Place to stay · Karas
Fish River Lodge
Lodge of stone and glass chalets on the western rim of the Fish River Canyon, inside the private Canyon Nature Park, well away from the Hobas viewpoints.
Fish River Lodge sits on the western rim of the Fish River Canyon, the largest canyon in Africa at about 160 km long and close to 550 m deep in places. Most visitors see the canyon from the public viewpoints near Hobas, inside the ǀAi-ǀAis/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park. This lodge is on the far side, in the privately owned Canyon Nature Park, and it is sold as the only lodge built right on the canyon edge.
What to expect
The chalets are stone with big glass fronts, set in a line along the rim with the main building in the middle, and each has an outdoor shower as well as the indoor one. The lodge’s own site puts the Canyon Nature Park at 55,000 ha, while the tour operators that sell it say about 45,000 ha, so the size depends on who you read. Either way it runs for some 75 km along the canyon, where Hartmann’s mountain zebra, kudu, oryx and springbok come to the permanent pools.
The lodge runs its own activities. There are walks along the rim, some self-guided, a full-day drive by 4x4 down to the river pools with lunch at the bottom, sundowner drives, e-bike rides and longer guided hikes with nights camped in the canyon. These hikes cover the western side and are separate from the NWR Hobas to ǀAi-ǀAis trail.
Practical details
- Dinner is usually served indoors, and outside by candlelight on warm evenings.
- The longer hikes generally run only in the cooler months, roughly April to September.
- Children are accepted.
Good to know
Because the lodge is on the western side, driving round to the Hobas viewpoints during a stay is not practical, so plan to use the lodge’s own outings instead. The rim is windy, enough that the lodge hands out earplugs at check-in. The pool is not heated.
Last updated 10 October 2026. Sources: Fish River Lodge, Wikipedia, Fish River Canyon, Expert Africa, Fish River Lodge, ATI Holidays, Fish River Lodge.
The cameras that found hyenas behind the canyon rim
Between May and October 2023 researchers strapped 42 camera traps to rocks and trees across the Canyon Nature Park, each 30 to 40 cm off the ground, half on the plateau and half down in the canyon. They covered 134 days of the dry season. Brown hyenas walked past 14 of the cameras.
The survey was run by an Italian group, Wildlife Initiative, with the Canyon Nature Trust, and came out in the South African Journal of Science in 2025 with Veronica Ramello as lead author. One co-author is Len le Roux, a co-owner of the lodge with Karen le Roux. The authors call it the first close study of brown hyena in the canyon. The animals favour the plateau, the flat ground behind the chalets where most of the antelope live, and the busiest cameras were in the side canyons, which the hyenas seem to use as staircases between top and bottom.
They also keep different hours. The hyenas were active at night and every person on the cameras was photographed by day, so the two hardly met. That squares with what visitors report. In Expert Africa’s tally of what its travellers have seen here since 2018, nobody logged a hyena or a leopard. About four in ten saw zebra and roughly a third saw oryx. The animal the cameras caught most was springbok. A couple who hiked in September 2018 listed a herd of kudu a long way off, two ostriches and a few baboons.
What the sheep years took away
The paper is blunt about why the list is short. Lion and spotted hyena were wiped out here in the last century, in the years of small-stock farming and hunting, and poison and traps killed the scavengers too. The park dates from 1995. Leopard, cheetah, caracal, aardwolf and honey badger are all on its list now. Len le Roux told Travel News Namibia in 2024 that the park and two neighbouring properties had taken out all their fences.
The lodge is younger than the park. It was built in 2008 and 2009 to a design by the Namibian architect Andy Chase, opened in July 2009, and had its interiors redone early in 2023. The buildings stand 5 to 8 m from the drop and there is no fence.
Jelly Legs and two stone camps
The lodge’s hike is a different thing from the public trail on our Fish River Canyon page, where you carry everything and stay down at the river for about five days. Here a vehicle drops you at the top of a gorge called Jelly Legs. It is about 19 km down and along to the rock pools, where you swim, and then a 6 km climb to Camp Eternity. The next day is 6.7 km to Mushroom Rock and a 3.9 km climb to Camp Edge, on the lip of the rim. At both camps the tents stand inside dry-packed stone gabions. The last morning is 9.3 km home.
Why it blows, and the last 19 km
The lodge puts the wind down to warm air rising out of the canyon into cooler air above, all year round. One guest who came in February 2024 wrote that it blew the coffee out of the cup, and liked it. Another, in December that year, could hardly sleep for the noise.
The other thing people mention is the road. From the B4 it is 85 km of the D463 and then a 19 km lodge track. The couple from 2018 found the D463 pretty good and passed the grader at work on it. A traveller in November 2025 called it the worst D road of the whole trip, left by the D459 and found that far better, so it probably comes down to when the grader last went through. The lodge track had a 20 km/h limit and speed bumps in 2018 and later guests still call it bumpy. Guests put the day drive to the canyon floor at seven to nine hours and say it is rough going, so two nights is the least that makes sense.
