Day 12: Into the lair of the Fearsome Face-Eater: Palmwag to Torra Conservancy
So much had happened on this trip already that it kind of felt like we were done, even though we had most of a week still to go. When planning the route I’d kind of run out of steam a bit at Palmwag. There was Desolation Valley to come, but that didn’t sound very appealing at all, after suffering through the beastly furnace of the day before.
Camel had climbed into my tent during the night. As you would have noticed in the previous pictures, his had a slight little hole or two after being jammed into his back wheel at 70kph, and when the mozzies kicked off their assault in the middle of the night he gave up and crammed in with me. Two 6’2”-plus beasts in the most miniature ‘two man’ hiking tent ain’t fun, I can tell you! By dawn I was desperate to escape, so I left him to it and went for a walk. This is what I found:
This is the walkway to the bar, right where I’d seen the ellie yesterday, and clearly he’d been in to cause some havoc overnight.
Apparently there had also been a bit of a bar fight. You never know, with a room full of drunk german tourists. I saw some camp staff and told them what had happened. Um… no! That was actually a juvenile male leopard who’d taken a particular liking to messing up their bar overnight. Apparently he’s particularly partial to this handily placed tree branch, and despises the wall clock, cause he’s already wrecked that:
We know this because he appears on the nightly CCTV feed! Hilarious. I was super keen to see the footage, but unfortunately the office was too busy. Not your average Protea Hotel on the Square, is it?
We had a super hearty English breakfast and lounged around, waiting for English to arrive. Eventually the DRZ roared into view, a triumphant Thomas bearing cash, and aboard a fully functioning motorcycle. Well, sort of, at least. The young man is prone to the irresistible temptations of a bargain, and when the bike was overheating about a year back, he bought an old second hand fan at Craig’s Used Parts and had it fitted at some dodgy backyard mechanic on Voortrekker Road. The blades of the fan were now hitting the radiator, and sliced open a nice cut in the fins at the back. Lovely.
Anyway, fan was chucked and radiator was now plastered closed with some kind of gummy sealant that would hopefully get us home. I’m prepared to lay serious money that’s exactly how it still is next time we go riding together.
We immediately loaded up and left before anything else could go wrong.
I was hoping we could head west again into the Achab river area, but I had a chat to the son of the owner of Palmwag Lodge and apparently the veterinary gate at the Wereldsend airstrip is permanently locked. That blank section on the map is is a rhino research area, and I’m sure they are understandably jumpy about people travelling through there. He said he’d only been down there once in all the time he’d been at Palmwag.
So it was back on the C43 to Bersig and then we hooked a right and headed for the very rough track through the Torra Conservancy. Literally as we turned off the road into the grasslands I made a really nasty discovery - I’d failed to do up my sleep roll bag super tight and it had dropped down and burnt a hole on the exhaust pipe. ****. ****. Bugger. BUGGER!!!!!! For all the wonder of Rox Straps, they do loosen progressively over rough ground, and mine had slipped just enough to allow the roll bag to drop down a few centimetres and melt through.
I was immediately in a super foul mood. Six weeks before we departed I tore a shoulder tendon at the Impi enduro, and it had been giving me a world of trouble. I was hocked up to the eyeballs on cortisone, which made riding bearable, but at night it aches and pains deep in the joint and makes sleeping terribly uncomfortable.
I’d already had one night’s poor sleep due to my nocturnal visitor, and going without sleep on a trip like this really messes with my vibe. A man needs his nap… and with my sleeping mat smouldered to smithereens I had severe doubts I’d now be getting any the next few nights.
It was my worst afternoon of the trip. I was deep in a horrible fog, and couldn’t get my head out of it. Furious with myself for not having triple checked the straps, and generally just being a bit of a SOB. In sympathy at my predicament, Tom’s bike threw a hissy fit and finally sheered the soldered ball right off the end of the clutch cable. Trust a bike to kick you when you’re down.
A furious mechanic is a great mechanic… I grabbed a hose clamp, jammed the sodding bloody cable into the mechanism, and clamped it down tight. Squashed it flat and instructed the damn thing to behave itself. It worked!!
It’s a shame I was moping through the mist curtain of misery, because the terrain was utterly unlike anything we’d seen before. Golden grasses covering the rocky ground in a rich matt, waving slowly in the afternoon breeze and lending a whimsical charm to the place.
We startled a small herd of zebra, and then minutes later my companions saw first a couple of jackal and then one of the sightings of the trip - the hunched over, lumbering figure of a massive old face-eater, scowling as the trundled off with his lop-sided lope. Unfortunately I missed him.
Mostly I was keeping my eye on the ground. Anything not to be sleeping on stones. Eventually we happened on a nice river bed and I dismounted immediately and declared the day over.
As we set up camp I made a bizarre discovery. My pillow and mat had been rolled up tight, and burned through in just on area - for a row of holes.
Astoundingly they both seemed that they might be holding air, which brightened my mood considerably. There were a hell of a lot of game signs everywhere, and a quick reconnoitre of our campsite revealed these two:
I’m pretty sure the first one is a rhino midden. The other? God alone knows. It looks like the lair of an elephant-size face eater! The camp descended into a scene of mild panic. This was definitely the night we felt most vulnerable on the trip. Far too much had already gone wrong, and that face-eater was definitely not a good sign. We parked the tents right up against each other, and in a somewhat pitiful attempt at security, surrounded them with bikes and an utterly ridiculous attempt at a Himba kraal.
It was going to be a extremely fitful night’s sleep, that is for sure!
eepwall: 
