The itinerary said we were going on a walk across the veld with Lita Cole, Kamieskroon-born self-taught Namaqualand botanist.
So we laced up our walking boots and set off, stomp stomp stomp, across the rocks and little low bushes and vaal terrain. We hadn’t gone more than about 100m from the camp when Lita stopped, pointed out some impossibly small plant, and told us why it was important. Two metres away was another one, a little smaller than my pinkie, but this one was in bloom.
The little pink flower – Crassula columnaris – could barely be seen with the naked eye. So we all got down on our knees and peered at it – this walk demanded reading glasses rather than binoculars.
“They bloom once every 10 years, and then they die,” Lita said.
Five minutes before we’d been crunching carelessly across the landscape, now there we were, this bunch of city people in our stout hiking boots, doing a little tippy-toed dance, trying to step only on the rocks and stony bits between the plants. I mean, who wants to crush a plant a little smaller than my pinkie that has been gearing up to bloom for the past 10 years?
Namaqualand is like that. It starts off as this great drab stretch of nothing very much, and then you notice something, and another one, a pink one, a purple one, a yellow one and a whole bunch of little white ones, and you’re charmed.
Of course people do not, as a rule, drive from Cape Town for around six hours to see tiny flowers, however perfectly formed they might be. They go to Namaqualand in the spring to see great sheets of colour, orange and white and magenta. They tend not to go to Namaqualand in winter, not unless they have to.
However, we had been invited to the Namaqualand National Park well before flower season to test a new concept: a luxury tented camp beside the beach on Koringkorrelbaai, a long crescent of white sand, between the Groen and Bitter rivers. You might never have heard of Koringkorrelbaai, but it’s had its measure of fame: it’s where the South African Olympic boxer and Nazi supporter Robey Leibrandt landed in 1941, during World War II, to launch a campaign to overthrow Prime Minister Jan Smuts. He was later captured, sentenced to death, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and was released in 1948 by the newly victorious National Government.
And why Koringkorrelbaai? Well, it’s to do with someone who nearly drowned there, was rescued and thumped on the back until he threw up. He’d had mielies for lunch.
The camp is run by a company called Chief’s Camp, which sets up luxury mobile camps wherever anyone might want one – river beds, deserts, the middle of Namaqualand. They bring in everything, from diesel to run the generators to firewood, water, wine and food. Oh, and smart two-person tents, each with electric blankets and its own chemical loo and hot shower.
There is also a lounge tent and a dining tent, both of which have cunning openings that can be moved about depending on the wind. The food is excellent, the wine generous, the blazing fires warm the cockles of your heart, and at night the sound of the sea soothes you to sleep.
The idea, a joint venture between SANParks and Chief’s Camp, is to set up a two-month camp in August and September for flower lovers. People on the flower trail will be able to spend two or three nights at the camp.
The coastal section of the Namaqualand National Park, which stretches about 50km from the Groen River to the Spoeg River – and is known, to the sorrow of park manager Bernard de Lente as the park’s Groen Spoeg region – is minimalist but gorgeous. In the right season of course there are its well-known sheets of flowers, but even when we went in late May there was stuff to see – such as tiny flowers; a Cape fur seal colony; the remarkable molten-looking caves at the Spoeg River mouth, which contain the oldest evidence of domestic sheep in South Africa, dating back an astonishing 2 000 years; the shifting sands that according to De Lente make up the only remaining fully functioning mobile dune system in the country;animals – meerkats, gemsbok, red hartebees, caracals and leopards – and birds. Then there is just the space – hectares and hectares of beach and land and sky and stars and very little else.
Until recently this stretch of the park belonged to De Beers and was off limits to almost everyone, so that apart from the odd diamond digging trench is still visible, the area seems pristine to the untrained eye, although De Lente said it wasn’t. Once the beaches were like four-lane highways, which meant the death of many endangered oyster catchers, but no more.
Last flower season, a London friend and I travelled up the length of Namaqualand looking for sheets of flowers. But due to a lack of rain in the crucial winter months it was a poor season, and while we came across the odd tablecloth spread of flowers and several pocket handkerchiefs, sheets of the kind photographed for travel brochures were nowhere to be seen.
And now the cleverness of setting up a beach camp becomes apparent. Most of the plants that grow along the coast depend on sea mists to keep them watered.
Even when there is no rain, an astonishing amount of water can collect on the flysheet of your tent during an overnight mist, as we discovered.
So even if it’s not a good Namaqualand season, you can be almost guaranteed a good display of flowers in the Groen Spoeg region, flowers that, unlike the modest Crassula columnaris, dazzle the eye in their sheer plenitude.
p For more information on the Namaqua Flowers Beach Camp call SANParks central reservations on 012 428 9111, e-mail reservations@sanparks.org or see www.sanparks.org. The camp will operate from August 1 until September 30, and bookings will be available for two or three nights.
If arid parks are your thing, SANParks has published a splendid book called The Arid Parks – Captured Experiences, compiled by Steve Newbould and Henriette Engelbrecht.
It is a collection of photographs taken by visitors to SANParks’s arid parks, which include the Namaqua National Park, Kgalagadi, Richtersveld, Augrabies, Tankwa Karoo and Mokala, near Kimberley. - Weekend Argus