South Africa, Lesotho & Swaziland
Travel Report
St Lucia Wetlands
Hiking in the Drakensberg
Bloemfontein to Cape Town
Cape Town
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Travel Notes
Bethlehem
Cape Town
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Drakensberg & PE
Cape Town
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Zulu Dancing
Zulu Drumming
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Travel notes from Bethlehem
Hi Everyone,
I dragged myself away from Mbabane and Swaziland, fearful that if I stayed any longer I would never leave, and headed to South Africa. Even as I boarded a bus in Mbabane for the short distance to Manzini I bumped into someone I knew. The Swazi people are very friendly and I never found myself sitting on a bus in silence, someone would always be talking to me. I changed transport at Manzini and took a Durban bound minibus to the border at Golela and on to Mtubatuba. At the border crossing they had a television on for the World Cup and we managed to catch up with the latest scores and the news that France were on their way home. The rest of the journey the locals were chatting to me interested to find out what life in England was like and how it compared to Southern Africa; I left the minibus in Mtubatuba with a lot of new friends.
I took a local minibus the short distance to St Lucia on the coast where I hoped to find some hippos. St Lucia is a small resort town that provides the amenities for tourists visiting the Greater St Lucia Wetlands, a stretch of coast encompassing coral reefs, estuaries, swamps, lakes and grasslands. It is also famous for it's hippo and crocodile populations. I stayed at Bibs Hostel in town; a budget travellers hang out who also organized free-guided walks into the wetlands and down to the estuary. At last I found my hippos but due to the limitations of my technology on this trip could not record them; the frequency of the hippos was so low that my microphone couldn't pick them up. On the Saturday was the England, Denmark match and a large crowd of us wandered down to the local bar to watch the match at 13.30. It was also a holiday weekend in SA and there was a Harley Davidson rally in town, this made for an interesting crowd in the bar. After the England win the party continued into the early hours of Sunday morning, gate crashing a biker's party at some point during the night.
While staying at Bibs I met an Australian girl, Rebecca, who was also travelling in the same direction as myself and who also planned to travel on the local transport. The backpacking circuit in SA is very commercialised, with hostels everywhere, which is good for keeping the budget down. There is also a bus, the Baz Bus that connects all the hostels together across the country and ferries backpackers around. The majority of travellers here seem to be travelling on the Baz Bus, which is a very easy option and sanitized way of seeing the country as you hardly have any contact with the local people, instead Rebecca and myself left St Lucia on the local minibus and headed to Winterton by the northern Drakensberg Mountains.
It took two days to get to Winterton travelling via Durban and spending a night at Pietermaritzburg. From Winterton we hitchhiked the last 25km to the Inkosana Lodge by the foot of the mountains. The Drakensberg is a hikers paradise and this lodge and one of the overnight hikes to Zulu Cave had been recommended to me a long time ago. The Drakensberg is a mountainous basalt escarpment forming the border between KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho. The peaks reach a height of between 3,000 and 3,500m and at this time of year are covered in snow. We did a day hike from Monks Cowl, mostly along the foot of the escarpment, to warm ourselves up for our two-day trip to Zulu Cave.
On our second day we set off into the mountains from Monks Cowl to the cave, the weather was perfect, clear skies and warm sun and the views of the peaks absolutely stunning; I could see why everyone raves about these mountains. This was the first long hike on this trip I'd done without taking a guide; Ed, the owner of the lodge, had lent me a map. The trail took us up the escarpment onto a plateau known as the Little Berg, from here the peaks of Sterkhorn, 2973m, Cathkin Peak, 3148m, and Champagne Castle, 3245m towered over us. We contoured around these peaks to s saddle from where a valley dropped away in front of us; down this valley was Zulu Cave. Finding the trail down the valley proved to be a bit of a problem, it was no longer where the map indicated. We left the trail and walked along a buttress between two valleys along where the map marked the trail. Eventually we found the trail again and followed it down to where the two valleys met and crossed the river below a waterfall and continued to follow the trail along the valley floor. On the way we encountered a snake, later identified as a Berg Adder, sunning itself on the path; its camouflage was excellent but I managed to spot it before I trod on it.
Zulu Cave was half way up a tributary valley in an escarpment. It was a large cave under an overhanging rock; a stream formed a waterfall as it cascaded over this overhang. The location was perfect and we felt as though we had left civilization a long way behind. The night in the cave wasn't as cold as I feared as just as the sun set some high cloud began to roll in. By first light the next morning we found ourselves fog bound in the cave; we could hardly see down into the valley. We hiked out of the cave and back towards Monks Cowl, the conditions very similar to those encountered on Dartmoor on a bad day. As the morning wore on the mist thickened and a heavy drizzle set in.
Our boots were soon soaked through from the long, wet grass and it was a relief when we finally made it off the mountain and back to the lodge.
After a day recovering from our hike to Zulu Cave we hitchhiked back to Winterton from where we caught the local minibuses towards Harrismith and Bethlehem. We plan to cross the border into Lesotho at Fouriesberg.
Geoff
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