Ai-Ais

The springs were known and used long before any building stood here. This is Nama country, and the name Ai-Ais comes from Khoekhoegowab, meaning 'fire-fire' or scalding hot — a description of the mineral-rich water, which averages about 60°C, that rises through the fault lines at the foot of the canyon. Khoekhoe herders watered stock in the valley and used the springs, and San hunter-gatherers were in the region long before them.

European accounts of the springs date from the nineteenth century, and the story usually told locally is that a Nama herder led the first settlers to the water while searching for stray sheep. Simple bathing facilities were put up in stages, and the springs were declared a national monument in 1964. It was developed as a resort with chalets and a spa under South African administration, and became part of the protected area created around the Fish River Canyon, the Ai-Ais Hot Springs Game Park.

Floods are part of its history: the Fish River, dry for most of the year, has come down in spate in 1972, 1974 and 1988, each time closing the camp, which has been rebuilt and renovated more than once. Since independence the park has been run by Namibia Wildlife Resorts, the state tourism operator, which also issues the canyon hiking permits. In 2003 Namibia and South Africa agreed to join the park with the Richtersveld across the Orange River, forming the Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, one of southern Africa's cross-border conservation areas.

Ai-Ais has no resident community of its own; its culture is that of a park camp, and it belongs to two groups of people. One is the staff — receptionists, cooks, cleaners, maintenance workers and rangers, mostly from Karas towns such as Keetmanshoop, Karasburg and the Nama villages of the south — who live on site in staff quarters and work in rotations. Khoekhoegowab and Afrikaans are what is spoken among them, with English for guests.

The other is the hikers. The multi-day trail down the canyon ends at Ai-Ais, and its finish gives the place its particular atmosphere: walkers arriving dusty and sunburnt after days in the gorge, going straight into the thermal pools, and the long comparing of notes that follows. The trail is open only in the cooler months, is limited to groups, and requires a permit and a medical certificate arranged in advance through the parks operator, so those who arrive have planned it for a long time.

Bathing custom is simple and public — the springs are used as a spa rather than a sacred site, though their Nama name and long use by herders are part of what the place means locally. Beyond that, the etiquette is park etiquette: quiet at night, food kept away from baboons, rubbish carried out, and no driving off the roads. The night sky, undimmed by any settlement for a hundred kilometres, is one of the things people come for.

Nobody lives at Ai-Ais in the ordinary sense. The permanent presence is a small staff, a few dozen people at most, housed at the resort and working shifts before returning to their homes in the south. Beyond the park boundary the country is enormous sheep and goat farms on very dry ground, worked by a handful of people each, and the nearest settlements of any size — Karasburg, Noordoewer and Keetmanshoop — are one to three hours away by road.

Everything is brought in. Supplies arrive by truck from Keetmanshoop or across the South African border, water comes from the river and the springs, and power and communications are limited; a break in the road after a storm is felt at once in the kitchen and the shop. Medical emergencies mean a long drive or a flight from the airstrip, which is why the hiking trail is so tightly controlled.

The working year follows the season. The resort is busy through the cool months, when the trail is open and the canyon fills with visitors, and very quiet in the heat of high summer, when the valley floor becomes one of the hottest places in the country. Days start early and stop in the middle of the afternoon, and by dark the only sounds are baboons on the slopes, wind in the thorn trees and the river if it happens to be running.

There is no local cuisine here in the ordinary sense — the resort kitchen and the braai fire are the two ways of eating. The restaurant serves southern African country cooking: lamb from the dry veld of the south, beef from the farms, game such as oryx and springbok as steaks or stews, with rice, pap and vegetables trucked in from far away, and generous breakfasts aimed at people about to walk or who have just finished walking.

Campers cook for themselves, and the standard meal is a braai — chops, boerewors coiled on the grid, and roosterkoek, bread rolls baked directly on the coals and eaten with butter and jam. Potjiekos, a stew left to simmer for hours in a three-legged iron pot, suits the long evenings, and biltong and dried sausage are the food of the road and the trail, along with dried fruit from the irrigated farms along the Orange River.

Drinks are simple: Namibian lager brewed to the German purity law, South African wine, rooibos tea and a great deal of water, which visitors underestimate in this heat. Hikers finishing the canyon trail have their own ritual of a cold drink at the pools, and the grapes and dates grown under irrigation down on the Orange are the one fresh local produce that reaches the valley regularly.