Marsh Multinational Hiked the Fish River Canyon

Jen looks quite smiley in that video. She was not smiley. She’d worked out in the middle of the night that at the pace they were going they were going to miss their flight home and had had a demi panic attack. Many more miserable nights stretched ahead and despair set in. She didn’t talk much that morning.

In fact, no one spoke much. Kevin was quietly working out how many kilometres they needed to cover on each of the next 3 1/2 days to make it out and back to Cape Town in time for the dinner Jen had booked them at ‘Africa’s Best Restaurant’, and Martin was just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.

It was another day of very slow progress, mainly scrambling over boulders but with a healthy dose of sand too, biên sur. The landscape didn’t change at all…sand, rocks and the canyon walls… not that we were able to take in the landscape much as you were just constantly looking at where your next footstep was. It was as boring as it was difficult and we were achieving a pace of about 2km/hour. It was not looking good for our flight home.

Things of note on day 2 –

• It was less hot

• We passed a Vespa, one of the only discernible landmarks the canyon has to offer, abandoned by some crazy South African scooter enthusiasts in the late 60’s (https://www.classicscooterist.com/veni-vidi-vici/).

• Lunch – salami, cheese & crackers. Martin: “Just the thing when you’re thirstier than you’ve ever been in your life“

As everyone had been quite grumpy that morning, we’d started off a lot later than we perhaps ought to have. By the time 4.30pm came round we hadn’t covered a lot of ground and there was nowhere suitable to camp for the night (Our standards for ‘suitable’ were fairly low – we needed water, however scummy, and a bit of shelter from the elements).

At 15km there was a hot springs (called, ironically, ‘Palm Springs’) and this is where we had to get to. It was an almighty effort but there was nothing for it but to keep going as it got colder, darker and windier..! Chris piped up, “There must be suffering!“

We crossed a final sandpit and heard the boys ahead shouting, “Water!“, “Baboons!“. Sadly by the time we got to them the baboons had made off but there was a lot of water and we managed to find a sheltered spot that was clearly popular with many of the hikers on the trail, too popular in fact from the amount of dirty loo roll (!!) and litter strewn around. BUT, beggars couldn’t be choosers and we set up camp.

There really was a VERY hot spring which Kevin and the boys took advantage of for a wash. The rest of of us sat on the floor next to our rucksacks feeling rather chilly and quietly waited for Kevin’s kitchen to open for the evening.

Kevin re-emerged in the camp like a red swamp monster and QUITE without warning decided to strip off to put his pj’s on.. the horror of accidentally seeing his bare bottom is something that will be with Jen for some time.

Supper was another Andrew Walker special of beef stew which again, in combination with some of Kevin’s special box wine, cheered all of us up.

This is probably the point where I should announce to you all that Martin Pugh was shockingly declining alcohol. Now I hope you can now really understand how bad things were.

Anyway, after dinner it was really quite dark and we all fairly quickly decided to get ready for bed. At this point, at the prospect of another awful 12 hours in her sleeping bag, Jen shed her first tears of this week.

To cheer her up, Kevin offered to set up her sleeping quarters and make sure she had a comfier night. It was only then that he deigned to demonstrate to her and Martin how to dig a hole for your hip under your sleeping mat which, by the way, is a GAME CHANGER.

Everyone was tucked up, most were asleep and Jen was drifting off, thinking that perhaps this wild-sleeping lark was ok, especially as she’d only needed to get up for a wee 5 times so far. Suddenly a large raindrop plopped on her forehead.

This was apparently the one point of the trip when Kevin really panicked. Our sleeping bags were the one item of comfort that any of us had in the canyon and they were getting wet. Jen sat bolt upright and glared at him. Meanwhile Martin was angrily packing up his sleeping bag and rucksack and he stomped off and sat on a rock.

Luckily it was very light and only lasted about 10 minutes but Kevin’s card was irrecoverably marked by this point.