Sixth Report - My Arrival

My first look at Augrabies Falls National Park, after driving another 1,5 hours from Upington at break-neck speed, was not really a look at all. It was so dark the only visibility came from the car's headlights and that is hardly an exaggeration. The windows of the car might for all intent and purposes have been painted black - just as Mick wanted. Adding to the gloom was a pretty powerful sandstorm which caused anything you could actually see through the windows - while passing a lonely street light for instance - to be sand. After a couple of very long days, a gruelling busride and a healthy amount of uncertainty, this was not improving my state of mind...

I'm still in the dark (no pun intended) about how Gert, the technical manager who picked me up, managed to find my little ground-floor appartment at the very tip of the restcamp area, but he did. He left the headlights on as I unloaded my luggage and the bags of groceries I had bought in Upington. A good thing he did too because otherwise I would not have found the keyhole...actually it was so dark I would not have noticed the entire building until I had walked against it.

So here I was, standing in the one-room flat where I would spend an entire year. As far as my bleak and tired mind was concerned, things were still not looking up. It is a very strange sensation: having absolutely no knowledge of where you are or what the world around your tiny appartment looks like. I looked out the window but all I could see was an inky darkness which did not allow the light from my room to penetrate it even slightly. The scratching noises I heard on the roof reminded me that there was a big tree next to my house, but that was all I knew about my new environment. Unsettling.

It would be fitting for me to tell you at this point that I had a restless night, waking up every so often to strange noises outside my door, the heat keeping me up, not giving me five minutes peace. Unfortunately that was not so dear readers. I fell asleep like a log and didn't open my eyes until the alarm on my mobile phone went off at 6.30 the next morning.

If not knowing what the outside looked like when I arrived was unsettling, than nothing could prepare me for what I faced on my first morning in Augrabies Falls. But far from being unsettling, it was in fact stunning. As if I had woken up from a bad dream and gone straight to the Elysian Fields of Greek myth. Gorgeous sunshine, a clear blue sky as far as my eyes could see, the prehistoric majesty of the Nama Plateau on the horizon and right outside my window, just a few paces outside the door, the Orange river raged. It is as if the river has lost all patience and wants nothing more than to reach the Atlantic - and nothing will stand in its way. Not even millions of years old granite. The Orange plunges down 60 meters and then proceeds to travel through a massive 18km gorge until the soil becomes softer and it reaches its final destination, the ocean. Augrabies means "The Place of Big Noise" in the Nama language and it's a most fitting name. Whenever I am sitting outside, especially at night, the sound of the falls make me think I'm close to a highway or in the middle of a city - a constant reminder of who is running this place. It is the 6th largest waterfall in the world in volume, with an average flow of about 50 to 70.000 liters per second - although last year it reached an impressive 1.6 million liters at one stage, which is nothing compared to the floods of 1988 when a comfortable 7.8 million (!!) liters flowed through. This flood cut off the park from the rest of the country and staff had to be choppered in and out on a daily basis.

In much better spirit I prepared myself for my first day of work. Looking very sharp in my ranger outfit - if I say so myself - I walked through the park campsite and past the typical Augrabies chalets towards the office of the Social Ecologist, Angela Isaks, my supervisor...