There’s a moment, before the start of Namibia’s Fish River Canyon hike, when your courage threatens to fail. Step up to the viewing platform, and the canyon unfolds before you; with each foot forward, the world falls further away beneath you. The drop is precipitous — and breathtakingly beautiful.
Which makes it all the more surreal, two hours later, to look back up at the starfish-like spines of the platform, now almost 500m above, and know that you’ve found the furthest reaches of that terrifying, tortuous scar, carved over millennia into the barren landscape.
With the 1.7km descent behind you, you are now at "kilometre zero": ahead lie 66km (87 if you skip the short cuts) of river, sand, boulders, pebbles, desert. All you have for the next five days is in the pack on your back; your water is filtered straight from the river.
There is no cellphone signal. In fact, within the canyon proper, there’s no sign of civilisation at all, other than a rather absurd tap jammed between rocks on the descent and the lone, garishly painted Vespa "Vidi" — the last whisper of an ill-fated attempt in the 1960s to tackle the route by scooter ("Veni" didn’t survive the brutal descent; "Vici" was swallowed by the river).
Bar two emergency exits — at 14km and 50km (on the shorter route) — you’re locked in.
But the place you’ve entered is one of multitudes. The river snakes through the canyon — the second largest in the world, after Arizona’s Grand Canyon — in a series of S-bends, each a portal to a new world: wide, sandy beaches; windswept slopes; black rock that time has tortured into a jagged, jutting parody of itself.
There are fields of boulders, multicoloured in the strange pink softness of the morning light; beaches of pebbles, rubbed smooth by the elements and the years; flat, unforgiving shale, where patches of fool’s gold glitter in the sun. Over it all, the golden cliffs stand sentinel.
Eyes on the track
"The thing with hiking," a mercenary-turned-campsite operator told me a few years back, "is that you have to focus. Take your eyes off the track, stop paying attention, and your ankle’s gone. If you’re alone or in the wrong place, you die."
He’s right, of course. But in part, that’s what gives hiking its appeal. It’s an activity that manages to be at once communal and solitary. For much of the time — and particularly on the Fish River hike — you’re alone with your thoughts, watching your step as you pick your way over boulders.
The mercenary’s words returned to me repeatedly over the first two days of the hike. The weight of your rucksack makes you ungainly, your footing unsure. Loose boulders, algae-smoothed stones, shifting sands. Always, your eyes need to be on your feet.
In case you forget, the beat of helicopter blades in the near-perfect silence is a stark and sombre reminder — some poor unfortunate behind is being medevaced out.
For all the looking down, though, it’s as important to stop and look up, to look around. There’s so much to see. The vastness of the space — the timelessness of it. The greenery that stubbornly clings to life in this inhospitable place: bright yellow flowers growing out of cracked clay; trees perched awkwardly on the slopes. The elusive wild horses (we spied two). The strange shimmer of the shale.
The water is a soothing presence, and constant. Flooding in January has left it high this year, so there’s no shortage of swimming spots, and no need to draw drinking water from stagnant pools. But by May, it’s already receding, leaving a mesmerising symmetry of lines in its banks.
There is something liberating about being able to drop your pack whenever the mood strikes and dip into the icy water. It’s freezing — a breath-catching contrast from the relentless heat. But walk away from the river, and you’re immediately struck by just how harsh and unforgiving the landscape is. It’s a death zone but for the water cutting through it.
Find your own ‘Gandalf’
One of my favourite things about hiking is the early mornings: sipping coffee in the stillness and feeling like the only person in the world.
On "The Fish", that moment of solitary contemplation is amplified. The sun has yet to find the bottom of the canyon; it shines gold on the flat-faced cliffs, but on the ground the light is soft, the colours delicate. You breathe it all in as you sit, in silence, filtering your water for the day.
Of course, the solitude is an illusion. Spaced ahead and behind you are numerous other groups (30 people start the hike each day). Some you never see after the descent — they bullet through the canyon, a singular focus on speed over leisure. Others you catch up with near the end, when they stop and look around, having registered their folly at rushing the experience.
For the most part, you keep encountering the same faces. You don’t know all their names, but in passing each other multiple times a day you’ve built an easy camaraderie. You look out for each other. "The couple" share their duct tape with us when our tent and trekking poles break; "The girls" vigorously, and democratically, debate each turn.
"The family" and their patriarch "Gandalf" (our moniker), a 74-year-old Fish River veteran completing the hike for the 30th time, became our guiding light. Follow their footprints and you know you’re on the right track. Take their generous advice, and you’ll find the best spots, too.
Fish River purists that they are, I’m sure they silently scoffed at our decision to bring tents rather than sleep rough under the stars. But rain on the first two nights, the whipping wind, the giant insects swarming our headlamps and the size of the scorpion (big tail, baby pincers) mere metres from our camp more than vindicated our call, I reckon.
With no real prescripts for the hike — there are no campsites, no specified daily distance to cover, no set side of the river to walk on — it helps to talk to people along the way, particularly those who’ve done it (29 times) before.
We have Gandalf’s crew to thank for suggesting we spend the second night at the sulphur springs (and for rescuing my shoes, bobbing down the river as I looked impotently on, having taken a tumble). The springs are only 15km in, but those kilometres are heavy going. They’re also high reward: beautiful beaches, idyllic rest spots, ethereal sunsets on sheer rockface.
The hike flattens out somewhat from there, the landscape changing subtly, and you hit an easy stride on the flats.
The last few days remain beautiful, if less dramatic. Sheer rockface gradually gives way to more distant mountain peaks; the scrubland becomes more prevalent. One moment you look back and realise that you’ve passed Four-Finger Rock — the last post of the canyon proper.
Signs of civilisation begin to appear – tyre tracks, a concrete causeway, the "Pink Palace" (a huddle of painted structures squatting in the sun), a no-entry sign.
The scent of death
The terrain, however, remains relentlessly unforgiving. The carcass of a wild horse — its bones bleached white, leather clinging to bone, and fur to leather — is an almost redundant reminder. "I suppose everything has to die somewhere," one of my companions muses prosaically.
Death defines the last days in other ways too — most unsettlingly at "the grave of the German soldier". It’s set slightly back from the path, up a small hillock on a windswept plain — a godforsaken place to die. But for all its remoteness, the grave has become something of a shrine. Tucked among the rocks are tacky plastic carnations, messages-in-bottles, bundled sticks and other offerings to Thilo von Trotha (1877-1905). It left me feeling distinctly queasy.
A lieutenant in the German colonial forces, Von Trotha is the nephew of Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha, the commander best known for signing the extermination order for the Herero and Nama people. Thilo was killed, ostensibly, while in negotiations with the Nama — but there’s little detail on the circumstances.
I subsequently discovered in a footnote in Jeremy Sarkin’s Germany’s Genocide of the Herero that, by at least one account, Thilo took part in some killings himself. The fact that he’s celebrated as a hero by an alt-right website lends a nauseating quality to the graveside veneration.
It’s an unwelcome reminder of the world we’ve escaped — and to which we will shortly return. It leaves me wishing we’d tarried longer in the canyon’s more inaccessible, less problematic spaces.
That feeling swiftly evaporates in the interminable final kilometres to the finish. Now, the prospect of a toasted sandwich and a cold beer at the Ai-Ais resort propels us forward with a momentum of its own.
Once we round the last bend in the river and clear a short slope, we suddenly find ourselves strolling through the resort campsite. As we shrug off our packs, peel off dust-caked shoes and almost skip up the steps to the restaurant patio, our fellow hikers ring in our arrival with a bell mounted on the wall, and a hearty round of applause. The ritual is repeated each time another group of weary hikers arrives.
It’s an emotional moment, infused with a camaraderie that’s rooted in five days of shared joy, pain and indescribable beauty — a fitting end to an unforgettable hike.
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