Fish River Canyon (ǀAi-ǀAis)

Three Vespas, a giant snake and sixteen glasses of mud

The railway official at Holoog siding was not sure where the canyon was. He sent Lily Marion Newton and her husband Charles to a farmer he called Oom Gert, who would know. Newton tells the story in Faraway Sandy Trails, a book more than sixty years old that the writer Ron Swilling dug out and retold in 2023. Oom Gert described a route over farm tracks and sandy riverbeds and gave one warning: you drive up a rise “and then, bang! the earth vanishes”. Where the track faded, a shepherd pointed them up a slope and told them not to drive over the edge.

Oom Gert said two more things. The mountain zebra on the plateau were so few he thought they might already be finished. And people from the next farm had climbed down to that plateau and stopped there, because the walls below it were sheer. When the Newtons came back a few years later there was a big board that said “Afgrond”, precipice.

It still arrives that way. People who drive the stony 10 km from Hobas say nothing warns you until you leave the car, and the railing at the main viewpoint is about the only barrier on the whole rim. What you look down on is two canyons. The wide flat shelf is the floor of a rift valley, roughly 20 km across, that sank some 350 million years ago in the version told locally (geologists do not all agree on the dates). The gorge is cut into that floor, and the river only started on it after Gondwana broke apart about 120 million years ago and the edge of the continent lifted. The Nama version is shorter. A giant snake was eating the sheep and goats, the men cornered it with spears and torches, and its thrashing as it died tore the furrows.

Three scooters at the bottom

The canyon became a national monument in 1962 and a reserve in 1968. That same year the Cape Town Vespa Club took three scooters into it. One hiker who went looking for the club’s reasons gave up none the wiser. What is left of one scooter stands propped against the rocks a little past Pulpit Rock. One group got to it just before lunch on their second day, and few trip reports leave it out.

The first recorded run of the whole trail was on 13 July 1990, when Bruce Matthews and Ronnie Muhl did in 11 hours 42 minutes what takes walkers five days. Ryan Sandes brought it under seven hours in 2012, and AJ Calitz ran 6 hours 39 minutes 52 seconds on 18 June 2016.

Sixteen glasses of muddy water

ǀAi-ǀAis was a cure long before it was a resort. In 1890 the missionary Tobias Fenchel wore himself out building the church at Keetmanshoop, was told he must go to the spring, went by ox-wagon and stayed several weeks. From the 1940s people came by donkey cart for long stays, put up reed shelters and led the hot water into clay hollows to bathe in.

By the 1950s it looked like an army camp, white tents in rows under a kommandant. Pieter de Waal described it for the holiday supplement of Die Suidwester in December 1950. Oom Jaap Ekstein from Karas swore by the muddy water over the clear and drank sixteen glasses of it a day. At eleven the camp went dead quiet, at four everyone got up for jukskei, and at ten at night talk stopped for the wireless from Johannesburg.

A rest camp opened in 1965 and had its official opening on 16 March 1971. The 1972 flood took all of it but one building on higher ground.

March flood, August trickle

Between 1980 and 2005 the gauge at ǀAi-ǀAis averaged 23.4 cubic metres a second in March and 0.01 in August. In May 2011 a party of 14 set off the day before the canyon was closed, and rangers ended up paddling them one at a time to an emergency exit in canoes. In a dry season it goes the other way. Two Windhoek hikers who go almost every year describe six porters refilling three water points on the trail daily, 20 litres to each, and 13 hikers lifted out by police helicopter because they had too little drinkable water. The supply they count on is Sulphur Springs, which smells of egg and does not agree with every stomach.

Zebra Pools, Baboon Mountain, Fish Eagle Pools

The landmark names promise more than most hikers get. Baboons are the safe bet, and one group met a troop of nearly 40 marching the other way on their fourth day. Klipspringer and mountain zebra are on the ministry’s list for the canyon, yet in the accounts behind this piece the nearest anyone came to a zebra was an old carcass. Leopard are in the species lists and in nobody’s trip report. Tracks thicken on the banks once the canyon widens after Three Sisters: otter, kudu, porcupine, cats.

The animal that keeps surprising people is the horse. Three separate accounts have wild horses on the canyon floor, one of them near Palm Springs on the second day, another at close range with two small herds. At the pools fish eagles come up again and again, with grey and goliath herons. The German soldier’s grave at about the 62 km mark has its story on our Gondwana Canyon Park page.

The strangest resident is 2 to 4 cm long. In 2005 a school expedition run from the National Museum found three heelwalkers at Augurabis, in the north of Gondwana Canyon Park and upstream of the national park. Anita Shoongeleni, 15, made the find with biologist Samanta Mapfumo. The insects belong to an order described only a few years before, the first new one in 87 years.

Hikers agree on a few things. The descent takes anything from 45 minutes to three hours. Japie van Vuuren, who has walked the canyon at least twenty times, calls the end almost boring. People who measure it get between 68 and 76 km, not 90. And the nights get more praise than any landmark, one pair calling the canyon after dark the best of it.