Booking the Fish River Canyon Hike

Bookings and other stuff

As with all things, there is a little admin to ensure your spot on the hike. Here are a few things you need to know for booking the Fish River Canyon Hike.

Hiking season is from May to September. Summer months are way too hot to hike but you can still go to the Hobas viewpoint. Maybe the view from here will encourage you to come back during the cooler months. Or it will let you decide to let sleeping dogs lie😉.

Only 30 people are allowed to go into the canyon per day and when you make a booking your party has to at least have 3 people. The latter is a safety precaution that any hiker should be happy to oblige to.

So knowing that the hiking season is only so long, and that there are only a limited number of people allowed to hike per day, the best advice is to book well in advance. However, I have heard of people who have decided on a whim to go do the hike. And what do you know!? They got lucky. But if you want to be sure of a spot on the hike, make the bookings well ahead of time.

So, your first step in planning is to choose a date and to wrangle up at least 2 friends to go along. Safety in numbers! Bookings are made through Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) and in 2017 hike itself cost  N$ 330.

I would suggest that you book your accommodation while you are at it. This will ensure that you have a place to stay before and after the hike as this area is a very popular tourist destination. We did not book accommodation early enough and ended up searching frantically. The most convenient places to stay are Ai-Ais and Hobas, the beginning and the end of the hike. You can also contact the NWR for bookings here. If you wait too long like we did, or prefer other accommodations, you can go to the Gondwana collection.  Namibians and other SADC citizens get good discounts here (with a Gondwana Card). But you still have to drive out to Hobas or Ai-Ais to leave your car.

Once you have a spot on the hike and a place to sleep, you are pretty much waxed with the admin part of the hike. There are however a few extra costs to take note of.

These are:

-The shuttle from Ai-Ais, if that is where you will be staying. The Shuttle runs daily to Hobas @ N$ 270 (2017). We did not take the shuttle as we had enough vehicles to shuttle ourselves back and forth. Therefore, I am not sure if the shuttle takes hikers only to Hobas, where they have to sign in, or do they take them all the way to the starting point.

–Entrance fees to Hobas @ +- N$ 60 (entrance fees could vary according to nationality so just check with Hobas/ NWR beforehand).

 

 There is still a little bit of official business left to attend to, but this must be done closer to D-Day. In more specific term ≤ 40 days.

You need completed medical and conservation forms and hand this in at the Hobas office.

There you will also need to sign an indemnity form. They will ask you how long you are planning to do the hike. This gave me a bit of false hope should something go wrong. I thought that if one does not exit within the given time, they will be concerned. However, I discovered when we finished that no one  ‘roll calls’  to account for all hikers. I was also concerned when I reported that people were attempting to exit via the escape route a couple of days before. The Ai-Ais office did not know that all the previous days’ hikers had not come out of the canyon. So, the moral of this story is to let someone back home know when your aim to finish so that they can start inquiring if you don’t come out in time.

This was the official booking related post, amounts and rules may have changed since we did the hike, so do not take this post as an absolute truth. Check with NWR beforehand.

On a less official note, you can go check out my tips for the hike based on my experience of the hike. Wish that I had some ‘inside info’ before I went all tra li da to the Fish. Happy booking and planning. it will be a trip of a lifetime.

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