, that all the places with plek or dorp in their names but don’t meet the definition above be renamed.  So far she has not received an answer to her plea.  Where we stayed is a dorp, per its name, because it has a Pep store, at which Laird bought me a t-shirt for sleeping (I forgot mine in Cape Town), all for R49 — or about $3.00, but no KFC. At one point on Monday, one of the Afrikaner women made a special point of telling us that the PEP/KFC definition was “tongue-in-cheek,” and had no official validity. I assured her we understood. Afrikaners seem to us to love a good story or joke more than most other groups we ever hang out with.

We stayed in a very old hotel owned by Mike’s sister and brother-in-law.  We had DELICIOUS country-style food for dinner each night.  They even made tongue on Sunday night that was good and normally I hate tongue.  Breakfast was pretty much regular breakfast stuff.  For lunches, we had picnics in an interesting place wherever we were that day.  The food was Fantastakie, as they say (but may not spell),  all made by the wonderful kitchen crew at the hotel.

How to describe the flowers????  Words pale before their beauty, their thousands of varieties, their innumerable strumpet ways to attract pollinators!  Laird will work on getting the pics ready to post.  There are over three THOUSAND varieties of flowers, more than half of which occur only there in Namaqualand.  OF COURSE the names were in Afrikaans!  Of course we couldn’t keep them in our minds!  Many times we heard Mike say, “there’s Pig Snot over there”.  So we have decided to just call them all Pig Snot.  Actually, for some reason we did not understand, pig parts feature prominently in Namaqualand flower names.  One flower, that looks like Star of Bethlehem, is called Chittering Cheese (or some version that sounds like chittering — but definitely I heard cheese; what a terribly inelegant name for such a beautiful flower!)

YES!  Those great swaths of orange or yellow or white that you see when you google Namaqualand flowers are real.  We didn’t see them until Sunday, but when we did, we stood in awe and our hearts soared at the sights!  Friday and Saturday, we saw mostly very tiny flowers spread out.  The land is unbelievably inhospitable in the summer — temperatures in excess of 115 F!  And NO rain.  Only winter rains, and if it doesn’t rain enough then, the flowers don’t open come spring.  The annual rainfall is about two and one-half inches of rain a year — or that’s what we think they said.  Yikes!  Makes New Mexico look like the tropics!  Actually, there is a similarity in landscape except even with so little rain there are more bushes, but virtually no trees.  For all of you folks on Facebook, go to Toere Namakwa to see beautiful pictures while you’re waiting for us to post.  If you aren’t on Facebook, you can go without having an account by, I believe, going to http://www.facebook.com/toerenamakwa (not sure if that is one or two words; try both.  Also try namakwatoere (again one or two) if the other doesn’t work.  It’s well worth the effort.

On Saturday, we went to a quiver tree forest — google them, too.  Amazing sight, even though they had already bloomed and were in “shut-down” mode.  They are tree aloes and I SO want one!  Sandy, you will, too, when you see them!  They are named quiver trees because the Khoi-san made arrow quivers from them because without their water, they weigh almost nothing.  Interesting thing about them:  when the summer is intolerably hot and they have used up almost all their water reserves, they amputate their own arms to conserve what little water they still have.  Isn’t that gruesome?  Baboons, the bane of flora and farmers all over South Africa, like to eat quiver trees for their water.  Namaqualand is definitely a dog-eat-dog world!

Look on a map, if you can, for Nieuwoudtville. It’s in the Northern Cape, a little ways north of the Western Cape boundary. We got off the N7 road onto a gravel road and drove for about 45 minutes in a very sere landscape. All of a sudden, we crested a hill and the flowers smacked us in the eyes. As Jonelle wrote earlier, it is almost unbelievable, because it is so like the pictures in ads for Namaqualand tours. The only thing lacking was a gemsbok or a bontebok chewing on the flowers. I guess there really isn’t enough water for a profusion of buck. I asked our driver to tell the story of “why here?” What he said was that the flowers are self-seeding annuals. When this year’s seed has set and dropped, the sheep are then let into the field to graze. The following spring, the farmers lightly plow the field and that encourages the flowers to germinate and grow. If there has been little water, the germination rate is low. But following adequate moisture at the right time, the seeds sprout and they get a carpet of color.

I took a bunch(!) of pics, but the pics are flat and 2-D, whereas the reality is magical and 3-D. I’m hoping to use software to stitch together several individual pics into a panorama. This may give you all a sense of what it was like to tiptoe through the Namaqualand flowers.

Our guides — both Mike and Marné – are near as dammit botanists. And linguists. Imagine knowing scientific names, Afrikaans names and some English names of several thousand flowers.

We’ll bring this to a close. We drove in from Capetown today. We left Capetown at 9:30 and didn’t get to Dana bay until 5:30 pm. Ordinarily, it’s a four-hour drive, but we made several stops and were caught at road construction projects. But still, we don’t really understand how it took us 8 hours to make a four hour trip.

More tomorrow, with pictures.