16/07/2026
ADVENTURE AT THE 'GREAT BEND'
How we muddled through the Gorge
The Orange River Gorge is a moody and changeable, broken-up set of river channels situated below the border village of Onseepkans in the Northern Cape. Here the world's oldest desert, the Namib, flanks the north bank, with Bushmanland to the south.
There's nothing like starting big when you're trying something and you don't really know what you're doing. That's what three of us did in 1977, bombing down brutal rapids in fragile fibreglass kayaks of ancient design. We survived, somehow.
Our university kayak club had previously tackled easy runs on mild rivers like the Great Fish near Grahamstown. We learnt little about the real challenges of full-on expeditions down uncharted waters but thought we were pretty hot anyway.
I suppose the thing that spurred me to stick a pin in the Orange River map was Willem Van Riet's decision to get a ride around the gorge on his pioneering trip down the full length of the river. He was warned about it. His classic record of adventures by water, Stroom Af in My Kanoe, was a school setbook that got me going.
If he didn't do it, we would.
This is not the well known Augrabies Gorge with its spectacular falls. The Orange Gorge cuts through an eerie moonscape of smooth granite shoulders and chaotic, tumbled boulders, as if its steep sides have been detonated by a vast explosion. There is also a major waterfall here - the Ritchie Falls, more recently known as the !Gariep Falls (with a click), !Gariep being the new name of the Orange River itself.
When it's run today by various commercial operators the hazards are known and things are organised. Not so with us.
The name Onseepkans comes from the Khoi word for "great bend in the river". But when we first arrived, one of us theorised differently about its origins. "A man who'd struggled across the desert for days and was filthy with dust and sweat had tried to shave without water. But the shaving cream dried up on his face. Finally he reached the river where at last he got a chance to unsoap himself."
In Afrikaans: On-seep-kans.
That's the nonsense you dream up on an exhausting river trip in the blistering sun.
At the lip of a now-famous drop called Little, or Mini, Falls, I capsized.
Suddenly under water and facing what I thought was certain death over the falls, I told myself not to panic but did anyway. Wriggling violently I tried to remember the technique of the Eskimo Roll which we had all practised back in the Rhodes Olympic pool till water came out of our every or***ce.
My drinking buddy and partner in adventures, John Moss, watching from high rocks on the bank, said afterwards: "The crowd gasped and came to its feet."
Some crowd: it was only two, Denis Riordan being the other one, but point made. We were all lecturers at Rhodes University, academic goons on a holiday jaunt.
Just above the falls is a pointed rock in mid-current that has become notorious among scores of river-runners since those first days. It snags the adventurous spirits who dare to run the drop. Now the paddlers are cheerful clients of commercial operators.
Old Pointy can knock you off course or toss you out of your boat. Today there's a guide with a throw-rope to drag you to safety - and it's all part of the fun. To us then, the falls was one of the unknown terrors awaiting us in the Gorge. To our knowledge, only an SA Navy expedition had run the Gorge until then. What the Navy was doing there, so far from the sea, beats me. Maybe laying mines to keep out freedom fighters?
The only mine in that turbulent channel was the pointed rock.
Hanging upside down in my whitewater kayak, this was a live-or-die moment. I made several increasingly desperate attempts to roll and somehow got upright, only to fall backwards and sideways over the drop.
Rolling up from a capsize was a strange and mysterious art in those days, as indeed was the whole of whitewater kayaking. We had little idea how to "read the river" (deciphering its hidden dynamics from what you can see on the surface). Our paddling was rudimentary, with no distinct strokes for technical moves, and the boats were prone to cracking up on the rocks that we frequently slammed into.
To paddle out with a smile and stay cool was the thing. My companions decided the wiser course was to walk around.
Still, our little party completed the Gorge run somehow without doing away with ourselves. We knew a lot more about rivers at the end of it than we had at the beginning.
There was the carry down the gorge side to the churning water below, managed without the roping methods now routinely used by rafting groups. There was the frightening descent of the noisy, steep, boisterous rapid that would be named Big Bunny in years to come. There was the narrow passage between two large rocks where the whole river funnelled through a deep channel, with some of it going under a massive boulder, posing the risk of sucking you in.
Big Bunny was to get its name in the eighties when one of our first rafting clients, a very keen German, kept asking when our expedition would reach "Ze beeg rabbit" that we'd told everyone about. The narrow crease between the rounded granite boulders inevitably got named Dolly Parton.
That's the way rapids get tagged. The names stick. Every hazard builds up a lore of epic tales and miraculous escapes, as if the river itself plays the game and really cares about delivering excitement.
It's all so distant and comical in retrospect, 50 years ago. In those five decades, South African rafting has emerged from the Stone Age. Now operations on the Gorge are slick. The food is scrumptious, the riverside camping spots are carefully chosen for their scenic value and fishing, and (most of) the professional guides know what they are doing.
Those who don't will learn the hard way.
As we did.
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