South Africa

In Namaqualand and at Postberg, in August and September, when the desert turns into a carpet of flowers. Namaqualand lines up parched plains and granite mountains among the driest of south-western Africa; once a year, its expanses are covered with multicoloured wild flowers, survivors of a once-humid coast that became desert fifty million years ago. The same show plays at Postberg, the section of West Coast National Park open to the public in early austral spring: flower beds over dozens of square kilometres, the ocean on one side, rock formations on the other, bonteboks and oryx in between. I brought it back in my story on the power of flowers. I filed that walk among the world’s most beautiful national parks.

I picked Lion’s Head, to look Table Mountain in the face. Table Mountain, 1,086 metres and over 360 million years old, ranks among the world’s oldest mountains; clouds catch on it so often that locals say the tablecloth is laid. A Swiss-designed cable car climbs to the plateau, and the visitor queue with it. By hiking the neighbouring Lion’s Head hill, in full sun, I earned a panoramic view of Table Mountain itself and the whole bay: the only spot where the table can be seen fully set. The wind, ever present, recalls why early explorers spoke of the Cape of Storms. The climb is told in my journey around the Cape peninsula. That route opens the series of my travels across the African continent.

At Boulders Beach, where a colony of 2,200 penguins lives beside a residential area. The formerly named Jackass Penguins deserve the nickname: their call sounds like a donkey’s bray, and 2,200 of them on one beach make a memorable racket. Their black-and-white outfit is camouflage, dark back against predators from the sky, pale belly against those from the deep; and far from clumsy, they dig burrows against the heat, now completed with artificial ones as people moved closer. When I passed, many chicks still wore their down, which is not waterproof. The encounter is in my day from Boulders to Good Hope. The encounter belongs with my wildlife watching around the world.

No: the southernmost point is Cape Agulhas, further south-east. Good Hope, named by Bartolomé Diaz in 1488, is not the dividing line between the Atlantic and Indian oceans either; it remains a dreaded landmark for sailors, at the junction of opposing currents that brew storms. Two kilometres away, Cape Point stacks two lighthouses: the 1860 one, perched at 249 metres and so often drowned in cloud that it proved useless, and the 1911 one, built at 87 metres after the wreck of the Lusitania. A funicular called the Flying Dutchman, after the local ghost-ship legend, climbs to the first. In that cliff scenery I crossed paths with the Cape eland, 600 kilos launched at up to 70 km/h. The headland is in my other African escapades to read.

Leopard mountains, a convicts’ road and the only terroir of rooibos. The Cederberg reserve, Unesco-listed in 2004, raises sandstone formations with strange silhouettes, Elephant Rock first, that blaze orange at sunset; it is also the only region in the world where rooibos grows, the reddish bush that neither the United States, Australia nor China managed to cultivate. Further east, the Swartberg Pass crosses the Little Karoo at 1,600 metres: 24 kilometres traced by Thomas Bain and 240 prisoners, opened in January 1888. And in Oudtshoorn, world capital of the ostrich, one 1.6-kilo egg equals 27 hen’s eggs. The detail is in my detour through ostrich country. The journey then heads into my crossing of the Cederberg in bloom.

Like a sea of red sand whose emptiness is a grand illusion. The Kalahari, from « kgalagadi », the great thirst, spreads 900,000 km² between the Zambezi and the Orange; wildlife roams freely across borders. On the sand strides the kori bustard, the heaviest flying bird in the world, and leaps the springbok, whose name means the jumping goat, head down and legs stiff. Meerkats and yellow mongooses keep watch, the black-backed jackal runs its prey to exhaustion, and at dusk I shared the horizon with a cheetah, then a lioness and her two cubs, sole company for kilometres around. Just before, the Augrabies falls hurl the Orange river 56 metres into the gorge it has carved. It is all in my objective dune in the Kalahari. That dune has its place among my journeys through the world’s deserts.