Damaraland is certainly a large area - 18 000 square miles — and it is definitely in a hot region. Current temperature is 31 degrees Celcious. But where I had expected lunar landscapes speckled with the occasional succulent, there are rolling hills swathed in softly wafting grass.
Where I had imagined blue skies untroubled by a single cloud, there are cumulonimbus boiling overhead and thick sheets of rain barrelling across the horizon. I had pictured a world that had no ambitions beyond ‘beige’ on the colour chart. This is every shade of green, from the near neon of a tennis ball to the silvery subtlety of a sage leaf.
“It is crazy special,” says Bernadro Hillary Roman as I climb into an open sided Land Cruiser behind him. “For 14 years, we have had a massive drought. This place normally looks like a rock garden.”
I meet goateed guide Bernadro — better known as Bons — at a sandy airstrip in the Palmwag Concession, a protected conservancy of 2 100sq miles in northwest Damaraland. It is several steps beyond the middle of nowhere.
Bouncing beneath the clouds in a tiny Cessna, I had seen signs of life fade the further north the plane travelled from the Namibian capital of Windhoek: first the settlements disappeared, then the trees, finally the roads. Below, enormous rock formations rippled out of the flat earth like petrified sea monsters.
Like most people, I have made the journey for one reason: to see a critically endangered species that has learnt to survive in this normally hostile and arid environment. “We have the world’s largest population of desert adapted black rhino here,” Bons says, driving towards our camp, sunglasses perched on his head. “And we have a 99,99% success rate of finding them.”
Bons has worked as a guide for Desert Rhino Camp since 2010 and knows the concession better than most. “I grew up 11 miles away, this is my backyard,” he tells me as the rain starts, so faint at first I have to hold out my hand to be sure I feel it. “Even if you put a bag over my head, I would know where we are.”
He doesn’t get a chance to demonstrate. Soon after our arrival at Desert Rhino, the skies darken, the wind picks up and the throaty growl of thunder rumbles across the plains, seeming to rebound off the surrounding mountains and pinball around the camp.
The rain is quickly torrential. Puddles turn to little streams. Little streams turn to small lakes. We are marooned, hiding in our canvas safari tents like desert Noahs as the waters rise.
There is little sign of the storm the following morning. A few clouds skim the horizon in the inky pre-dawn light and the earth is dark and damp, but the water has entirely drained into the porous soil. What I take to be the cartoon-like croak of a frog is, according to Bons, the dual calls of two Rüppell’s korhaans — slender, beige birds found in regions with little rain.
As the sun rises, turning the grass golden, they form a tiny orchestra, joined by the looping whistle of a Benguela long billed lark and the cheerful twitters of sparrow larks.
The plan for the day is to join Palmwag’s rangers and — with luck — follow them to some of the 17 or so black rhinos within driving distance of the camp. The rangers had set off a couple of hours earlier to get the search underway. “The trackers track the rhino and we track the trackers,” says Bons with a characteristically mischievous grin. “It’s hard for them though — the rain will have washed away any footprints.”
We spend the morning trundling along tracks that weave across the concession, each turn revealing another epic landscape — an endless parade of grass covered hills filing to the horizon, punctuated by sandstone cliffs and giant outcrops of red basalt.
Yellow mouse whiskers and purple carpetweed flowers poke up between the rocks, splashing the desert with colour. The minty smell of wild tea carries on the breeze. “Usually this looks like Mars,” says Bons. “If a guest from the last 10 years saw pictures of it now, they would need to see a doctor.”
Prominent in the landscape is the plant that allows black rhinos to survive in a more typical year.
The drought-resistant Euphorbia damarana, or Damara milk bush, contain a latex sap that’s poisonous to most animals, including humans, but not rhinos, sustaining them in the absence of other sources of food. — National Geographic
