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Published: January 23rd 2018
Cederberg to Fish River Canyon was a full day driving, 8 hours in total. We stopped off at Springbok just before the border, a small dusty place with a frontier town vibe. The local industry seemed to revolve exclusively around vehicle repairs, luckily for us. After fixing the lock the previous day, we’d uncovered another car problem. The fridge in the back should run off a second car battery, which didn’t seem to be working. It functioned fine while driving, but cut off as soon as we killed the engine. We had the battery tested at a branch of SupaQuick and were told it was working but flat, meaning there must be a problem with the charging circuit. Off we went to find the local electrical mechanic. He identified the problem almost immediately, when an important looking connector fell apart in his hands. I was beginning to form the impression that while the car itself was relatively new, the various accessories had been salvaged from older vehicles. It was also obvious nobody had checked the car properly before giving it to us. The mechanic went off in search of spare parts. We hung around his shop drinking ginger ale while Sam
tried to talk me out of using swearwords in my email to Car Hire Guy.
It was a quick fix in the end. The border crossing to Namibia was smooth and painless compared with our previous experiences in East Africa. Very quickly the landscape became much more arid. Not sandy red dunes, that comes later. Wide gravel roads and flat stony plains, grey in colour, led us towards Fish River Canyon.
After 2 hours we arrived at Canyon Roadhouse, the only visible structure in any direction, a place so strange I could easily have believed we’d hallucinated it. The Roadhouse is a combination hotel / bar / campsite / mechanic, and they’ve really gone all out on their mechanics shop theme. It was a bizarre combination of Africana and Americana, like catching malaria somewhere in a Southern African desert and having a weird fever dream about Route 66.
An assortment of vintage vehicles in varying states of decay lay scattered around the property, both inside and out. Motorbikes, tractors, enormous trucks, dozens of cars. Alien looking desert plants pushed up through empty windscreens and curled round flattened tyres. Old wrecks outside were slowly merging with the desert,
sun bleaching paint, softening colours until they match the sand and stone. Inside the bar, walls were plastered with number plates and beams festooned with rusty tools. A lovingly restored vintage ambulance sat parked in the middle of the restaurant, defiantly in the way of everything.
This was where we were camping for the night. We sat down and ordered some cold beers. A single Christmas bauble was taped to the beer pump, in honour of the season.
The next morning we got up early and headed out to see the Canyon. Fish River Canyon is 140km long, up to 27km wide and 500m deep in places. It seems to be caught in an ongoing feud with Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge over who takes second place to the Grand Canyon for title of biggest in the world. At certain times of year, it’s possible to apply for a special permit and hike 5 days along the length of the canyon floor. Needless to say, this was not the correct time of year. We had hoped to do a day hike, perhaps walk down into the canyon and then back up. On inquiring about this at the entrance gate,
we were directed towards the enormous sign which clearly stated “ABSOLUTELY NO DAY HIKES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER”. Or words to that effect. We tried our camp site and were told there are viewpoints you can drive to but no walks (for this is a harsh and unforgiving desert at the height of summer, foolish Europeans). On asking again if there was anything at all we could do that wasn’t just a tourist viewpoint, the receptionist took out a map and directed us towards a 4x4 trail that ran along the canyon’s edge. This looked more promising.
We drove to the main viewpoint first, then to hiker’s point, which offered equally impressive scenery but more peace and quiet. The canyon was stunning, and so very massive. This was December, and so the river had almost disappeared, leaving behind just a few scattered pools. Despite this dryness, the shape of it leaves you with such a clear impression of water, of slow persistent forces and incomprehensible amounts of time.
Still, I feel canyons are a lot harder to appreciate than equivalently sized hills or mountains. If it were inverted into peaks instead of troughs, you could stand back and
admire the whole thing from a distance. The problem with canyons is you can only see tiny fraction at once, so it’s hard to appreciate the scale. Perhaps I just lack imagination.
It was also very challenging to photograph nicely, way beyond my level of skill. No matter what I did it just looked flat, losing any sense of depth and grandeur.
Pretty happy with our canyon experience so far, we set off along the 4x4 trail. This did not seem to be a popular choice. We saw no other cars. There was only one brief steep technical section, but the road did seem to be made up exclusively of razor sharp jagged stones, which may have been what was putting people off.
We stopped to have a closer look at the surreal looking quiver trees. Native only to Namibia and little bits of South Africa, they look like an impressionist’s sculpture of a tree. Almost metallic, copper and silver coloured, bark carved with rough angulated strokes.
After a little more driving we paused to stretch our legs. The track was a fair way back from the edge at this point, but I wandered over to
see what the canyon looked like from here. Honestly, it looked incredible. Vastly preferable to the more accessible viewpoints we’d seen earlier. Here the riverbed formed a tight loop, almost pinching off the rock in the middle to create an island. I finally managed to take a picture of the kind I wanted, something that conveyed a sense of scale and shape.
As we jumped back in the car, I felt positively euphoric about having discovered our own private and far superior canyon viewpoint. My smugness rapidly evaporated as we pulled away and realised we had a flat tyre. Not just flat, shredded. I couldn’t believe it. We spent 5 months driving around East Africa in 2013 without a single puncture, despite Sam's enthusiastic off-roading. I’d thought we were immune, but I guess our tyre karma ran out. Sam made me crawl under the car to set the jack and unclip the spare, his argument being that its easier for me because I'm smaller. After witnessing the Cape Cobra incident at the previous campsite, I was now obviously convinced that the underbelly of the car must be crawling with venomous snakes.
On wrestling the spare tyre out, I
discovered it was also flat. Our only spare. I quietly swore to myself that if I die here in this desert, I will pass up the chance for a peaceful afterlife in order to come back and haunt the absolute fuck out of car hire guy. We weren’t going to die, of course. We had 25 litres of water, a tent and several weeks of food. The fridge would run out of batteries and we'd have to drink warm gin and tonic, but that's about the worst that would happen before someone eventually came this way, even if it took several days, which it might. We could even wait until dawn when it would be cooler, and hike the 15km to the main road.
We put the spare tyre on anyway, because it was only soft as opposed to shredded. After inflating to normal pressures it still seemed to be holding, so we made our way back to camp with extreme caution. It got there, but clearly had a slow puncture and was flat again within a few hours. We borrowed the phone from reception (there was no mobile signal anywhere) but Sam refused to let me deliver a
bollocking to Car Hire Guy, who over the course of only 3 days had become my arch nemesis. We were still, he reminded me, relying on this person to rescue us if anything goes seriously wrong with the car. I was furious, obviously. The other problems had been inconvenient and annoying, but a flat spare tyre in a desert is dangerous.
Sam’s conversation with Car Hire Guy was not helpful. The staff at Roadhouse seemed to think most larger hire companies should be able to get a tyre sent out to us. Not our guy. The nearest place we could buy a new one was Keetmanshoop, around 2 hours away. Luckily the mechanic paraphernalia at Roadhouse wasn’t just for show, and there actually was someone on site who could fix a tyre. He was out when we asked, so we hung around the bar awaiting his return.
Midway through our second beers, a group of European tourists piled out of their overland truck and into our bar, huddling together at one end of the counter behind their local guide. They communicated with the bartender entirely through this guide, despite the fact the bartender clearly spoke perfect English. They
instructed their guide to request a bag of ice, he asked the bartender in English, who replied in English. The guide then turned around and repeated this reply to the group, in English. This bizarre exchange continued for some time.
I try to avoid staying in places the big overland trucks use. In the past we've driven into a campsite, seen one parked then reversed right back out again. I know there's an element of travel snobbery here, and I guess I shouldn't judge people for how they choose to see the world. They were probably looking at us, covered head to toe in dust with our flat tyre propped up against the bar, congratulating themselves on the wise decision not to go it alone.
The mechanic managed to patch two small punctures in the spare tyre, though he noted it had already been repaired once before. The shredded tyre was of course beyond help. We’d just have to suck it up and buy a new one, as I couldn’t think of a legitimate way to blame that on Car Hire Guy.
Unfortunately the nearest tyre shop was 200km away, along empty desert roads. We’d have drive
it on our repeatedly patched tyre of questionable reliability and with no spare, but we really had no other choice.
That evening we attempted to cheer ourselves up with a braai, but it was too windy and nothing cooked. After a while I turned the food and was briefly encouraged to see it had gone slightly brown, but this turned out to be just dirt from the grill. Our fire was so pitiful it prompted a South African guy to come over and offer to lend us his gas camping stove. We explained that we had one ourselves but were determined to braai this steak, even if it takes all night and gives us E.Coli.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
Given your close calls with death in a desert...
I think I would also opt for the overland trucks.