Far below is a ribbon of blue; not much to look at, a shallow stream, a dribble; barely enough to float a boat on. Or so it appears from half a kilometer above it. But the Fish River, inconsequential as it looks from the clifftops, has, in its very long lifetime, moved more rock than all Africa's construction companies put together.

And to greater effect.

With a little help from plate tectonics, the Fish River has dug itself the second-largest canyon in the world. At 160 km long, up to 27 km wide and 500 meters deep, the Fish River Canyon in the southwest African nation of Namibia is bested only by the U.S. of A.'s Grand Canyon in the size and grandeur stakes. Funny what a little energy can accomplish.

After taking in the views -- the slowly sculpted cliffs, the plunges, the vastness of the little river's enterprise -- I leave the rim of the precipice and get to work. It's time to check out Memory and her lovely cheeses.

Africa, equatorial regions excepted, is a dry continent. And Namibia is the driest nation on the continent south of the Sahara. If you look at a map of Namibia, the initial impression is that there is a lot going on. The maps are liberally dotted with place names and -- hey! -- you naturally assume that if a place has a name, then it must be a place. Right? Wrong.

If, for example, you decide to pull into Red Drum expecting to hit a couple of bars, tuck into steak with fries, and maybe a Caesar salad on the side before folding yourself gratefully into a bed with crisply starched sheets . . . then get ready to be disappointed. Red Drum, despite its cartographical prominence, is just that: a drum. Painted red.

Unfeasibly blessed

Take a closer look at the map. This time ignore the names. Look for the signs demarcating petrol stations. Where there is a petrol station there is usually a town. Or a shop. Or, at the very least, a petrol station. Usually. This brings Namibia into more accurate perspective for the visitor. It's big. It's empty. It's arid. And outside the capital, Windhoek, which is almost unfeasibly blessed with delicatessens, fresh fruit and veg, boutiques and such, much of the country is devoid of shops.

So how do the Namibians manage to feed the half a million visitors who arrive each year? The answer is with difficulty.

Namibia's tourism sales point is "wilderness."

There are literally hundreds of lodges, ranging from the distinctly primitive to the definitely upmarket, tucked away in its deserts, dunes, mountains and prehistoric plains. Laying on sundowners at lodges isn't an issue -- liquor keeps well, beer's not a problem to store -- but when it comes to food, the management headaches begin.

Meat is easy. Namibia is carnivore country; a "lady's steak" sometimes weighs in at a dainty 500 grams, one Windhoek restaurant offers T-bone and chips with the suggested budget option of dispensing with the chips, and the domestically produced beef, lamb and game meat such as kudu and zebra are justly famous throughout southern Africa.

But fruit and veg are a logistical nightmare. Namibia doesn't grow them. Not in significant quantities. Most lodges rely on refrigerated trucks that groan slowly north from the lush fields of South Africa's Cape region. These growling behemoths can make it to the arterial towns in a few days -- but from then on it is a race against time. Smaller trucks or 4WDs capable of negotiating seriously rough roads stack up the crates and tear off for their remote destinations desperate to hit their generator-powered coolrooms before the lettuces dissolve into rancid slime, tomatoes burst in the heat and cucumbers warp and shrivel into wizened boomerangs. To their credit quite a few of the trucks make it. Some of their contents, too.

Five years ago, Alain Noirfalise, manager of the four lodges that house visitors to the privately owned Gondwana Canyon Park beside the Fish River Canyon, decided he'd had enough of the wacky races. It was taking six days after ordering lettuce for the stuff to arrive, he recalled. "When it arrived we often had to throw it away," he bemoaned. He sawed up some derelict telephone poles, built a shelter, lobbed green netting over the top, planted seeds -- and Gondwana's journey to sustainability began.

The Gondwana lodges are impressive. With a total of 185 beds (many in curiously gnomelike caves with subterranean bathrooms) and 120 staff, they constitute a bigger community than many Namibian towns. Some 20,000 tourists stay each year, but because the lodges sprawl over a large, bouldered area, there is no sense whatsoever of overcrowding.

Ebullient convert

Meanwhile, 200 springbok released half a decade ago have become 2,500 today. The mountain zebra, giraffe, and oryx are similarly thriving.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about Gondwana -- for vegetarians and fresh foodies, at least -- is that nowadays nothing on the menu, other than jam, comes out of tins.

The rough experiment of five years ago has blossomed into a foodself sufficiency rate of over 70 percent . . . and Memory, like all the staff here, is an ebullient convert to organic do-it-yourselfing. With great pride, she shows me the cheese factory powered and supplied by a small herd of Jersey cows. Mozarella, Gouda, cream cheese, farm butter, yoghurt, chilli blocks, cheese spread, cheese with stinging nettles, garden herbs, carroway.

Breshnev oversees her work. Your parents called you Breshnev? "Yes." Said in a tone of voice that implies "I'm stuck with it -- so don't push the issue, chum, I've got cheese to make!"

Next door, pigs, fed entirely on kitchen and garden waste, are being converted into poloni, sausage, cabernossi, ham and bacon. Half a kilometre away I get to see the veg. Broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, chard, garlic -- all thriving and impervious to the desert that surrounds them. Hens chuckle and cluck nearby, fenced in to prevent nocturnal visitations from African Wild Cats or hyenas.

Water makes this enterprise possible. Namibia has water; it is just a long way underground. Noirfalise pumped it up -- Gondwana now even produces its own bottled mineral water -- ignored the sceptics, indulged in trials and plenty of errors and lo! The desert bloomed in a small way. And without screwing up the local ecology. An African success story (unlike the government-run Fish River Canyon lodge at Ai Ais (which still sticks to its sludgy tinned green beans and is an unmitigated disaster).

Yes, funny what a little energy can accomplish. When it's well directed.