North Namibian Safari - Cheetah Farm
Created | Updated Nov 5, 2008
Once you get significantly north of Windhoek – as well as getting decidedly more African and dusty – the towns in Northern Namibia all start to sound the same and pretty much (with a few exceptions) all start with the letter O. This makes life a tad confusing, and by the time we had gone through a few agricultural checkpoints and saw the outlines of the Brandenberg mountains against the horizon I had lost some of my usually quite reliable bearings.
There were five of us in the ubiquitous white Toyota Land Cruiser – Lisa, an English photographer commissioned to take some photos for a friends' travel company; Tina, a German tourist on her last major trip before flying back to Berlin, Maridene; blonde, blue-eyed true-born Namibian daughter of the family we'd be staying with at the Cheetah farm, myself and Andrew, our driver and guide. Andrew, or Bru as he was known by nearly everyone, was a South African by birth and happily munched away on the salty biltong 'love-bites' I'd picked up in Okahandja. An affable fellow, whose blonde German girlfriend with piercing blue eyes had picked me up at 6am that morning as I stumbled off the Keetmanshoop train and wandered blearily around the Windhoek station, looking lost.
Bru, it turned out, was also suffering from a rather severe stomach upset and/or Malaria but had nonetheless decided to take us on our way through the Namibian veldt. They breed them fairly resilient in SA.
He reckoned the biltong would settle his stomach a bit, but I did wonder at the back of my mind whether I'd be driving us back when he doubled up with cramps that night. Luckily my fears were unfounded.
Passing through Okahandja, we were soon in the deep, ash-blonde plains of the veldt, through which the impressive dark granite hunks that made up the Brandenberg range, pushed themselves towards the powder-blue cerulean skies. As the sun dipped below the Brandenberg's we had covered the distance from Okahandja to Otijtongwe – a white Namibian-owned Cheetah farm. Driving up the dusty track to the farm we dropped Maridene at her home and then parked the Toyota in a secluded spot in the on-site camping-area. We fairly hastily erected our tents and Bru lit the camp-fire while Lisa, Tina and myself were taken to the main farmhouse to meet the 'tame' Cheetahs.
I have to say I went with some trepidation, I'm not really a very 'catty' kind of guy and as far as I was concerned, these cats were just bigger, more deadly versions of the domestic tabby. To be honest, I wasn't wrong but one thing I'd be missing out is how beautiful and graceful these creatures are in the flesh. Domestic cats slink about and generally annoy me with their chilled-out arrogance, but these graceful creatures bounced when they walked and hardly seemed to touch the ground at all. They also looked like they could look after themselves and would take on prey that was as at least as big as themselves, if not bigger. Show me a domestic cat that does that - generally they pick on things smaller than themselves like the feline bullies they are! The coats of the cheetahs were also beautiful - spotted mantles with a strange spiky mane behind the shoulders. We were invited to touch them – as long as we avoided their paws, which again reminded me of a few domestic cats I had known – and I swear when one jumped up on the bench we were sitting on, it was no further than six inches from my face, its beautiful eyes staring back at me. I slowly and cheekily took a picture of it, but in the lottery that turned out to be my camera, it came out pretty blurred, unfortunately. After that we were escorted by the tame Cheetahs to the waiting, fairly chunky looking open-topped safari vehicle which was to ferry us round the 'wild' cheetah enclosures.
So what is it with Cheetahs... they are unlikely to kill a man, and one on its own would have difficulties as they are fairly slight and only come up to just below the average person's hips. That being said, our host, Mario, showed us some rather impressive scars on his arm that had resulted in the playful attentions of the so-called 'tame' cheetahs. So even though I had calmed somewhat meeting the 'tame' versions who had been hand-reared and brought up round the farm-house and the children and dogs, I was seriously concerned when we went to meet the 'wild' ones.
Five or so of us mounted onto the back of the beaten-up Toyota bakkie and proceeded though the fenced-off area where the wild cheetah were at play. Hanging on to the bars of the bakkie, my gaze fell upon a bucket of evil-smelling bloody meat that turned out to be a dead donkey. Nice.
The wild cheetahs soon became aware of our presence as we trundled around the park and leisurely kept pace by the side of the truck until Mario stopped and got out. Armed with a baseball bat, no less. He then went round to the back of the bakkie and hooked out several lumps of the evil smelling 'donkey-cutlet' and threw them into the air for the cheetahs to gamely catch. At this point my camera ran out of film and I ducked down in the back of the bakkie to re-load. I became aware of a light touch upon my shoulder and then a scratch so I looked up only to see the tail end of one of the Cheetahs bounding off the back of the bakkie. Apparently I had looked like a handy stepping-stone to the bucket of donkey meat and the cheetah had jumped on me to get ahead in the queue!
Later that night I had a few drinks in the hut with Mario, our erstwhile driver and Cheetah warden. The girls and Bru went to bed pretty early, so I was left with Mario and a few large Klippies before bed. Apparently he got to sleep with an inordinate number of women every year as the Cheetah farm was a regular stop on the Trans-Africa 'Overlander' routes – packed to the gills with European twenty-something girls, who, after an afternoon of gazing in awe at the Cheetahs and Mario's radiating machismo, just fell into his camp-bed ... Either that, or they were sick of sleeping in tents for the last five months and so, spending the night with some uber-macho, scarred, tanned game warden 10 years their senior was a small price to pay. I took it all with a pinch of salt to be honest - it all sounded like part of a well-worn story that may well have been embellished a bit. Having said, that anyone who can take on a pack of wild cheetahs with only a baseball bat to defend himself certainly deserves some kind of accolade. And unaccountably quite a few girls I met, as soon as they get into the bush, start to be bowled over by the simplest forms of macho, outsdoorsy behaviour that in Europe would merely be the cause of derisive comments. Still maybe it's just because I wasn't very good at looking totally comfortable in the outback and that this is the main card white Africans have to play – the fact that they have grown up with the Bush on their doorstep and can skin a kudu as soon as they're old enough to hold a boot-knife!
The next morning, after a fitful night's sleep listening to the African chorus of crickets, jackals and other assorted beasties (not to mention the dry heat), we breakfasted over a wood-fire. Bru was looking a bit better, which was just as well as we had a fair journey to Opuwo – the gateway to Kaokoland.
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