Fish River Canyon

Dropping down the B1 towards the South African boarder, the next major town is Keetmanshoop – there's not much to the town except a Spar and a Telecom Namibia office (we ended up paying a kid N$4 to 'watch' the car). Close to town is a quivertree forest; our destination for the evening.














The Quivertree Forest Restcamp also has a couple of enclosed cheetahs, which they feed at 4, and allow you to stroke them – Kirsten got in just in time. Unfortunately the wind had been gusting all day (making driving the camper-van a bit dodgy at times), and no sooner had the cats been fed, the storm arrived.














We made it back to the van before the heavens really opened, accompanied by a spot of lightening. The van was being buffered heavily by the wind, and it did make us glad (for the first time) not to be in a tent. The storm passed as quickly as it has come, and with it the wind died, leaving some rather nice sunset light on the quivertrees. It also seamed to bring out the most hellish looking insects – two inch long bodies, with evil high pitched squeaks, and as we found out when we ran a few over; luminous green guts.














The other attraction in the area (and owned by the same people) is the Giants Playground – a large area of basalt boulders seemingly piled up in large stacks. It makes for an unusual landscape, and is certainly worth a visit if you're in the area (the same can be said for so many tourist attractions). The 5km road out to the site from the campground was literally covered in the hell insects; every few seconds you'd crunch a few of the monsters, who seemed to be feeding on their fallen brethren.














The main draw card in southern Namibia is Fish River Canyon. Whist it is not as deep as the Grand Canyon (550m versus almost a mile), standing on the rim it is no less impressive. The canyon follows a meandering path, with many large loops which offer fantastic vistas.

We stopped at the main viewpoint (which is the only one many people see), then a couple of the others than are accessible in a 2-wheel drive. There is a 4x4 track that follows the canyon for 20km, and although we had a Land-Cruiser, it's also a camper-van, so we were a little nervous about taking it down; nevertheless we went for it. The track is mainly a bumpy gravel track, but there are a couple of steep section with large boulders, that any vehicle with low clearance would come a cropper on.















After a rattling journey out, the view from Eagle's Rock was simply sublime. From here you can see three giant loops in the river far below you. We passed only one car on the way out here (if we'd broken down we'd have been there a while), so maybe it's better they leave the road as it is, so you don't have to share the view with anyone else.















There is a hike that does the 90km stretch of the canyon floor between just above the main lookout, to where it starts to peter out at Ai-Ais; this takes 5 days and only runs in the winter months between May and September. We stayed in the Hobas campsite near the trail start, and drove down to Ai-Ais the next day – this was arduous enough. From Ai-Ais you can walk into the canyon, the floor of which consist of sand and (further up) large boulder fields; the hike is definitely for those seeking a physical challenge rather than those seeking constantly changing scenery.















We spend our final night in Namibia in a very nice camp site on the Orange river near the boarder crossing at Noordoewer. The couple next to us had driven their Nissan from Switzerland, down west Africa via Gibraltar in four months, and were planning on driving up east Africa back to Switzerland over the next eight (I'm always jealous of people who have more adventurous travel plans than us).















We woke up with the Orange river four metres behind the van, and had a leisurely breakfast before discovering another puncture. I set to work, but couldn't operate the high lift jack (this turned out to be a little knackered). With a borrowed jack from our Swiss friends (who knew what they were doing), we got the wheel off, but couldn't release the spare as the mechanism had rather rusted up. We tried to find the hole to no avail, and this collimated in me rolling the wheel down and into the river , and standing knee deep, submerging a type and looking for bubbles.















After all than effort we put the wheel back on, pumped it up, and drove 20km to the nearest garage, who fixed it for about four quid - in hindsight we could have saved a lot of effort. So, slightly later than planned, we crossed the boarder into South Africa.