Chapter 7: Fish River Canyon
We brave souls lined up on the South African side of the Gariep River, waiting to “take Namibia” in well-stocked overland vehicles. Our little convoy of SUVs, bakkies, 4x4s of all descriptions and desert-adapted motorcycles looked like a dusty cavalcade from the Thunderdome episode of the post-Apocalyptic Mad Max movie series. One expected a dishevelled Mel Gibson to be somewhere out front, plotting our survival with a Marlboro in his mouth and a sawn-off shotgun in his hands.
We all seemed to have read the same guidebooks, which must have warned:
“Namibia has nothing. Bring your own fuel, your own water, your own bully beef, your own TV set, your own sleeping bags and your own wife. Don’t forget your own GPS, otherwise you might get lost on our excellent road system. And if you want something sweet for pudding, bring that along too.”
Obviously, we’d all overpacked. Why? Were we a bunch of suburban poodles in fear of visiting a place that didn’t have a mall every 5 km? Was it merely a lot of fun to play Survivor – Namibia? Boys and their toys? Had we all read one too many Africa adventure magazines? Or did we really think that a two-minute noodle purchased in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg tasted better than a two-minute noodle bought in Windhoek?
We made it across the border to the Namibian side at Noordoewer without incident. The cheerful Namibian customs guys walked up and down the queue, admiring all the machinery on show. The convoy members, soon to be scattered, a mix of South Africans and intrepid foreign tourists, checked their supplies and mentally prepared for a tough old time ahead.
And so it came as a bit of a surprise to Jules and me to find a perfectly civilised BP filling station in Noordoewer, where we bartered South African rands for a couple of chocolate Ola ice creams.
“It’s hell being in Namibia,” I smiled at my wife, as we wolfed down two heavens on a stick and stained our brand new, all-weather, bring-it-on Cape Union Mart khaki safari shirts. What would Sirs Laurens van der Post and Edmund Hillary think of us?
We soon forgot to worry about all that, however, as the wonder and majesty of our neighbour on the far western side of southern Africa called out. Namibia might be ancient, but she sure is blonde and very beautiful.
To our right were the Karasberge, a low, jagged range of mountains that looked like the geological teeth of someone without a good dental plan.
We took the bright black B1 highway to the north, turning left onto the C10 dirt road to the Fish River Canyon, deep in the Land of Look Again.
“Hang on,” I said to Jules, as we drove into the canyon lands. We were dwarfed by the dry cathedrals looming over us. “What do you mean by Look Again?”
“At first glance you see nothing,” she said. “You cannot imagine a single creature living out here. There’s only rock and sky. Then you look again, and you see something. A bird. A klipspringer. Why don’t you pull over right here?”
We climbed out of the bakkie. I was sure I’d bought a silvery-grey one. Who had nicked it, leaving me this old brown number with the wheezy diesel chest? We felt a silence so overwhelming our ears rang with it. And then we heard the sweet sound of a distant bird, and I caught a small movement out of the corner of my eye, at a rockpile not far from us. We called out and hollow echoes returned, like vocal boomerangs.
“Now you start seeing individual holes in the rock,” said Jules. “That’s where the dassies, the Egyptian cobras and the puffadders live. Here, somewhere, are also leopard, kudu, Hartmann’s mountain zebra, ground squirrels and look, there’s a baboon hiding behind those stones.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked, a little querulously.
“Some of us watch too much TV, while others do their homework,” my wife replied. Was there a touch of smugness on her face, or was it just the chocolate makeup she was wearing at the time?
We arrived at the Ai-Ais resort deep in the canyon just after lunch, and the man at Reception immediately passed on a great gift from the Namibian government: an extra hour of sunlight, an extra hour of life. We wound our watches backwards and I made plans for a second lunch.
Ai-Ais is Nama for “scalding hot”. Stone Age inhabitants must have used the springs thousands of years ago. A Nama shepherd looking for livestock back in 1850 (and how often have people gone down in the annals of history as great discoverers when, in actual fact, they’d really just lost their sheep and stumbled upon a significant place?) found these hot springs, flowing out of the ground at 60˚C, rich in fluorides, sulphates and chlorides.
In Lords of the Last Frontier, legendary travel writer Lawrence Green says: “The radio-active water has a high magnesium-sulphate content. It acts as a purgative and many sufferers from arthritis benefit from the heat treatment. I met people who were carried down to the hot springs on beds and who recovered the use of their limbs. There is a store at Ai-Ais and a shack for the caretaker. Visitors camp out in the shadeless gorge. It is far from comfortable among the scorched rocks of the riverbed, but invalids are sustained by their faith in the waters.”
Well, that was back in 1952 and times had changed. We didn’t see a single invalid at Ai-Ais, unless you counted the sufferers of self-inflicted rugby-hangovers wandering around the grounds one Sunday morning. And if the waters really had been radio-active, the place would have been deserted.
In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, travel legend Bill Bryson indirectly explains why Green would have said something so “utterly Chernobyl” back then:
“For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radio-activity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radio-active thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its ‘radio-active mineral springs’. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938.”
The Germans used Ai-Ais as a base to fight the Nama rebellion in 1903. In 1962 the canyon was proclaimed a “natural monument”. A game reserve was proclaimed six years later and a modern rest camp was opened in 1971. It was promptly washed away by floods the next year, and rebuilt the following year. The camp retained an old-fashioned 1970s feel. Extended Namibian and South African families had been meeting here for decades, and Ai-Ais had become a gathering place for many generations of nostalgic outdoors enthusiasts.
“OK already, so you did your homework,” I said to Jules. “Now please can we go and watch rugby at the bar? Time-out for travel hacks.”
“Who’s playing?” she wanted to know.
“So you didn’t do all the homework, did you? South Africa, the Springboks, the amaBokoBoko, are playing the Wallabies from Australia in the Tri-Nations this afternoon. Kick-off is in five minutes.”
We settled ourselves downstairs on the veranda with a TV set in the distance, a gaggle of eager South African tourists in the middle-distance and a table-full of Tafel Lagers right in front of us. There was a sun-glare on the TV screen and both Jules and I became distracted by a swarm of alcoholic Fish River bees that insisted we share our beer with them. I gather we won the game, however, because a distinctly un-Australian party soon broke out all over the place.
The fires were lit for the ritual of burning meat and the happy campers sat around outside their tents, sipping on fine Namibian beer and large tumblers of brandy and Coke.
A light breeze blew through the canyon, bringing with it the aroma of barbecue and snatches of campside conversation.
Three burly South African mates discussed their favourite Namibian fishing spots. One hardy British couple working on their overland vehicle regaled an awestruck Windhoek woman with dry reportage on their near-death experience at the hand of would-be kidnappers in Brazzaville, Congo. At another braai fire, mothers exchanged tips about how to keep dust out of the cooler boxes and what to do when the brats hit a sugar high on the back seat of the Land Rover. A huge family get-together turned frosty when someone swung a drunken punch at someone else, luckily hitting only fresh canyon air. The die-hard rugby fans swamped the bar area and watched the after-match presentations, and if Catherine Zeta-Jones had suddenly arrived, jumped on a table and dropped all her kit, she might have been ignored. Well, maybe.
And through all of this hullabaloo, a newly minted baby girl in her 4x4 all-terrain perambulator slept soundly, kissed by the cool breeze of the day’s end.
On a sunset walk down to the river, I was fascinated to discover Das Rollende Hotel, an overlanding double-trailer truck full of Germans. They slept in one trailer and spent their road-time in the other. This gargantuan Teutonic hotel on wheels rolls through all of Namibia, carrying a good proportion of the German travelling public with it in a jolly, Oktoberfest way.
The next morning we left for Hobas camp, because I needed the classic photograph of the Fish River Canyon. I had a feeling that a long walk in the mid-morning sun would be involved. I loudly dreaded the prospect of this experience, feeling liverish from too much beer and many ice creams consumed the day before. Who said victory was always sweet? Sometimes victory, especially of the rugby variety, should come with two headache tablets, the hair of the dog and three hours in a quiet, dark hideaway. Actually, let’s lose the hair of the dog. Ai-Ais, the “Lourdes of Africa”, had lured me into another dah-redful hangover.
In case you’re fit and interested, it’s a trek of 90 km down the canyon from Hiker’s Point to Ai-Ais, but that’s not the whole story. It’s four, maybe five, days of hardship, because you have to carry everything you need. There are no McDonald’s franchises down there. Make sure you have a comprehensive medical kit and the know-how to use it, because there are no chemist shops in the canyon. It’s hot as Hades by day and cold as a witch’s tit by night, in winter. You don’t even want to think about going there in high summer.
When it comes to such an extreme experience, I have to bow out. Something else just came up. I get bored walking long distances. I end up throwing stones at things that want to bite me. Also, I have ankles that turn easily. I don’t like snakes. I sleep very badly on rocks. And I get gout, just by thinking about getting gout. So please don’t ask me to accompany you down the Fish River Canyon. Good luck with that, however. But when you finally rock up at Ai-Ais, all blistery and in a bad mood, it’s Tafels on me at the bar.
“So I’m just telling you,” I told Jules. “I’m not walking a million miles to get this picture.”
“Fine. But we do need some exercise. Bum-lifts while driving aren’t enough,” she insisted. “Remember what your mate Ernest Hemingway once wrote.”
“What?”
“Travel broadens the mind. It also broadens the ass.”
“OK, but I’m just saying,” I said.
Well, it turned out that all you needed to do for the classic Fish River Canyon photograph was drive up to the vantage point, climb out with your camera, walk no more than four metres and snap away. My hangover disappeared in a cloud of bonhomie and I could face the day, armed with a fully filled diesel bakkie and a nearly limitless supply of digital memory in my cameras.
I looked down. More than 350 million years ago, a fault-line split open at this spot and that was the start of the geo-rot that was to become the Fish River Canyon. Like, at one stage back then, you had your Olduvai Potholes up in Kenya, and you know what happened to them. Over the millennia, the river scoured away at the rock as it roared through here and a Gondwanaland glacier added the finishing touches, cleaving its way through the billion-year-old formations. It’s been a very long time since the Fish River had such an All-Mighty effect on the land. Now a restless river of air sculpts the rocks down there.
We proceeded to another lookout point and came across a bizarre city of rocky cairns. On the lip of the canyon, people had amused themselves (and others, like us) by building little castles, mini-Stonehenges, pyramids, pagodas and bridges into a veritable rock concert. Later, the woman with the tickets at the Hobas Camp entrance said the cairns had been put there by tourists “having a bit of fun”.
“It’s when they have a pap wiel (flat tyre),” said a tour guide, riffling through an old postcard display on the front desk. “That’s when the guy runs around with the jack and the spare and his wife plays with the stones.”
My old friend, the veteran off-road adventure photojournalist Geoff Dalglish, later told me the stones had been put there by travellers “to bless those who follow”. It’s my preferred explanation for the origin of Cairnsville, Namibia.
On our way back to Ai-Ais, we detoured to a quirky establishment that smacked of the Bagdad Café with a touch of stock car thrown in for fun. About 2 km from the Canon Roadhouse, the signs began: Hungry? Thirsty? Sleepy? We looked out for Grumpy, Doc and Sneezy, but they had gone to far greener pastures.
An old Ford truck from Kaiser Bill’s days, filled with rampant cactus, stood near the front gate. Another nearby wreck had been turned into a pot plant and farm implements adorned the walls of this diner in the desert. Bacon and eggs were dancing jigs in the Art Deco halls of my fevered brain.
While we waited for our brunch, we scoured the little curio shop. An Italian girl wandered in and asked no one in particular if horses ever got rabies. She pronounced it “rabia”, however, and all of us within earshot thought she was asking if there were Arab horses about. We said yes, we thought so, and she began to throw a frothie right there in the shop. Pulled off her fleece top to reveal a shapely body with the distinct outline of horse-teeth embedded in her armpit. When one of us (it must have been Jules, the boys were too busy gawking) finally twigged, the girl was reassured about the rabies thing and we heard the full story later, over said English breakfast.
It turns out she’d had a Hollywood fantasy about riding bareback into the desert on one of the normally gentle and restrained resort horses. A bit of manhandling allegedly took place and the steed dispatched her girlish dreams post haste.
The mental image of a rabid horse rampaging through the desert sands with gnashing teeth made calm brunching impossible. We urged the girl to visit a hospital in Keetmanshoop to have the bite checked out. She just sat in the shade waiting, as I once did after a fierce cat attack in Namaqualand, for the madness to set in.