Fish River Canyon

Fish River Canyon is the second-largest canyon on Earth by volume, exceeded only by the Grand Canyon in the United States, and it was formed by the same combination of tectonic uplift, volcanic activity and the patient erosive power of water that shaped the American original, though on an entirely different geological timescale and in an environment of such extreme aridity that the walls of the canyon look almost lunar in their bareness.

The canyon reaches a depth of approximately 550 metres at its deepest point near the Hobas rest camp, and the rim trail known as the Fish River Hiking Trail is a demanding 80-kilometre, four-to-five-day backpacking route that descends from the southern end near the Seeheim railway station and follows the river through the canyon floor to Hobas, requiring reasonable fitness and a good level of self-sufficiency since there are no facilities and no water points on the trail itself apart from the river.

The river at the bottom of the canyon is a misnomer for much of the year: in the dry season from May to September the Fish River reduces to a series of disconnected pools, and hikers must carry all their water for the journey, but after summer rainfall the river can become a fast-flowing torrent and flash floods are a genuine and documented hazard, which is why the trail is closed during the rainy season from December to March and why even in the dry months hikers are advised to check current conditions before setting out.

The geology of the canyon walls is one of the most instructive in southern Africa: the striated bands of different-coloured rock visible in the canyon face represent hundreds of millions of years of sedimentary deposition, compression and erosion, and the orange and red tones of the upper layers are the same Bokkeveld and Karoo Sequence sediments found across the Great Escarpment of southern Africa, pushed upward by tectonic forces and then carved back down again by the patient work of the river.

The endemic quiver tree, Aloe pillansii, grows on the canyon rim and nowhere else on Earth, its grotesque candelabra shape a response to the specific combination of fog, intense sunlight and poor soils that characterise the canyon environment, and the best viewpoints on the rim particularly at the rest camp at Hobas frame the canyon walls against a sky so vast and free of light pollution that on clear nights the Milky Way appears to rise directly from the canyon rim.

Fish River Canyon is the second-largest canyon on Earth by volume and the largest in Africa, offering a scale of landscape drama that is simply not available anywhere else on the continent.

The five-day hiking trail along the canyon floor is one of Africa's classic wilderness walks, offering an intimate and physically demanding encounter with one of the planet's most ancient landscapes.

The endemic quiver tree, Aloe pillansii, grows only on the canyon rim and nowhere else on Earth, making it a botanical endpoint found only at this location.