Lüderitz to Karios, Namibia

8 - 11 Nov 07

Fish River Canyon

After moving on each day for 3 consecutive days, we were relieved to be spending 3 consecutive nights at the Cañon Village lodge, Fish River Canyon. And we couldn’t have chosen a better place to do that.
Cañon Village was very attractively designed, the food was good with locally grown vegetables, our room was cool and the pool was squeaky clean. Also, there were some good walking trails from the lodge that we could explore without a guide.
There was only one organized excursion that we couldn’t miss and that was to Fish River Canyon. The canyon measures 160 km in length and up to 27 km in width, with a maximum depth of 550 m. It’s the second largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon. There is a 5-day hike that can be done in the canyon but it is closed at this time of year and, anyway, we preferred to see it all from above.
After our late afternoon walk, we stopped by the bar for a sundowners and met an English couple who also live in Switzerland, in Basel. The two men introduced themselves as ‘Ian’ and ‘Flemming’, creating quite a ‘Bond’. Like most other couples we met at the lodges in Namibia, they had hired a car for their holiday, which meant long driving days to get from one lodge to the next. For instance it took them about 5 hours to drive from Lüderitz, whereas it took us only one hour 11 minutes.

10 November. We went on a morning walk from Cañon Village to Cañon Lodge. On the way we saw some klipspringers, a little steenbok and were joined near the lodge by a couple of horses. They seemed bored and wanted to walk with us. There was a good view from the terrace outside Cañon Lodge where we had lunch. We saw several rock dassies and some black starlings, that tried unsuccessfully to beg food from us.