Grand Canyon - Eat Your Heart Out!

 

 

We've just spent part of the third day of our 20-day 'Nomad Adventure Tour' hiking around the Fish River Canyon here in southern Nambia. It is staggeringly awesome! It's arguably the second largest such canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in Arizona - 'arguably' second, because there's apparently another one in Ethiopia which challenges for second place. Frankly, and having never been to either of the other two, we don't care whether it's 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the world - it's just spectacular!!! - and the three exclamation marks are definitely warranted. For those of you who might care about these things, Fish River Canyon is 160km in length, 27km in width, and the dramatic inner canyon reaches a depth of 550m.  

It's part of the !Ai-!Ais Transfrontier Park (the exclamation marks this time represent a complicated clicking noise in the local Nama language, though they're happy to accept the European version pronounced 'eye-ice'). The term means 'burning water', because of the hot thermal water spring, rich in sulphur, chloride and fluoride, which bubbles up from the ground at an average temperature of around 65 degrees C - hot enough to boil an egg in 3 minutes, should you wish. (Some people say that !Ai-!Ais didn't always mean 'burning water' but that became its meaning after the first San bushman, having dug down to seek water, scalded himself badly and shouted a kind of expletive in shock and anger.) The spring emerges at the base of the mountains right in the middle of the encampment where we've just stayed for the night. Apparently, the place has in the past been used as a military base camp - by the German military during the Nama uprising of 1903-07, and again in 1915 by the South Africans licking their wounds after the South-West Africa campaign. Now, however, it's a beautiful spa resort and national monument/conservation area. After our lengthy, and very dusty, truck journey, and the hike around the Fish River Canyon, it was just wonderful to get to Ai-Ais in time for a swim in the indoor pool, which was as warm as a bath - cooled down from its 65-degree heat before it fills both the outdoor and indoors pools here - and which was a good appetiser for the braai (BBQ, of pork chop, mealie-pap, and Afrikaans version of sauerkraut) which was cooked for us by Gertrude, our wonderful Zimbabwean chef/guide/trouble-shooter and diplomat, and Ella, her German kitchen assistant, here on a student internship.

Before we got to Fish River Canyon, we'd spent our first two days of the trip travelling vast, dusty distances through the Northern Cape of South Africa and into southern Nambia, stopping at a San Bushman's educational resource centre, !Kwa ttu, to learn about their traditional ways, and at a winery in Piketberg in the Northern Cape for a very interesting tour and wine-tasting, every one of us coming away very happy with a free bottle of wine of our choosing! On our first night in Nambia, we stayed in some lovely African huts right beside the Orange River, which rises in the Drakensburg mountains in Lesotho, forms part of the international border between South Africa and Namibia at this point, as well as several provincial borders within South Africa on its 1,800 km route to the Atlantic. In the morning, on the little patch of well-watered grass right outside our hut, we were visited by a number of small birds, with bright red heads and backs, which we're still trying to identify, but which were pretty tame, coming right up to just a few yards from where we were sitting enjoying the early morning sun and the views across the river where more intrepid travellers were heading off in brightly coloured canoes.

The landscape over the past 3 days has been absolutely fascinating - from endless acres of veld/scrubland dotted with thousands of small and very caustic/poisonous 'milk bushes' to increasingly almost barren desert. Occasionally, we've travelled through some really rugged mountainous areas - many of them as flat-topped as the more famous Table Mountain. Apparently that's because the rest of the land through which we've travelled has actually sunk as a result of erosion during the ice-age, leaving behind vast tracts of much higher land which once covered the whole area, but which now appear to be mountains. (I'm sure there's a more geologically-correct way of explaining all this, which doubtless Carole in our book-group could give, but which I'm afraid I can't - must read up about it).

Travelling through this empty landscape, we've seen virtually no people at all, hardly any settlements or towns, and not a huge amount, given the acreage we've travelled through, in the way of wildlife. This might sound odd, given that since we started this safari tour we've spotted several ostriches, oryx, kudu, eland, springbok, mountain zebras (slightly different from their plain-dwelling cousins), feral horses, and one lone black-backed jackal.

The group we're with seem an interesting bunch. We're the only two Brits on board the truck; there are several people about our age - one Dutch couple, a German couple, another German and two Belgian men - as well as several much younger people probably between mid-30s and mid-40s: four fun-loving young German women travelling together, a Portuguese couple, and a Swiss woman (called Barbara, I'm delighted to report - it's unusual to find anyone that young with that name any more!), as well as a fascinating 80 year-old Polish woman who fled her country to escape the Communist regime, and took up residence in Sweden many decades ago. She's a much-travelled woman too - mainly travelling solo to very remote parts of the world. Her story is that, some 30 years ago, she had a terminal diagnosis following a mastectomy and chemo for breast-cancer. She decided then that, against all medical advice, she would travel and see as much of the world as possible before she died. 30 years on, she still travels adventurously several times a year, and seems to have covered most of the world, including just about every African nation, most of the central Asian 'istans' (apart from Afghanistan, which she's going to next year apparently!), Australasia, Siberia and Antartica. During these 30 years, she's had another mastectomy, an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from her spine, several chemo- and radio-therapy courses, and recently a knee operation following a road accident. She's convinced - probably rightly - that her longevity, despite all the prognoses, is down to her determination to keep travelling. She's a diminutive, tough, and possibly cantakerous woman - and a real inspiration!

Oh, and before signing off this blog, it's perhaps worth sharing a little anecdote with you . A few times during our travels, our guide, Gertrude (or Gertie, though with her Zimbabwean accent it sounds more like 'Gettie') has once or twice pointed out little settlements or small towns which she explains, with absolutely no hint of irony, were started by missionaries "for the benefit of" the Namas/the Khoi Khoi/the San people, etc. Each time it reminds me of the following quote from that wonderful Archbishop, Desmond Tutu:

"When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the bible and we had the land. They said 'let us pray'. And when we opened our eyes, we had the bible and they had the land."!!

Can't you just hear his infectious high-pitched cackle as you read those words.....?