Blyde River Canyon is a canyon 800 metres deep on the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, and unlike almost every other great canyon it stays green from rim to river, its red cliffs rising out of forest and its river running through bush rather than desert. The viewpoints along the rim are strung on the Panorama Route, and the picture people come for is the Three Rondavels, three round, flat-topped peaks standing over the canyon like the thatched huts they are named after; they carry older local names, the chief and his three wives, and the afternoon is the time to see them, when the sun swings round to strike them head-on instead of leaving them flat and shadowed. At God's Window the escarpment falls sheer to the Lowveld, the hot plain that runs to Kruger and Mozambique, and on humid summer mornings a sea of cloud pools far below the railing; a short trail behind the lookout climbs into a pocket of dripping mountain rainforest that grows only here.
At Bourke's Luck Potholes the Blyde meets the Treur, and the two rivers have drilled the rock into round shafts and bowls, some many metres deep, that you look straight down into from footbridges; the name comes from a gold prospector who found nothing here. Berlin Falls, a few minutes off the route, drops in a thin column into a green pool, and after the December-to-March rains every fall in the canyon runs full while the long views are most often lost to cloud. Below the rim the canyon is warm and wooded enough that every primate species in South Africa lives in it, so a day here can cross paths with all of them, from vervet monkeys to bushbabies. The rivers end in the Blyde Dam, where boats run along the foot of the cliffs. Blyde means joy in old Dutch, from a party that gave the river up for lost in 1844 and then came home, and the canyon has kept the name.