Part 55
In my last blog, I had written that my little movie did get made. However, when we were almost finished with the filming, Dennis Bughwan apologized and said that for the next eight weeks, or so, he was totally tied up with his photographic work and other business matters. We would have to postpone everything until then.
I was also exhausted from having to drive my taxicab from five in the afternoon until three or four in the morning, go home grab three hours sleep and dash off to meet Dennis and kids by 8:00 a.m. I could also do with a break, but how was I to survive financially? My beloved Rover motor car was also costing me too much to run. It was very heavy on petrol consumption.
I had a sudden madcap brainwave. What if I drove to Walvis Bay where my parents still lived and spent some time with them until Dennis was ready to continue filming? I had also heard from my Dad that if I sold my Rover in Walvis Bay, good second-hand cars were hard to find there and the fishermen had plenty of money to spend. I could get a good price for it.
I set off on a 2,500-mile journey from the East coast of South Africa to the West coast, with the vague idea that I could sell the car and then hitchhike back to Durban. The trip was very long and mostly boring. I drove to Kimberley where the original diamond rush had taken place many years ago. I then went on to Upington on the banks of the Orange river, where a few diehard prospectors still panned for diamonds along the riverbanks.
I had travelled from the lush green of sub-tropical Durban, into the semi-desert regions of the Karoo. From Upington to the next town of Keetmanshoop, about 400 miles away, the land transformed again from the sparse scrub and quiver trees to pure featureless and flat desert. Quiver trees are so named because the San people (better known as bushmen) make quivers as carrying cases for their arrows with which they hunt for game.
On my way to the next town, Mariental, a mere 150 miles away, I was taught a lesson in desert driving. All the roads had sand surfaces in those years. A grader had recently graded the left-hand side of the road, making it very comfortable to drive on. However, after about 50 miles the grading abruptly stopped, leaving a small pile of loose sand straight ahead. I drove straight into the pile and was stuck.
On those roads you were lucky if you passed three or four cars in a day. So, there I was in the middle of nowhere. I tried to dig the wheels out of the loose sand and put the car in reverse to drive out of the obstruction. In my ignorance I revved the engine too hard and dug the car in even deeper. I figured that I was stuck there for the night at least.
Then, to my relief, I saw whirling dust on the road in the far distance. As it approached, I could see that it was large, but old American car, a Buick or Pontiac or something of the sort with a fishtail back end. The vehicle stopped, the driver got out and looked at me with utter contempt. He was a huge white man, obviously a farmer, who refused to speak to me in English. He was a man of few words. I struggled with my very limited Afrikaans and tried to explain that I couldn’t get the car out of the sand. This was obvious anyway, so he completely ignored me, studied the problem for a few moments, then knelt down and started to very carefully dig the sand away from the rear wheels.
I can only describe him as a road surgeon. This big guy was incredibly gentle as he prepared the surface of the sand then reached into my car and pulled the floor mats out and placed them on the sand at the back of the rear wheels. He then got into the driver’s seat of the car, switched on the engine and, with incredible skill, started to drive the car backwards. The lesson I learned was that he did not accelerate at all beyond the bare necessity of inching the car backwards. Therefore ,the wheels did not spin and did not dig into the sand or, in this case, the floor mats. I was in awe of his skills no doubt borne of a lifetime of living in those harsh desert conditions.
He got out of the car, looked at me with contempt again, did not say a word and drove off, leaving me with my tail between my legs and my car out of the sand. I made it to Mariental before dark and found a small hotel that I could just afford. This left me 170 miles from Windhoek, the capital of what is now Namibia.
The following day, I left early and passed through Windhoek by mid-morning and headed for Walvis Bay on the coast more than 300 miles away. The route through the desert took me through Swakopmund, a delightful seaside resort with quaint 19th-century houses and buildings built along the style of a Baltic coastal town in Germany. Swakopmund was almost entirely German-speaking as far as the white population was concerned, whereas Walvis Bay, the only port on the West Coast before Cape Town some 1,200 miles to the south, was predominantly Afrikaans-speaking. The two African tribes in the region were the Herero and Avambo people.
I finally arrived at my parent’s house, exhausted by the drive but happy that my wonderful Rover had come through the ordeal unscathed. That night, my Dad told me about his latest commercial adventure, as well as his ongoing pilchard trawler fishing that continued to make good money. Dad had a quirky sense of humor and had opened the first barber shop ever in Walvis Bay. He had called it “Herr Dresser,” which was the only time I ever saw our Dresser surname used to an advantage. He had trouble finding a barber to come and live in Walvis Bay, which in the 1960s was still considered to be a lawless town straight out of the American Wild West.
A reluctant barber was found, and the shop opened. However, my Dad quickly discovered that he had employed an alcoholic. Only a few weeks after opening, the barber had arrived drunk. In the course of cutting the hair of one of the huge muscular fishermen, the barber managed to slice off a large chunk of the man’s ear with his cutthroat razor. The enraged fisherman grabbed the barber, put him in the barber’s chair, tied him down with strips of torn up aprons, uprooted the chair and carried both barber and chair out into the street. He then directed traffic towards his victim, in the hope of getting him run over. The terrified barber survived and was last seen running out of town as fast as his wobbly legs would take him. After that, my Dad confined himself to checking on his trawler when it returned to port and spent the rest of his time prospecting for diamonds, minerals and semiprecious stones in the desert.
He did discover a source of very high-quality iron ore and, shortly after I arrived, he sent me out into the desert with a young Avambo man to dig a deep hole throughout the morning. He would then arrive in the afternoon, place some sticks of dynamite in the hole and set it off so that the rocks below the sand on the surface were shattered, allowing the hole to be dug deeper. He also collected samples of the iron ore we were digging into. I even found some time to start writing poetry in the glorious vastness and stark beauty of the desert.
Sadly ,the sampling plus a survey of the area revealed that there was only about a quarter of a million tons of iron ore altogether, which was simply not enough to start to mine it commercially. I later learned that the Namib desert had indications of many different metals and gemstones but very little in viable quantities other than a Uranium find near Swakopmund.
I received a letter from Dennis in Durban saying that he was ready to recommence filming. I managed to sell my car for a remarkable £450, £50 more than I had bought it for. Now, I had to get back to Durban. I took a train to Windhoek, spent a pleasant day with a young lady who had provided me with a bed for a couple of nights. Not her bed, by the way. The following day she drove me out of town and left me on the main road heading back towards Upington. From early morning to late afternoon exactly four cars came past. They all stopped and offered me a lift but none of them were going more than 100 miles down the road. I declined the offers and waited for the young lady who had said she would come and check on me. So, back to Windhoek.
That night I took her for dinner to a local hotel, where she saw an old friend. He told us that he was flying to Cape Town in the morning and I was welcome to join him. That would take me 1,200 miles south, whereas Durban was 2,500 miles to the east. I weighed my options and decided that I would have a better chance hitchhiking from Cape Town to Durban than standing in the desert day after day. I took the lift in his Piper Cub aircraft and was awed by watching the desert from the air, with its vast exposed rock strata and massive sand dunes. I then hitched from Cape Town to Johannesburg (1,000) miles and on to Durban (400 miles), arriving with most of my money intact.
The moral of this story is that, when faced by a major problem, improvise, don’t give up. When Peter Warren improvised and created a very effective computing accounting program for his former business, it actually led to the beginning of his development of ExoTech which is what is causing all the excitement in the computing world today!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.