Gondwana Canyon Park

Sixty boreholes and a truck full of rocks

In 1973 August Sycholt wrote a piece for the magazine Ster about a couple farming on the lip of the Fish River Canyon. Christiaan and Johanna Fourie had not had a neighbour for nine years. They had come to the farm Altdoring in the 1950s on a donkey cart and lived at first in a shelter among the rocks. Christiaan sank more than 60 boreholes across 15,000 hectares and only a few ever gave water. They kept karakul sheep and goats, Johanna boiled soap from karakul fat, and three or four times a year they went to town to sell pelts and buy groceries. Their two boys were at school in Karasburg.

The Fouries held on until the late 1990s, then sold, and Altdoring is now part of the park. Manni Goldbeck, a co-founder of Gondwana who retold the Ster piece in 2025, says all that is left of the farm is an old bakkie rusting beside the road between Canyon Lodge and ǀAi-ǀAis, full of bullet holes. It carried rocks for jackal-proof fencing until it broke down and cost too much to fix.

What the fences were for

Afrikaner farmers settled this country from the 1940s, and the state helped pay for mesh fences dug into the ground so that jackals could not get under them and at the lambs. Arsenic and strychnine did the rest, and took the genets, foxes, aardwolves, eagles and vultures as well. The big game was long gone by then. Hunters and traders who crossed the Orange River had shot out the rhino early in the 1800s and the giraffe by the 1830s. Giraffe hide was cut into long riempies, the thongs wanted for ox-wagons, and klipspringer pelts went for saddle blankets.

Then the karakul market fell away as buyers overseas turned against fur, and a drought ran from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s. When Gondwana started buying, the first job was taking the wire down. An Austrian newspaper feature on the park puts it at 500 km of fencing.

Old wrecks have done rather well out of all this. A Tracks4Africa writer who stopped at Canyon Roadhouse in 2014 reported that its car theme started with one rusted vehicle in the yard of the original farm. In February 2026 Gondwana announced a 1957 Nash Metropolitan for it, a small car built in England for American buyers.

The lieutenant in the canyon

Not far from Altdoring, down in the southern part of the Fish River Canyon, there is a grave, and Goldbeck writes that Christiaan Fourie was one of the few people who knew where it was. Leutnant Thilo von Trotha was 27 when he was shot there on 14 June 1905, during Germany’s war against the Nama, while he was talking peace with Nama fighters. The grave record kept by South African genealogists says he was shot from behind, because the Nama suspected the talks were cover for a cavalry raid further down the valley to take back stolen livestock.

The accounts do not agree on who he had gone to meet. Goldbeck names Cornelius Frederiks, the Bethanie leader. The grave record and a Business Day writer who hiked past in 2023 both say Bondelswarts. Goldbeck also calls him a nephew of Lothar von Trotha, the general who issued the extermination order against the Herero in October 1904. The grave is no secret now. People on the multi-day canyon hike walk right past it.

Counting without binoculars

Once a year, over a weekend in late June, the park counts its game, and since 2022 anyone can sign up. The 2025 count was the 23rd and drew 60 people, lodge guests among the staff and conservation partners. Teams drive eight fixed routes at a steady speed and note each animal, its age class and how far it stood from the track. Binoculars stay in the bag. The count is done the same way every year so that one year can be set against the next, and the totals are worked out with a correction for how easy each species is to spot. Springbok are the ones the park watches as its indicator, because they are sensitive to changes in the veld.

Nobody should book here for the game alone. Expert Africa keeps a tally of what its travellers report seeing: most guests at all three Gondwana places saw oryx, about two thirds at Canyon Lodge and Canyon Village saw zebra (a third at the Roadhouse), and roughly a quarter at Canyon Lodge saw wildebeest. A Gondwana writer who drove the plains between the Holoog and Klein Karas mountains in 2013 logged plains zebra, red hartebeest, oryx, wildebeest, ostrich, springbok and kudu, was told mornings are better, and met mountain zebra only as tracks on a walking trail. One overlander whose trip report went up in October 2024 did better without trying, waking at the Hobas campsite in the state park next door to zebra grazing close to camp.

Rhino, after more than 150 years

In July 2025 Gondwana, the conservation group Elephants, Rhinos and People and the environment ministry announced a black rhino sanctuary in the park. They bill it as the largest privately owned one in the world. By March 2026 a calf had been born and the anti-poaching unit was working with drones and sensors. How many rhino there are is not published, and not one of Expert Africa’s travellers has recorded seeing one, so do not expect to meet a rhino on a self-drive. Gondwana said that March that guided tracking for lodge guests was coming soon, and a rhino information centre is planned for the Roadhouse.

Two things from the same records are useful before you choose a bed. Expert Africa’s own write-up of the Roadhouse says the rooms share walls and you hear the neighbours and their plumbing. Canyon Village is built for bigger groups, and one traveller there reserved a particular dinner table to keep clear of the tour parties.