Desert Dreamscapes

Deserts are mystical places. But the |Ai-|Ais-Richtersveld Transfrontier Park straddling South Africa and Namibia, with some of the oddest plant species you’ll ever see, is in a class of its own.

Land of Look Again

There is something deeply spiritual about the |Ai-|Ais-Richtersveld that touches the hearts of most travellers. But when you first enter this desert wilderness, it appears lifeless. The heat, rocks and desert wind can seem your only companions.

Out of the corner of your eye you might catch the swoop of wings and the towering silence is pierced by cheerful birdsong.

Elemental Magic

Then you will see a plant that unexpectedly moves you with its patience, courage or reckless beauty.

Your deeper senses open, and around every bend you see, hear and understand more. Now you are gripped by the magic of this elemental land.

North Gazer

If there is a signature plant of the Richtersveld, it is the hardy and affectionately named Halfmens (which means half-human), which always bends towards the north. The scientific name is Pachypodium namaquanum, but the locals also call it the Noordkyker (north-gazer).

There is a legend in these parts that these were once people driven across the river from the north. They were turned into plants, but they never stopped gazing wistfully towards their homeland.

Dancing Daisies

The other plants are just as fascinating. This is a water-thrifty world of fat-leafed miniature succulents, plants that disguise themselves as stones, spiky euphorbias, red-leafed aloes with acid yellow flowers, majestic quiver trees, stoic evergreen shepherd’s trees, window plants that sink into the sheltering earth and let diffused sunlight play through their translucent cells.

After spring rains, exuberant daisies come out to play.

A River Runs Through It

The Orange River links the South African Richtersveld National Park and the Namibian |Ai-|Ais Hot Springs Game Reserve. The Transfrontier Park was created in 2003, when South Africa and Namibia signed a co-management agreement.

Roughly speaking, you’ll see more animals on the Namibian side, and a wider variety of plant species on the South African. A ferry and border control point was installed in late 2007 so that tourists could more easily visit both parks. Previously, this would have meant a round trip involving hundreds of kilometres.

Fish River Canyon

The Namibian side of the Transfrontier Park is where you’ll find the second largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in the US.

How could the demure Fish River, visible as a thin green line half a kilometre down, be capable of carving such a gigantic canyon for itself? In point of fact, it didn’t. Not alone, that is. This enormous chasm, 550 metres deep, 161 kilometres long and 27 km across at its widest point, was also created by a conspiracy of geological faults and events.

Hiking the Canyon

Hundreds of hikers are drawn to this ancient, stark canyon every year. A fitness certificate from a doctor is required before you can undertake this trek. |Ai-|Ais literally means ‘hot-hot’ in the Nama tongue, so be prepared to be physically and mentally challenged by this extraordinary landscape. The end-point of the hike, and the first place you’ll find an ice cold beer, is at a healing spring, where a resort (recently upgraded) was built decades ago. For more sedentary visitors, there are several magnificent viewsites over the ancient petrified oxbows.

Towering Beauty

On either side of the Transfrontier Park, the naked grandeur of its mountains enfolds you. They change colour constantly, through the day and evening, switching between plum, violet, cherry velvet, burgundy, buckskin and ebony, interspersed with snowy quartzite.

The secret life in them is also fascinating. The natural hollows in the rocks are shelters for small creatures like rock hyraxes and hairy-footed gerbils. Keep your eyes open. You may round a bend here and chance upon two klipspringers, delicately balanced on their tiny black ballerina-like hooves; or a gang of curious Hartmann’s zebra gazing at you from a high outcrop.

Garden of the Gods

But your lasting impressions will probably be of the perfect natural rock gardens you will stumble across again and again. And long after you’ve left, the spirit of this otherworldly place will stay with you, a dreamscape seared into memory.