Life Along The Limpopo

The Limpopo River is South Africa’s border with Botswana for about 500km. It’s also a lifeline for farmers and wildlife, and for the deep roots of ancient trees. Join us as we follow one WhatsApp message to the next, from Steenbokpan to Pontdrift.

- Toast Coetzer

The Limpopo River springs up somewhere in your Gauteng backyard, where the furthest tendrils of the Crocodile River collect their water. Near Rooibokkraal, north of Thabazimbi, the Marico River joins forces with the Crocodile, and thus the Limpopo is born.

These are the facts, but the Limpopo is much more enigmatic than the familiar name in your map book suggests. It disappears and reappears as the seasons change. It floods and dries up again. If your first encounter with the Limpopo is from a bridge as you drive between South Africa and Botswana, you might be disappointed: a couple of sandbanks, a muddy pool. Is this really the “mighty” Limpopo?

There’s nothing flashy about it. – it doesn’t make the cover of coffee table books. It seems to be kept wilfully out of sight and reach, barred off by game fences, obscured by riverine thickets.

A direct approach to exploring the Limpopo is futile. There’s no single viewpoint where you can tick it off as an attraction. It’s an accumulation of experiences rather than a been there-done-that postcard. You need to come here looking for other things: trees, birds, buck; or simply peace and quiet offered by the odd campsite and lodge. Then, slowly, somewhere in your peripheral vision, the Limpopo will take its full, mysterious shape.

Follow the trees

Farmer Willem Frost loves trees. From the moment I meet him near his farm along the Matlabas River, a tributary of the Limpopo, he bemoans the fact that the day just won’t be long enough to get to all the special trees he wants to show me.

It is early in November 2020 and the rain has already begun to fall in this part of the Bushveld, in what will become a bumper rainy season.