Fish River Canyon 2026
What can I say? It was beautiful, fun and we had a very nice group of people on the hike. It was excellent to be so remote and off grid for a few days.
Hang around enough hikers in South Africa and you’ll definitely be asked “Have you done the fish?” This is not a code word or a secret club. They asking if you’ve done the famous Fish River Canyon Hike in Namibia. I’m so glad I’ve now ticked this hike off, and I would be keen to do it again in future.
When I saw a cancellation on the Johannesburg Hiking Club for this hike, I jumped and managed to get myself onto the trip. I was pretty lucky, a lot of the decisions about the travel was already in motion. So all I needed to do was pay some money, train and figure out all my gear.
If you want to skip all the waffle, each day below will have the strava link and gpx file. Follow at your own risk, we didn’t always go the right way. Also the gear list is at the bottom of this post.
Getting there
I joined 3 others in a car pool from Johannesburg. We drove from Johannesburg and stopped overnight at Geluksdam Guest House in Olifantshoek. Olifantshoek wasn’t very big, so I have to give mention to LJ’s, a small fast food restaurant that we managed to get dinner from. One of the hikers ordered a chicken salad - I was skeptical but it ended up looking pretty good.
The guest house had an amazing amount of artwork and our breakfast was very nice! The rain towards the border did not help with the nerves. Because we all did not have tents for the hike 😅. I also enjoyed the weavers nests all down the road to the border.
The border crossing took forever 🐌. The South African side had a long queue for the car papers. Then the Namibian side took an age to get through. Funny enough, we were all worried about the foot and mouth control point. We thought we would be having our bags searched and some food would get taken away. But this was fast and no deep search was done. It was all the paperwork and stops after that which made the border crossing take a very long time.
In Namibia a few of us stayed at The White House Guest Farm. The owner, Dolf has a really nice place and offers a package for hikers to stay and get to and from the hike. The food was amazing and we chowed like kings before and after the hike.
The main objective for the night was getting rid of all the excess weight in our packs. Most of us dropped a ton of extra weight leaving things behind (a small chair in my case - what was I thinking 😂 - I did not miss it).
Day 1 - 8km
We didn’t quite make the 6am departure time to head out to Hobas (oops). But this wasn’t a problem as we even managed to stop at the Canyon Roadhouse for a quick coffee.
Once we met the rest of the group (10 of us in total) we signed in as group 51. This also took a fair amount of time getting all the forms, signing everything and collecting the money done. To get to the start we went via one of the canyon viewpoints. Looking down was pretty spectacular and daunting considering we were going down to the bottom shortly.
A million photos later we started going down. This is the most dangerous part of the hike, with your full pack and the steep cliff to get down into the canyon. However it did pass quicker than I expected. But this was probably due to losing the extra pack weight and the practicing I did with my pack before hand.
The bottom greeted us with a nice full river, a little greener than I thought the water would be. We didn’t go very far till we caught group 50, consisting of mostly school kids. Worried about the possible noisy kids and late hour we found the first flat spot and setup camp.
I had 2 packs of two minute noodles with some cheese for dinner. Very nice but the cheese was a pain to clean out of my pot (however, a hack is to use sand to scrub out a pot).
Like I said we all did not take tents, and this was a first for me. It turned out fine, except I got so so so much sand everywhere. The highlight that continued throughout the trip was the night sky with all the stars. It was so amazing, I’ve never experienced this with no tent above me we all stared out at the stars before drifting off. I will say it was very bright and even later the moon came out making the night even more bright (I was grateful I carried an eye mask for this).
Day 2 - 14km
Most of us woke up before the sunrise (occurs fairly late in Namibia in winter), so we got an excellent sunrise.
The group decided to have a late breakfast after a little bit of walking. So only a coffee and rusk before setting off. This turned out to be a mistake for me, when we stopped for lunch I had to unpack everything to cook my oats. Lessons learnt 😀.
On day 2 half of the group made a silly mistake, we crossed the river too early (we wanted to try not get our shoes wet). This took us on some really technical bolder hopping and we even missed the famous vespa scooter.
We decided to stop at the so call “Palm Springs” or “Sulphur Springs” for the night. Named this because of the palm tree and hot spring coming out of the canyon into the river. So we all took a dip in this natural hot tub (wow it was seriously hot).
For dinner I did Smash (mash potato) and biltong which was actually very nice. Some fellow hikers shared some fire water 🥴 and some dark chocolate.
Day 3 - 19km
We didn’t manage a morning hot tub dip, but our group was greeted with two wild horses on the other side of the river.
This day was much flatter than the rest, but we had quite a few river crossings to navigate. The challenge was always to cross without taking our shoes off, this was quite fun figuring out which route to take across the river. We needed to do more milage today to catch up on the first two days of slow rock jumping, so this was a big day.
Later in the afternoon we found a magical flat camp spot right next to the river with amazing views again. This was the best camp spot of the trip. We all had fun swimming and did some admin like cleaning clothes etc.. A forever foods instant meal of chicken with rice made this dinner very easy to cook.
Day 4 - 21.7km
Another big day was needed to catch up on distance required, so we had a very early morning. Day 4 was mostly taking the shortcuts, which meant leaving the river in places and actually doing some climbing over some hills. This is the common approach on the fish river canyon hike or else you need to spend more days doing the hike. The terrain looked very much like a western and could have also featured as the planet Tatooine in Star Wars.
The main aim for the day was to get to the Pink Palace and wow did this motivate everyone to move fast. The Pink Palace is a small remote food stall manned by two amazing ladies who stay there for the full four months of the hiking season (they get resupplied weekly).
Our group took full advantage of the “Palace”. Beers, burgers, pies, fruit and more beer! I had a game burger which was so tasty and it was huge. The Palace was painted pink, had a veranda and some chairs (oh you miss simple things 😂). Also a comment from Alex (a hiker in the group), “Wow, a shower, this place really is a Palace!”. Not that we could use the shower, still very funny with his accent.
The group was not moving after the refuelling of proper food and beer. So we decided to camp right near the Palace. We didn’t have dinner because we were full.
This turned out to be the coldest night of the trip, I even pulled out the bivy bag to keep me warm. I haven’t quite figured out the bivy, it had so much condensation build up over night I was wondering if there was perhaps a drizzle during the night (there was not).
Day 5 - 17km
The last day was exciting, but I also had the “oh no normal life is not far away, nooooo” feeling.
This last 17 km had a few river crossings and some more desert sections with mountains that looked like they were made of boulders. We spotted some baboons on this leg of the trip.
Some of us managed to grab the last swim of the hike in a section of water. However it was about 30cm deep, so not exactly ideal.
The last 2-3km was almost like a sprint to get to the finishing beer. We had a slight miscommunication in the group and a couple of us finished way behind the front group. So I missed the bell and cheering 🤦🏻♂️.
High fives, photos and everyone was feeling good. Only one drawback was the age I had to wait for my beer. Thanks to the tourist bus full of people and one barman I struggled waiting for the beer to properly end the hike. I’m silly sometimes 😬.
After som “kuiering” we headed back to the guest house for a well deserved dinner. Dolf did take us via one of the Gondwana lodges for a quick beer/coffee on the way, he’s a pretty good ambassador for Namibia 🧐.
I was not completely broken after the hike, apart from a few pains and the normal stiffness. I suppose that was thanks to all the hiking I did during the year. I really enjoyed this hike and it’s one for the books.
Heading back to Johannesburg we stayed at Redsands.
Gear
What I can remember and things I would leave behind.
Paperwork
- Medical certificate
- Passport (I did not take this on hike - but someone mentioned if you get rescued and need to go to SA this will make things easier)
- Cash for the Pink Palace
- Insurance info
- Emergency numbers
- Map
General
- Big water bottle (1.5l)
- Small water bottle (500ml)
- Water purification tablets (some of the group just drank the water straight and were fine)
- Sand gaiters (there was so much sand)
- Suntan lotion
- Tape and cable ties and super glue (used some tape for small fixes)
- Headlamp
- Trekking poles (so so useful with crossing the river)
- Lots of ziplock bags to keep daily food separate and things organised
First aid (didn’t use but you need it)
- Plasters mixed
- Bandage
- Antiseptic cream
- Imodium
- Safety pins
- Head ache tabs
- Tabard small (did not have issues with bugs)
- Vaseline
Electrical
- Phone
- Power bank
- Earphones
- Watch charger (nice to track the route)
- Usb-C cable
Clothes
- 2 x shorts
- 2 x T-shirts
- Long sleeve top for sleeping
- Long thermals for sleeping
- Hat
- Bennie
- Crocs (thought I would need for river crossings, but mainly used for around camp)
- Warm camp socks (for camp with my crocs)
- 2 x hiking socks
- 2 x underwear
- Puffer jacket
- Buff
- Gloves (did not use the gloves)
- Emergency Poncho (did not use - but probably a good idea)
Cooking
- Camp stove
- Gas cylinder
- Lighter and matches (with a group you don’t really need a backup of matches)
- Cooking pot
- Spoon
- Knife (did not use the knife - but I think you might need it in an emergency?)
- Mug (glad I had this, eat oats out of the pot and coffee in the mug for breakfast)
- Cloth (I used it to clean pot daily)
- Ice-cream tub for some loose food storage (I was worried about mice getting into my food, but no one had this issue)
Sleeping
- Blow up mat
- Blow up pillow
- Bivy bag
- Sleeping bag (mine was rated for 5 deg comfort and 0 deg limit)
- Ground sheet (very useful to try keep the majority of sand off you)
- Eye mask (it’s very bright so this helped)
Toiletries
- Toilet paper
- Towel
- Toothbrush and paste
- Trowel
Food
I took too much, so next time I’ll try better to work out the required calories. I should not have had so much left over food. I should have only had the dinner we skipped at the Pink Palace and possibly a few snacks emergency snacks left over.
I did enjoy the 1 rusk each day with breakfast and a warm drink at night (rooibos cappuccino sachets are great).
Check all the sand, my typical camp spot in the morning:
DO THIS HIKE if you can!