Zip, tear, tighten, press, push, squeeze. Undies past your knobbly hairy knees, socks over toes, pants past your bones. Belt buckled, zipper up, button-down shirt thrown over your back. Buttons and holes lined up, collar popped. Boots on, laces tied bunny ears. backpack bulging slung over your shoulders. Hip support locked in. The slack is tacked. Peering over the edge, the earth plummets. Final photos. We drop off the precipice deep into the yawing canyon, leaving behind a sky blue as the iris' of an icelandic's eyes.
The colour palette of earthy brown hues, goose greys and charcoal blacks, rusts and reds, we leave behind a world of shiny, glossy, swipey metallic.
Once we leave the height of the canyon, our swashbuckling journey begins as we lay eyes on the whipping Fish River. Still as Evian, we catch the river in its eerily quiet wintery months. These are the remnants of the gushing summer. The River swings and swoops back and forth along the canyon's floor as Indiana's bullwhip. We keep it close to us, never straying too far from this life blood.
The sedate River responds to movement by reflecting the hiker's daily march, the lapping lips and tongues of wild horses, the swoop and dive of ravenous raptors, the flitting fish that never made it downstream and the swimming Namibia guy, his belly a barrel, his bulky legs pistons, and his skin tanned coffee by the countless hours of daylight exposure.
The landscape on which we tread is forever changing. The dirtied rim of the subsiding river, as the blazing sun sips, is revealed as concentric circles on rounded pebbles. The now exposed rocks form fields we need to hop, balancing like pirouetting ballerina's.
The crunch of boot tread on the course gravely terrain, scrape, clink as an aluminium pole pierces a crevice.
We hurdle rising rock formations, graze our knees on sharp outcrops, we cut across swathes of sinking river sand so soft its arms tear at our legs pulling us downwards,as we find ourselves immersed in a battle between the moon's gravitational pull and the doughy dirt. The heavy heave as lungs expand and contract as we lunge, drop, squat and pivot.
Regardless of the immense physicality of the hike, the silence, the peace, the freshness is serenity. It allows for mindless contemplation, stressless thinking, soulful reflection ...until...
Bang! it's popped like a grass blade to a balloon by the bouncing crew that we meet en route. Their flower power outfits and leisurely laissez faire attitude abound. Where we're kitted for survival, they're kitted for lounging lazily around campfires smoking kilograms of mary jane and singing REM songs. We share little but passing 'Hi's' and then they're off, oddly, like mountain goats.
The dampened sounds of our chatter are soaked by the serrations of the towering Manhattan-like walls of the cavernous Canyon. We are aware of the sun tracking across the sky. As it peers from behind the Canyon walls, googling at us, we rise. Rising, no thing protects us from the streaming scorching sun beams during the long day, and as we pitch our tents at day's end and the sun crash lands, the lengthy shadows drawn turn icey.
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