So long and thanks for the Fish

We reached Von Trotha’s grave just after sunrise on the last day when everything was cool except my burning feet. 

Leutnant Thilo von Trotha. Hier ruht in Gott, 27 years old when he was shot in the back during peace negotiations with the Bondelswart-Nama in a place where trust is as scarce as water. 

While the others pondered the uncertain circumstances that had brought him to his rest in one of the most desolate places on earth, I wondered if he had been buried with his boots on and if he would mind swapping them for mine.

In Cape Town, the salesman had warned me. “La Sportivas run narrow. And they won’t stretch.”

But the heart wants what the heart wants. Never mind that the boots doubled the cost of the trip, including petrol to and from Ai Ais in southern Namibia along with park fees and enough food and coffee for five days. Everybody told me get good boots for the Fish.

We sat at the grave and tried not to think of the 20 or so clicks that still lay ahead to the cold beer and hot springs at Ai Ais. 

The seven of us had covered roughly 55km and two years from the morning during lockdown when an email pinged in from Amsterdam. “Hey, PK,” she said, “wanna do the Fish?”

I imagined it would be like us crawling out of our bunkers once the pandemic was over, blinking at the sunlight. By the time we started the trek into the canyon in June 2022, just four of the 30 people who had put up their hands two years earlier looked down into the canyon depths from the viewpoint at the start. The rest had been scattered to the winds by divorce, financial ruin, life and death. 

There are many reasons why people put hiking the Fish River Canyon on their bucket lists. It’s hard. It’s the second-oldest canyon in the world after the Grand. It’s empty and often silent. It is an exercise in myth making.

The canyon starts near the town of Seeheim and runs for 160km before it finally opens out into a floodplain near Ai Ais, a resort whose hot springs and palm trees take on a mythical quality of their own for hikers trudging downriver. 

Its depth ranges between 300-700m deep. In some places it is 27km wide but mostly it winds though a narrow defile, deep enough so that even when its rims are lit by the rising sun, the canyon floor will still be dark and cold. 

For me, trouble started at kilometre zero of the descent, as soon as I felt the 17kg on my back travel down my spine and into my big toes. “This,” I thought, “is not going to end well.”

The descent comes as a shock to most. A fall here will screw up your day magnificently. In 2.5km as the crow plummets, you drop 600m on a path made grisly with loose stone and rusty chains in the trickier places.

Our descent, as it turned, was trouble-free. But what we traded daylight for safety and we made only a few kilometres before nightfall.

We camped on a shelf of sand sloping gently to the green river. Night came quickly as it does here, bringing with it a deep and profound darkness. There was no moon which was just as well. Social media is full of complaints about what it is like to sleep in the canyon under a full moon, frozen like a buck in the beam of a torch.

Dinner was instant food cooked on hiking stoves. A mouthful of red wine. A piece of biltong. Lots of thoughts.

Ahead lay 80km of deep winding desert canyon. There are two escape routes, both so rugged that the cure is worse than the injury. 

On the upside, there was lots of water from a heavy rainy season. We would not have to dig for water (as hikers are doing this year) nor carry more than a litre or two at a time, save for on the shortcuts that took us away from the river’s course.

Our leader roused us well before dawn on the second day. My toes throbbed. 

“You can’t expect your body to do what you haven’t trained it for,” she said, as I laced my boots amid wails and profanities.

The dawns are always the best time in the canyon. The shadows lift as light spills down the slopes. That grotesque figure from the night? Just a tree scrabbling for life among the boulders. And that ogre over there? Just hunchbacked rock looking down on our camp.

Over there the gleam and trickle of water running over stone. Filling water bottles — first for coffee and then for morning’s trek — the first of the daily routines. One of life’s greatest pleasures might be crouching by a clean-flowing river and letting water trickle into a waterbottle, listening to birdsong and baboons barking, while the light steals across the land.

And so we trudged on to the Vespa. 

Perched on a cairn not far from the start of the hike, the Vespa is a monument to vanity and stupidity, the remnant of a poorly considered plan to ride three scooters the length of the canyon. Many strange dreams may be hatched in Cape Town bars as the winter blues set in, but this was surely the dumbest.

The first scooter was lost when it got away from its handlers on the descent, covering the 600m to the canyon floor in record velocity. The second drowned during a river crossing, never to be seen again. The third, after days of pulling, pushing and hoisting over obstacles, was abandoned where its motor and clutch burnt to a crisp.

Now it is a milestone, a place to swing your leg over for one of those canyon rituals.

Hiking the canyon is all about rituals. The hurried scoops of cereal for breakfast, eaten while standing, bowl in one hand, the other trying to stuff a sleeping bag into a backpack. Or that daily moment of discovery that the backpack that has been religiously emptied of food and wine and water still feels heavier every day.

The biggest ritual of all, though, is the slogging. A note for the unwary: the Fish River Canyon is not hiking as you know it. Except for the shortcuts and the few hardened floodplains, there are few compacted paths. Instead there are boulder fields interspersed with wide deserts of soft river sand. There is no meditative, monk-like rambling down a camino to ecstasy, only grit (a lot of it in your boots) and bloody mindedness. Doing the Fish isn’t a great hike. It’s a victory.

So take trekking poles for the boulders and gaiters for the sand.

Most of the time, I hiked alone with my thoughts, following the canyon’s curves downstream. We paused often to sip water under stunted trees and in the shade of fallen rocks. The main thing was to make the miles before stopping somewhere beautiful to stretch out our sleeping bags and marvel at the canyon walls  turning red with the dropping sun.

By the morning of the fifth day, the last, I could barely get my boots on without a stream of bitter invective which I hoped burnt their ears in Ziano di Fiemme at the edge of the faraway Dolomites.  

My pack, meanwhile, was the shape — and weight, apparently — of one of the fabled wild horses of which we had seen just two, not counting the sun-bleached bones of a third surrounded by horse dung.

On the last morning we broke camp at Four Finger Rock before dawn and trekked to Von Trotha’s grave. His comrades had buried him in a part of the canyon where it turns slightly eastward so that he would, in eternity, face the sunrise.

Another boulder field followed but we were making good time. At the Kochas Drift causeway, we saw our first road in five days. I looked back at Four Finger Rock and wondered if I would ever come this way again.

There was no time to dwell on that. Bandage Pass lay ahead. Then Fool’s Gold Corner and a place on the map called Stinkwater. 

Two more bends in the river and another 10km and it was done. Someone rang the bell for us as we slogged in to Ai Ais. There was a picture of wild horses above the bar. The boots came off for the last time.

Would I ever hike the Fish again? No.

Is it the most beautiful place I’ve ever been? Quite possibly.