Today’s post highlights two campsites we visit near Fish River Canyon, Namibia (a very impressive spot I’ll write about in more detail tomorrow). But for now, here are some of the neat locations and activities around this area.

Landscape views from our overland truck as we approach Fish River Canyon:

We stop for the night at Canyon Roadhouse, which has a cafe, lodge, campground, and lots of classic cars rusting on the front lawn.

The car theme continues inside the cafe…

Photos from dinner at our campsite that evening:

Another terrific meal courtesy of our co-guide and driver, Juliana — chicken and veggies in a tasty sauce over pasta with side dishes of more veggies.

That night our other co-guide Riaan (Juliana’s better half) sets up his laptop and projector to screen a movie — we watch The Ghost and the Darkness, a 1996 movie starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer about man-eating lions in Africa. It is TERRIBLE. Like, incredibly cheesy and painfully bad.

Sunrise is exceptionally scenic the next morning:

Let me pause to tell you about two books I’m reading at this point in time:

The first is Born Free by Joy Adamson. In the 1950s, British wildlife conservationists George and Joy Adamson became the proud parents of a newborn lioness when George shot her mother in self-defense. They were living in Kenya at the time and named the orphan Elsa, taking her into their home. (There were two other cubs that went to zoos.) Joy documented their experience raising Elsa as a member of their family in Born Free and it ranked at the top of the NYT Best Seller List for 13 weeks in 1960 (today you can visit the location of their home on the shores of Lake Naivasha). Joy writes with a scientific distance informed by her profession, but also with tremendous heart as she and her husband clearly had such abundant affection for Elsa. Eventually they returned her to the wild, taking many months to find the perfect spot and prepare her to fend for herself. Many years later Elsa died of a tick bite (she had given birth to three cubs in the wild), and ultimately both Joy and George were gruesomely murdered — separately, many years apart: Joy by her former employee who staged it to look like a lion had attacked her, and George by poachers as he rushed to the aid of a tourist. Their deaths are not covered in the book; I just found their unfortunate fates fascinating.

The second is Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. This is a book I got for Christmas years ago and always intended to read but never did. Then I found it at a hostel in Johannesburg and decided now was the time. Audrey Niffenegger also wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife, which I loved when it debuted a decade ago. This book is about two generations of identical twin sisters in London — two of them middle aged, and two of them around 21 years old. When one of the older twins (Elspeth) passes away after a long illness, she leaves her flat to her twin nieces, even though she has not seen them since they were babies. The twins, homebodies up until this point in their lives, venture to live the city. Little do they realize that their aunt Elspeth haunts the flat as a ghost. The twins team up with Elspeth’s former lover to communicate with her and figure out the rules of this new dimension. I was surprisingly on board with the ghost scenario — Niffenegger presents the details of this world so convincingly that it’s easy to go along with the supernatural elements. But I found some other plot points hard to swallow, like when Elspeth’s former lover takes up with one of the nieces.

That morning we visit the expansive Fish River Canyon, and I’ll save those photos for tomorrow’s post.

Afterwards we drive a short distance to the Ai-Ais Hotsprings Spa. This is a bonus destination — our guides ask the group if we’d like to spend the night here instead of the campground on the itinerary. It will cost about $10 extra per person but we’ll get to access the pools and indoor hot springs. It’s an easy decision — YES all around!

Our guides suggest we walk the final 10 minutes to the entrance of this place because the mountains here are pretty. Most of us take them up on it and meet them down the road a short while later.

Here’s the main outdoor pool, which we’ll be back to visit as soon as we can throw on swimsuits:

And here are the indoor hot springs, in which I spend a glorious two hours relaxing that afternoon while engrossed in my book.

This is how we spend most of the afternoon. It’s fantastic.

Juliana joins us for some photo fun:

This is a new sport called synchronized selfies — pose for a group photo above water, then take a deep breath and dive under for the actual shot.

As if they day couldn’t get any better, we make PIZZA for dinner!

Riaan and Juliana have a portable pizza oven that cooks personal size pizzas in about 3-4 minutes each. They set out a TON of toppings — all sorts of veggies, meats, cheeses, and sauces — so that we can design whatever kind of pizza we want. The only catch is that we have to eat in shifts since it takes a few minutes to cook each one and pizza is best eaten hot.

We pass the time with Springbok shots — Amarula liquor and creme de menthe. As we’ve learned, it’s the most popular drink in this part of Africa. They’re not bad. Due to a lack of shot glasses, we drink them in the crook of beer mugs from the on-site bar. Australian couple Jeremy and Holly are very fun enablers.

Say hi to Lisa and Amy!

There is a painting of Fish River Canyon on the wall of the lodge restaurant — a lovely illustration of where we visited this morning.

I look forward to sharing those canyon images tomorrow!

I visited Namibia on a 12-day tour from Windhoek to Cape Town with Acacia Africa. They discounted my tour in exchange for blogging and photography; opinions are my own.