Crooks in Kruger's Corner

Amid the vastness of South Africa’s Kruger National Park – at almost 20,000 square kilometres, it’s roughly the size of Slovenia – we’ve finally arrived at a very tiny carpark in the far north-east.

The caramel-coloured Limpopo River flows sluggishly in front of us, marking Kruger’s (and South Africa’s) northern frontier. This unprepossessing carpark, a mere dot on the map, belongs to Crooks Corner, the point where South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique converge.

The name refers not to some long-forgotten local administrator but ‘crook’ in the idiomatic sense: a rogue or scoundrel. For it was here in this forsaken corner of Kruger, a little more than a hundred years ago, that ivory poachers, gunrunners, kidnappers and other ne’er-do-wells once plied their nefarious trade.

We’ve spent the night at the luxurious Pafuri Tented Lodge on the Luvuvhu River. An avian chorus, led by the shrieking hadada ibis, wakes us at dawn. The rising sun throws a dazzling golden blanket over the water as we prepare for our morning game drive, my companions lugging bags full of cameras, various lenses, even a drone.

“What do you want to see today?” asks our affable ranger, Vongani, as we climb into the 4x4.

“Everything?” we answer hopefully.

Unfortunately, ‘everything’ turns out to be wishful thinking. Northern Kruger certainly offers an

unforgettable landscape – and far fewer crowds than the south - but the trade-off is that there’s considerably less wildlife.

We cross the Luvuvhu on a tarred road flanked by a carpet of beautiful – but highly poisonous – belladonna-lilies. After ten minutes Vongani slows and stops. Lions? A rhino perhaps? But Vongani’s keen eyes have spotted something much smaller. A column of ants, thick as a broom handle, teems on the road in front of us. Considerably larger game reveals itself as we make our way through the varied landscape. A herd of elephants grazing among some fever trees. A lone zebra in a mopane forest. Kudu and impala. Wary Cape Buffalo wallowing in a muddy waterhole.

Scattered on rocky hillocks are baobab trees, a feature of Kruger’s north, with their bulging trunks and branches that look like stubby fingers clawing at the sky. The bark of a baobab’s trunk contains high amounts of water, stored during the rainy season, which makes the trees an inviting target for thirsty elephants: many of the trees we see have had their bark stripped.

As we get closer to the Limpopo, the landscape changes once more. We pass among tall lala palms, which are home to small greyish palm swifts. The local people here use the sap from the palms’ trunks to make a sweet wine, rich in vitamin C and said to taste a little like ginger beer.

The road narrows to a sandy track. The vegetation becomes lusher, curtains of vines enveloping us. It feels less a game drive and more like beating a path to a secret surf spot.

Finally, we emerge onto a short, tarred road that leads to the Crooks Corner carpark. It’s not hard to see why this area attracted law dodgers. Even in the vastness of Kruger National Park, we feel

completely isolated from civilization. Back when the converging countries here were named South Africa, Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa, it was simple enough for a fugitive to slip quietly across a frontier if local authorities became too nosy. According to an information board in the carpark, one of Crooks Corner’s more infamous denizens was the ivory poacher Stephanus Cecil Rutgert Barnard. Local people called him Bvekenya, which translates as ‘one who swaggers as he walks’.

It couldn’t have been an easy living. Apart from the constant threat of being nabbed by the law, malaria was rife - it’s said that fugitives lived here on a diet of quinine and whiskey. There were dangerous animals to contend with and, of course, scant honour among thieves. We take some photographs of a pod of hippos – like mammalian icebergs, only a tiny fraction of them is

visible above the water’s surface. Then one of my companions, the tech lover, suggests sending up his drone for some aerial photography. Use of drones is strictly forbidden throughout Kruger, but

above the Limpopo, he reasons - isn’t that technically Zimbabwe?

In a few moments the drone is freed from its case and ready for lift-off. Just then - and the timing couldn’t have been more dramatic - a blue and white 4WD marked ‘POLICE’ glides silently into the carpark like a cruising shark. There’s a hiss of alarm between my companions

and within seconds the drone is slipped surreptitiously back into its case.

OK, maybe operating a drone on the border of Kruger is illegal. If the police had turned up just a few minutes later, we would have been caught red-handed. And while we’re not exactly desperate criminals, I don’t think we’d have seriously considered fleeing across the Limpopo - unlike the crooks in this corner of Africa a century ago.

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Michael Ward, writing here in the third person, is a handsome and talented writer based in Melbourne, Australia.  A former gravedigger, occasional actor, ex-breakfast DJ in Canberra and once a much-loved, Mr. Chipps-like English teacher in Japan, Michael has been a television comedy writer for almost 30 years.