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Day 1: Starting on the border of South Africa and Namibia
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 & 4 | Day 5 & 6
After a quick safety briefing, we set off in 2-man fiberglass Mohohawk type canoes. Each team carries one bucket with food or cooking utensils and the rest of our personal stuff is secured with bungee straps. Our team sacrifices some comfort items to carry fishing gear.
Being the stronger rower I end up in the captain seat (in the back) and my dad takes the engine room seat (in the front). Engine room rows and shuts up, and the captain steers. That's the theory anyway. If you can manage to follow the rule, you'll generally be OK.
It's a desolate and harsh landscape. A desert of rocks. Large stretches you won't even find sand. Pebbles maybe. Not sand. Incredibly, once your eyes adapt to the new environment, and you start looking attentively, you'll notice a hardy bush here and there eking out an existence somewhere between rocks.
On the river banks you find some greener foliage and cool shady trees where years of flooding deposited rich soil.
The river is a diluted chocolate milk brown from billions of sediments collected along its long windy path from the Drakensberg in the east, to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. In some patches the deep water churn and boil with liveliness. In the more open stretches only rippling currents indicate the broody power below.
Hitting the first rapid, the brown water is split into white gushing streaks hugging the dark granite rocks, before the brown tongues can lick it up again. A sun faded broken-in-two canoe stretches over a larger rock. A testament to the power of the water, and a silent warning to us.
My dad and I sail through the first rapids like experts. Working in tandem and following the rules pays off. We both relax, take a deep breath of the unpolluted air and enjoy the abundant bird life. We're going to have a good time.
That evening, after setting up camp, I get a go at fishing. In a matter of an hour I must have caught 8 mudfish. Rare that you find such natural waters untouched by man's greedy hands. Using a fish head as bait, I hook a powerful fish later that night that strangely heads straight up a rapid instead of turning downstream and leveraging the current's power to its advantage. On a tight ratchet the line peels of my reel and I can only marvel at the fish's power. On light tackle the fish wins the day. I'm not even really upset. Under the magical starry streaked sky, the milky way brighter than ever before, this is what the best moments in life is all about...
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 & 4 | Day 5 & 6