SECTION 1: COMPREHENSION.

Read the passage adapted from A Drink of Dry Land – journeys through Namibia
written
by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit and answer the questions that follow:
Miles from Nowhere….
Looking back on it all, I wonder why we didn’t pack the lounge curtains, the
kitchen sink and the
two cats.
We certainly stuffed everything else into our grey Isuzu diesel bakkie for our two-
month Dry
Lands journey: four kinds of sardines, mussels, pickled fish, candles, five torches,
six kinds of
beans, three dozen two-minute noodle packs, bags of sucky sweets, wine and
sauces of all
descriptions. Two laptops, three cameras, six lenses, a big box full of double
adaptors, USB
leads, batteries, chargers, dusters, a wind-up radio and 100 compact discs. Oh, and
a pack of
playing cards, for the various gin rummy championships along the way.
I had just been reading about the eighteenth-century journeys of flamboyant
Francois le
Vaillant, an adventurous Frenchman who never travelled anywhere without his
baboon, Kees,
hordes of camp followers, wagonloads of exotic condiments, trading tobacco, a
fully stocked
mobile kitchen, 4kg of chocolate, thousands of beads, hundreds of scarves, an
armoury of 15
muskets, a monster of a scimitar and an ostrich feather in his hat.
Maybe some le Vaillant spirit had rubbed off on me. But this was 2004, a year by
which, it may
be said, a substantial amount of travellers’ comforts had been established in
southern Africa,
unlike the late 1780’s. These days there are all manner of filling stations, snack
shops,
department stores, restaurants and yes, even camera stockists, along the way into
the
wilderness. And we weren’t even going into such a wilderness, just a couple of
months of long
tar and gravel travel with plenty of human settlements in between. But it’s fun to
pretend, so
we packed for the expedition as if our very lives depended on it.
We left Jo’burg in the early spring. When we go on long trips, Jules and I always
escape from
the city after dawn on a Sunday. There’s no traffic except for the breakfast-run
Harleys with
their trademark engine growls and shiny merchandising, the lycra-clad bicycle
crowd with their
praying mantis alien bug helmets and the all-night party lot racing from red light to
red light,
their shades barely covering their eyes.
Heading west, we made a detour through the village of Magaliesberg to Koster,
from where we
would drop south towards Lichtenburg. For a few minutes we tracked a hot air
balloon full of
tourists, Brie and champagne as it sailed silently towards the mountains.
Jules and I cut through the Verwoerdian face brick suburbs of Lichtenburg and the
only signs
of life were the vendors waving the Afrikaans Sunday newspaper Rapport in our
faces. The
headline read, “Ai, dis lekker” (Oh, it’s Good). We had just beaten the New
Zealand All Blacks
in a game of rugby and the platteland seemed to glow briefly – with pride.
Lichtenburg, however;
looked like a hollow-cheeked, fever-eyed kind of place to live. Out here it probably
pays to be
tough and to know your way around a mealie and the innards of an old Mercedes
Benz. But these
were just drive-through observations. For all we really knew, the locals were all
gentle, peaceful
and contented citizens.
One thing is for certain. Lictenburg’s most exciting day ever was 13 March 1926.
On that day,
a young farmer called Kobus Voorendyk and his labourer Jan were digging fence-
pole holes,
when Jan suddenly yelled:
“Baas, hier’s ‘n diamant!” (Master, here’s a diamond!)
That discovery sparked off a world-class diamond rush. By the end of the year,
more than
100 000 men were scrabbling in the dirt around Lichtenburg. Such excitement!
Kobus
Voorendyk coined it Big Time. You had to pay him 15% of anything found on his
farm – and you
bought his water. Within months, Kobus’s farm was organised chaos. Church
ministers and
circus performers vied for the hearts and minds of the diggers, you couldn’t see for
all the dust
and in less than ten years more than seven million carats of diamonds had been
excavated from
the area. And then Lichtenburg slumped back into a coma. As far as we could see,
it still
awaited the kiss of a sweet prince – or perhaps a sharp-eyed tourism tout – to bring
it back to
life.
We slid onto the N14 south and entered the North West town of Sannieshof. I’d
been here six
months before with my friend, photographer Les Bush. We saw a shop in
Sannieshof that
displayed an Osama bin Laden T-shirt on a rack outside. This was rather strange,
considering
we were nowhere near his allegedly favourite spot – the north-west territories of
Pakistan.
Les had come to teach me the time-honoured art of bird watching. He had chosen
Barber’s Pan
because it’s an all-year water source and the migrating birds love it here. Little-
known fact:
birds are South Africa’s most exotic foreign tourists. They fly down from Europe,
Russia and
Asia, dodging Spanish hunters and Chinese trappers along the way. En route we
had seen the
Russian-bred lesser kestrels chasing bugs in the mealie lands, perching on
telephone lines and
enjoying the prospect of a gathering storm, which was turning clouds into castles
in the sky. In
the face of persistent organic pollutants, expanding agriculture, devastation of
habitat, hordes
of humans, hunting, acid rain, damming, oil spills, pesticides, fire, electrocutions,
the household
cat, squatter encroachment, avian diseases, commercial fishing, the caged-bird
trade, climate
change, deforestation, drought and invasive aliens, it’s great to know there’s a
place like
Barber’s Pan, where they can rest, congregate and eat in peace.
Now, six months later, Jules and I, passing Barber’s Pan continued our journey
through the
North West Province and headed into the Northern Cape. With Yusuf Islam
(formerly Cat
Stephens) singing Miles form Nowhere on the bakkie tape, we finally drove into
Hotazel. Ever
since I began this insane road-trekking more than 30 years ago, I had wanted to
come to the
Kalahari town with the strange name. A manganese mining town, Hotazel had a
deadly Sunday
afternoon dorpie feel to it. Even the dogs were silent. A sign put up by the local
Combined
School invited us to a performance – later that week – of Ipi Tombi , the “smash
hit musical”.