Marsh Multinational Hiked the Fish River Canyon

Everything changed overnight.

A message came through from the advance party that the road just before the Namibian border had been washed away by a flash flood. It was like a divine warning.. that we ignored.

There was a way around – via the coast – adding 400km and 4 hours to our already monumental drive of 800km. It was decided that we were to leave at 4am to give us a chance of arriving in daylight in the resort of Ai-Ais where we would spend the night before and after the hike.

3.45am arrived. Jen and Kevin still asleep. Martin had been unable to charge his phone (Jen’s fault) and had therefore decided not to sleep at all, and was sitting on his balcony chain-smoking. Gavin (driver) was the only one raring to go and finally managed to get us all in the car. We drove to Andrew (Kev’s brother)’s house to pick up the rest of the troops and we were off in convoy, heading for Namibia.

It was quite a morning. Kevin was in full entertainment mode, hopped up on last night’s double vodka cokes and jelly babies. Martin was in charge of music (we began with Linkin Park). You can just imagine….

Jen, aided by a silk sleepmask and her Teddy, managed to sleep through the first 5 hours of Kevin’s ‘banter’ but was swiftly switched into the front seat in favour of him when she woke up.

As we sped up through Western Cape and into Northern Cape, the landscape went from very green to mountainous and finally to desert as far as the eye could see. Kevin kept up a patter about the types of rocks and vegetation that we were seeing (often being corrected by Gavin) which could only be cut off by yet ANOTHER game of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ read out from Martin’s phone. All four of us were millionaires by the time we got to Steinkopf, 80km from the Namibian border and where the road divides… We were able to spend our winnings on 2 trips to the loo, a ‘roostekoek’ (like a stotty filled with grated cheese, butter & bacon!) and a hand-made catapult for Gavin (“Baboon scarer!”).

In Steinkopf there was a police roadblock related to the washed away road but miraculously after some fine Walker (both Kevin AND his brother, Andrew) negotiations and some calls to the South African Highways Agency we were allowed through after about an hour. We’re still not entirely sure how legit this was!!!

We had left the flat open desert and entered a valley when we suddenly saw the road, or lack thereof. Not a drop of water remained but neither did much of the tarmac! The road had been rerouted onto the dirt / gravel on the hillside and we were all thanking our lucky stars that Avis had upgraded us to a bigger and sturdier SUV!

Just before the border the other car indicated a stop on the side of the road. The non-hikers were worried about the rations of nice cheese and meats they had in their coolbox, as apparently the Namibian customs officials tend to do their grocery shopping in the boots of people crossing the border! The goodies in question was redistributed, blocks of cheese stashed under Gavin’s binoculars, steaks in the tent bags, even Kevin offered to conceal a salami in his trousers – but was turned down.

In the end, despite tensions running high, the border crossing was fairly stress-free. About 8 forms each to fill in and the necessity of demonstrating to both the S.African and Namibian border police that we hadn’t stolen our hire car, and we were through.

We stopped at the first service station and celebratory road beers were bought, along with an ice lolly for the driver. We were about to repatriate the food to the coolbox when we noticed a smart car with blacked out windows and no number plates had stopped next to us and was watching us intently. Clearly there HAD been a whiff of cheese detected and we were being surveilled. We swiftly got on the road again and the car followed us for about a kilometre before obviously getting bored and heading back to the border station to wait for the next arrival with a boot full of charcuterie.

The landscape on arrival in Namibia was even bleaker than on the South African side but impressively so. It felt like we had landed on the moon. For the first and last time on the trip, Jen said: “Kevin, this is amazing, thanks so much for bringing us here“.

The last two hours of the drive to Ai-Ais were fairly desperate. We’d been on the road for 10 hours already, with heroic Gavin driving the whole time. We were wildly casting around for new conversational topics, and failing. Switching from asphalt to dirt road, and then a kudu jumping in front of the car, provided some light relief but we were all very glad when we finally arrived in Ai-Ais just after 4pm.

In Ai-Ais there is a campsite, some ‘chalets’, a bar, a restaurant and a hot springs swimming pool. We checked in to our chalet (2 bedrooms, 4 adults.. the first demonstration of Kevin’s stellar organisational skills.. he was clearly looking for someone to spoon and there weren’t any takers) and made a beeline for the bar.

The rest of the evening involved a delicious dinner, drinking the bar dry of Chardonnay, allocation of hike rations and Kevin *very* nearly losing his rag with Jen and Gavin.