Solitaire

a travel novel by Ton van der Lee

Brief Synopsis

'I live under a tree in a dry riverbed. All around me, the barren wastes of the Namib desert stretch away into the shimmering distance. I sleep on a mattress in the sand. Around my bed I have made a circle of rocks and branches to frighten off the scorpions and the snakes. I don't know if it works.'

When film producer Ton van der Lee sells his successful business and leaves Amsterdam for Africa, his friends and colleagues are shocked.

Everyone dreams of leaving everything behind, of getting out of the rat race and starting all over again in a strange place, but no one ever really does it.

Ton ends up in Solitaire, a tiny village at a remote junction of dirt tracks in the middle of the Namib Desert. It is inhabited by Peter, the owner of Solitaire and the derelict farm surrounding it. His only company are Moose, his hard drinking brother-in-law, and the jackals that howl in the night.

Here, Ton sets up his camp. He hunts springbok for food, makes long treks into the desert, and listens to the heartbeat of the earth. He feels at home. With Solitaire as his base, he travels to the Kalahari desert, the holy hills of the Bushmen, the Okavango Delta, and the land of the mysterious Himba people.

Then, an enthusiastic article appears in the Lonely Planet travel guide about the primitive restaurant he has started at Solitaire. The tourists start pouring in.

The downfall of his paradise becomes inevitable.

Themes of the book

Solitaire is concerned with a number of themes.

First of all, there is the growing desire among western career people to get out of the rat race, to leave all that stress behind and start a radically different life somewhere far away. In this sense, it is a reflection on the dangers of burn out.

Secondly, the book is concerned with the main character's search for spirituality. Ton is certainly no 'new age' type, but he believes that in the west, our connection with the earth has been lost. He finds it in the desert. The irony of the book is, that he ends up by spoiling the idyllic place he has found.

Thirdly, this is an adventurous travel book. Ton travels through South Africa, and finds his ideal place in the remote Namib desert. We learn a great deal about the wildlife, the landscapes, and the customs of the various peoples he encounters. Once he is based in Solitaire he undertakes extensive travels to the Kalahari, to the Tsodilo Hills, which is the main holy place of the Bushmen, and to Botswana, where he visits the green Okavango Delta, which some people have called the last paradise on earth. Finally he travels to the remote Kaokoveld, a huge and isolated area of north western Namibia, in search of the rare desert elephant, the famous White Lady rock paintings, and the elusive Himba tribe, perhaps the last people in Africa who still live completely traditionally.

Finally, the book is concerned with the current situation in southern Africa, sketching an up to date image of politics, race relations, economics, tourism and ecology.

Excerpt from chapter 3

I live under a tree in a dry riverbed. The three buildings that make up the village of Solitaire are a mile away. Peter, the owner of Solitaire and the surrounding desert, lets me camp here. He has lived at this remote junction of dirt tracks in the middle of the Namib Desert for years. His only company are Moose, his brother-in-law, and the jackals that howl in the night.His wife ran away with the kids. She lives in the capital, where she owns a small shop that sells bridal clothes. Once a year, at Christmas, she comes round.

Peter and Moose live off the shop and the petrol pump. Solitaire is the first stop after Walvis Bay, 180 miles to the north. In between there is nothing, absolutely nothing, except barren desert. People have no choice, they have to fill up here. The next town down the road has twenty houses, and is almost 200 miles away. The shop sells canned food, beer and liquor, strips of zebra meat (shot and dried by Peter), and homemade bread, the specialty of Moose.

Solitaire is always open. Our or five cars pass by every day. You can see them coming for miles because of the dustclouds. The two men sit on the old, creaking veranda all day and watch the mountains in the distance. I slept in the kitchen behind the shop for a while. Moose sleeps in a cabin next to the generator, which is usually broken. Peter lives in a small house made of corrugated iron, by the well.

The kitchen floor became too hard for me so I moved to an enormous camelthorn tree on the bank of a bone dry river. It comes out of the mountains in the east, winds its way through the plains, and somewhere in the west it must reach the hills I call the Three Sisters. The mountains here have no names, except in the language of the wandering Nama, which nobody understands, and is impossible to pronounce with its strange clicks.

I'm very happy with my camp. The river sand is soft and white. Between the banks there is a microclimate. There are a lot of bushes and plants, yesterday I counted twelve different ones that were flowering. It almost never rains in this desert, but there is a heavy dew every night. The animals and the plants have adapted. There is a lizard here that climbs up on the edge of a dune at dawn and unfolds a specialised collar. The dewdrops are caught in the collar and roll straight down into its mouth. There are lots of insects and small animals. I see their tracks in the sand every morning. There are burrows of earth wolves in the riverbanks nearby. At night I hear them sniffing around, rustling through the undergrowth.

The tree provides me with a pleasant shade. It is January and in the daytime it gets very hot, up to 40 degrees. I sleep on a mattress in the sand. Around my bed I have made a circle of rocks and branches, and I have dug out a shallow moat in the sand, to frighten off the scorpions and the snakes. I donÕt know if it works. Towards dusk I make a small fire and stare at the sun going down between the Three Sisters, somewhere far away where the cold South Atlantic Ocean breaks on the desert beach. It's a magnificent spectacle, and it is different every day, orchestrated flawlessly by an invisible director for my pleasure.

I go to bed early and get up at dawn. The tree also shelters me from the cold dew. Usually, I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I put on my slippers and walk up the river bed, by the light of the moon I watch for scorpions I might step on, they stand out black against the white sand. I take a pee, look up at the enormous sky full of white shiny stars and feel happy. I think I've found my place. I'm not quite sure yet, but I do get the feeling that I'd like to stay here, in this beautiful, virgin desert, where nature is untainted, where tourism has not reached yet, and where the spirit of mother earth hovers over the plains.

When I stand there and look up at the sky I feel the spirituality I was looking for all around me. I suddenly understand the people who say that the earth is one big, living organism. I'd like to include the sky and the stars, too, because it all feels like a logical, organic whole that could not have been different, that is perfect in itself. I can almost hear the creature breathe. How can it be that I had lost every inkling of its existence, back in Amsterdam. Almost lost, I should say, I remembered enough to go and look for it.

This is how our ancestors must have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, in harmony with nature, a part of it. Romantic feelings, which are interrupted roughly when the diesel pump by the waterhole roars into life at six in the morning and tears the pristine desert silence to pieces. Fortunately it only takes half an hour to pump up enough water for the rest of the day.

Today was very hot. Little fluffy clouds have been hovering around the mountain tops for some days now, they move around but nothing much happens. Moose talks of rain with an excited expression on his fat, shiny face. But there has been no rain here for the past eight years, not a drop.

At the end of the afternoon it gets a little cooler. I go for a walk with the dogs. They're already waiting for me. With my arrival, a new type of human being has appeared into their lives: someone who doesn't kick them, beat them or throws empty cans, but talks to them, strokes them, and, best of all, goes for walks with them, for hours and hours. I have a stick to beat off snakes ( I doubt whether a stick is effective against puff adders, spitting cobra's and zebra snakes, but itÕs nice to swing it while I walk), a cap, a bottle of Windhoek beer in my shorts, and I wear high walking shoes against the spiky bushes.

The track to the west peters out after a few hundred meters, at the pile of bottles and cans, tangled masses of rusty wire, car wrecks and useless wood by the old well. I walk westward, across the plain which is covered in short brown grass. In the distance I see the Three Sisters, and much further away I can see the low chain of mountains I call Tibet. The sky is intensely blue. The four dogs are running ahead of me, the two biggest ones soon dwindle to tiny dots that move around me in enormous circles. They smell earth wolves, mongoose and other burrowing animals, and hunt them in vain. Sometimes they start to dig up a burrow, but after a few minutes they look at me helplessly with their snouts full of sand, shake their heads dumbly and run off again, in search of the next exciting smell.

In the distance I see a herd of springbok that has not noticed us yet. They have turned their brown backs towards us and are grazing calmly. Scampi has run far ahead of me, he's already seen them. I stop and watch anxiously. As usual, IÕm afraid that the herd will notice the dogs too late. But then the leader pricks up its ears, looks around and takes off with elegant bounds. The whole herd of maybe thirty animals follows. TheyÕre not in a hurry, they do not need the giant leaps of fifteen or more feet they make at full speed to stay ahead of the dogs.

A little later the two big dogs, Scampi and Lily, are back and look at me shamefaced. The two small ones have not even noticed their fruitless hunt, they've been rooting around in an abandoned mongoose hill. I give Scampi a pat on the back and theyÕre off again.

An hour later we find ourselves in very different terrain. Here, the sand is coarse and the ground is crisscrossed by old channels. Bushes with leathery leaves and long, spiky thorns grow everywhere. The dogs are far ahead, except for Ghost, a bastard terrier, the smallest and fiercest of them all. I can hear them barking excitedly in the distance. When they haven't come back after ten minutes, I begin to wonder whether something's the matter. They're barking very nervously, and very intensely. With Ghost at my heels I hurry towards the sound. I scale a low hill and see the three dogs running in circles around a big dead thornbush, barking like maniacs.

A young springbok has become entangled in the bush. Panting with fear, the animals struggles in the thorny branches. The dogs make brief sallies and fall back again. They don't need to be afraid, for the young animal is defenceless, but apparently they dare not go in for the kill. I push my way into the bush and try to pull the branches apart. The antilope begins to moan and shiver, it looks like it will die of pure fear. While I am tearing my skin on the branches and try to pull the thorns out of its fur, which is sodden with sweat and saliva, a white blur flashes past me, and Ghost is at the throat of the animal. He growls and grunts, the springbok shrieks with fear, hot blood spouts all over my bare legs. Now the other dogs pounce as well, and a few seconds later, I hear the animalÕs death rattle. It slumps to the ground and the dogs look at me triumphantly.

My city heart is deeply shocked, and with shaking legs I look at the dead buck. I sit down and open my bottle of beer, while the dogs sit down in a circle and watch me expectantly. Finally, I hoist the lifeless carcass up on my shoulders, and with blood streaming down my chest and back, I begin to walk. Tonight we're having springbok steak.

The clouds over the mountains have been moving around ineffectively for several days. Until this morning. They began to mass and turned grey, a hot wind blew clouds of red dust across the plains, and suddenly a few fat drops fell on the powdery dirt. A few at first, then a downpour. It lasted for an hour. Then it was suddenly dry again. In the mountains it must have rained much harder. This is the first rain in eight years. Moose is very excited, he says we should go and wait at the river bed, he thinks the water will come soon. He has seen it before, when he arrived from Zambia, ten years ago.

We put the padlock on the door of the shop, although no one has passed in the last two days, and get into PeterÕs ancient pick up truck to drive to the place where the old river bed crosses the dirt road. Moose sits down on a flat rock under a huge old camelthorn. He pulls out a can of Holsten. It's twelve oÕclock and he's already a little drunk. 'I should clear my camp', I say, 'if thereÕs really going to be a flashflood'. 'WeÕll make it', Moose says.

I hear a rumbling sound in the distance. 'There it is', says Moose. A huge brown wave is washing towards us, faster than IÕd thought possible. It roars past, carrying branches, uprooted shrubs and a dead jackal. The water is dirty, it bubbles and hisses. I'm worried about my camp, two miles away, in the bed of this same river. I jump into the pick up truck and start it while Moose scrambles into the back, laughing. Dodging bushes and trees, skidding in the sand, I drive to my tree as fast as I can. I can see it in the distance, but I have no idea how fast the flashflood moves.

When we arrive at the camp it's deceptively quiet. The sun is shining, bees are hovering around a flowering bush, the wind rustles through the leaves of the tree. I jump out of the car, run into the riverbed, and start throwing my stuff up on the bank. It's not that much, really. I've just finished by saving my cooking gear when Moose puts up his finger. The water is coming. I pull myself up by a large root and see the wave coming, a little smaller now, it seems. A few minutes later itÕs all over. The river dries up into a tiny stream, which sinks into the sand without a trace before Moose has finished his next beer. He throws the can into a bush and nods with satisfaction. 'YouÕll be surprised tomorrow, you should go climb the koppie '.

At dawn I am woken up by the sun as usual. The camel thorn branches are motionless above my head. Fat drops of dew are covering my blanket. That's new. I get up and see that the sand is moist. The dew must have been much heavier than usual, probably because of yesterday's rain. When I arrive at the kitchen after a twenty minute walk Peter is already eating a springbok steak with fried eggs. His enormous belly is bulging over his threadbare shorts. He greets me sleepily and concentrates on his meat. I look in the oven and pull out one of the loaves we baked yesterday.

After breakfast I fill a bottle with water, get my walking stick and whistle for the dogs. We head for the koppie, the round hill rising in the middle of the plain, not far from the junction. Everything is further away than it seems in the crystal clear air of the Namib desert. It takes me an hour to get to the base of the koppie. I begin to climb across the black boulders. A puff adder is sunning itself on a big flat rock. Lily begins to bark nervously, and I freeze. It's a large specimen, at least two metres long, and a thick as my wrist behind its small, wedge shaped head. The scaly body is marked with perfectly symmetrical, brown and white zigzags. The puff adder gives no sign that it has noticed us. That's what makes it so dangerous. All other snakes take off when they hear something big approaching, or rather feel, because snakes are deaf. Except for the puff adder. It will stay put in the middle of a track and strike in cold blood when man or animal gets too close. I watch the adder motionlessly. All the dogs are barking now. Slowly I walk backwards, without turning, feeling behind me with my stick and hoping I wonÕt stumble on a loose rock. When I'm three metres away, the adder has not moved. I relax a little, turn and climb up quickly on the other side. My hands are trembling.

At the top of the koppie I look around and hold my breath. There's a bright green haze all over the brown desert plains, everywhere plants and grasses have started to spring up. Seeds that have lain dormant in the ground for years are sprouting in a frantic hurry to grow and mature before this rare supply of moisture dries up. That is why the Namib desert dons its green robes within a few hours after the rain.

A narrow, worn track runs right across the summit of the hill. I have crossed it a few times on the way up. Later, Moose will tell me it's a zebra trail. The mountain zebra's of Namibia, which have been named Hartmann zebra after their discoverer, like to survey their domain from high places. At the same time, the trails are migratory routes, and they enable the zebra to take flight quickly from their natural enemies such as the leopard, which is ill at ease in treeless surroundings.

On the way down I find a baboon skull. It's lying on a ridge, watching me calmly, bleached perfectly by years of sun and wind, with a little help from the insects and worms. I take it with me and put it on the shelf in the shop, between the giant dried lizard and the propellor of a microlite that crashed here a few years back. Moose is on his third beer. He nods at me. 'Beautiful, isn't it', he says, and takes a gulp. 'I love the Namib. IÕm never going to leave'.

Ton van der Lee, september 2000