Ups and downs in Drakensberg

Warning: Long Post Ahead.

Mason and I snuck away from the chaos of Joburg this weekend to do some hiking together in Drakensberg. I had never heard of Drakensberg before we moved to South Africa, but when I read that Steve Davey had named it one of forty places you must see before you die, saw that it was a World Heritage Site, and was within a few hours of Joburg I decided I had to find a way to make it down there. Drakensberg is basically an enormous geological escarpment that creates the border between South Africa and Lesotho. It is the reason Lesotho has been able to maintain isolation from South Africa through the centuries.

It is easier said than done to find this massive wall, especially in the dark. Mason and I finally got to our “chalet” at 11:30pm. The reception was closed. They had a pegboard with keys for late arrivals on the wall, but our name wasn’t on the board. We did the only moral thing to do in such a circumstance – we took the keys belonging to S & I Stever. We got up at 6am, made the bed and put the keys back on the board, grateful that Mr. and Mrs. Stever never showed. No one even knew we’d been there until we returned later in the day during business hours to let them know they should probably wash the sheets and take our R700.

Since we had arrived during the night, we had no real idea where we were and what to expect. When we opened our window, this is what we saw – the Amphitheatre – a four mile long, one mile high solid rock wall. Very hard to get a sense for its grandeur from a photo on a blog.



We decided to hike what is called The Gorge through the Royal Natal National Park since it is supposed to have the best views of the Amphitheatre and the Tugela Falls that plummet from it, the second highest waterfall in the world. It was awesome to set out up the canyon that morning. No one else was awake and the birds were singing their lungs out. About 30 minutes up the trail I had opened up a bit of distance on Mason when I noticed that the singing had changed. I stopped to look around and realized I was traversing a hill that was absolutely crawling with baboons. We had heard bad things about the baboons, that they could get quite pushy because hikers feed them, so I showed Mason what was going on and then kept moving. I only got a couple of pictures of them, none of them showing the entire hill. There must have been 20-30 baboons. This one was five or ten feet from us.



This is a shot I took of Mason shortly thereafter. Mason was absolutely awesome on this trip. It is so much fun to have a son old enough to go hiking with. I’m in heaven.



Here you can see how close we were to the Amphitheater, and that we had climbed up pretty high to get a bird’s eye view.



This is where we had come from.




This entire hike was a bit of an obstacle course. Much of it was very fun, like climbing ladders such as this up rock faces (not sure Katie would have been very comfortable with some of the stuff we climbed). However, there were also parts that were frustrating. In cowboy movies, the cowboys always ride down/up river a ways to so the Indian trackers “lose their scent”. This trail did the same thing with us. From time to time the trail would drop down to the rocky creek, where we’d be expected to hop from rock to rock up the creek until the trail comes out somewhere a few hundred meters upstream. I’m quite sure we never made it all the way to top of this trail, but we certainly gave it our best. We chased several forks and deadends and finally gave up. On the way out we lost our way (rock hopping again) and had to climb a few hundred meters up the side of the hill to regain the trail.



The next day we decided to head down into the “Central Drakensberg” area around Cathedral Peak and see if we could get all the way to the top. The drive there was really cool because we drove through myriad Zulu villages. Here’s a shot of one.



Here’s a series of shots that show you how long a hike we took to get to the top of the wall. The road at the bottom is where we started. I ended up summiting without Mason. Unfortunately he forgot to take a picture of me on top, so hetook this lame one of me with the summit in the background. You can see me climbing the final shoot.









It was a great trip. The scenery was beautiful, the exercise felt great, and most importantly, I had awesome company. I look forward to many more years hiking with Mason.