Year in the Wild Blog

Getaway Magazine – January 2012 – Augrabies Falls National Park

My third feature article (four-pages long) for Getaway Magazine, published in January 2012, on Augrabies Falls National Park. (0.7MB size).

Augrabies Falls in flood…

At the moment, the Gariep River is at a normal level for this time of year. But when the upcountry thunderstorms arrive, the river morphs into an angry serpent. And the Augrabies Falls transform into a raging quagmire. Here are some photos from the information board at the reception area. The photos are taken by several different photographers. As you can see, you don't want to be on the boardwalks when the flooding starts...

The big flood of 1988 delivered a wopping 7 800 cubic metres of
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Place of Great Noise

From a place of great silence - the Kgalagadi - we've now travelled on to Augrabies, the 'noise-making place' (Aukoerebis), as named by the local Nama people. Here, the Gariep River (or Orange) falls 91 metres, carving out a massive 18km canyon in the granite geology. Although it's loud, and you can hear the falls from a few kilometres away (during floods, apparently the sound carries 40km), it's not noisy in a negative sense - in fact, Gareth and I are really enjoying being close to water
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