Quick spin to the Commando Memorial

Lovely Autumnal Sunday for a bike to the Commando Memorial and back.

Quick spin to Glenfinnan

First spin on my road bike since I got back, a quick trip from Calluna to the Glenfinnan Monument and back, in lovely warm September weather!

Johannesburg in a day

It was a 5 hour drive from Drakensberg to Jahannesburg. To start with the scenery was interesting, mountains, escarpments and dams, once we got away from the Drakensberg it was basically straight roads all the way to Johannesburg. I was staying at Bob’sBackpackers, in the east of the city, handily, very close to the airport.

With only one day in Johannesburg I had to make the most of it, so I joined a tour of the city, Soweto township and visited the Apartheid Museum. I had been warned by numerous people that “Johannesburg is dangerous”, “don’t stay very long” and “don’t go out on your own”. I didn’t feel that way when out and about on the tour, but I had taken the tour partly to avoid trying to find out.

Our guide Jabu was very informative throughout the day, he has been running tours for the past 20 years, he was born in Soweto and lives there now with his family. Our first stop was in the city at the Carlton Centre, which had a lift to 45 floors up, where you could get great views of the city. In cities I always like to get as high as possible to get my bearings, see the layout of the city and pick out the top spots to visit.

Soweto, coming from “South western township”, was created in 1904 as a place to move non-whites to, out of the city, but allowing them to be close enough to use for work. The population of Soweto is over 4 million, while Johannesburg itself is only 1.5 million. Today there are still tin roofed shacks, but alongside them are purpose built housing schemes and private built houses.

We visited the Orlando Towers, visible form all over Soweto. They are two old decommissioned coal fired power station towers that have been painted in colourful murals depicting events in South Africa and corporate branding. You can bungee from between the two towers if you want!

On the road Orlando West, is the original home of Nelson Mandela, now a museum telling his story from when he lived in Soweto, and just round the corner on Vilakazi Street, Desmond Tutu has his Johannesburg home. We had lunch nearby at a restaurant called Sakhumzi, it was a buffet of all different types of South African food.

The afternoon was taken up visiting the Apartheid Museum, at first I though an entire afternoon was too much time to spend in a museum, but I was wrong. The museum was very informative, powerful and moving. The museum tells the story of the rise and fall of apartheid. There are 32 exhibits, with some temporary or visiting exhibitions, all laid out on a very easy to follow path. When you are issued your ticket, you are randomly classed on the ticket as white or non-white, this dictates which entrance you use and which path you take through the first exhibit.

There was an extensive exhibition based on Nelson Mandela which was very interesting and told his life story in pictures, videos, words and effects. It was interesting seeing this having visited Robben Island in Cape Town and having visited his house at 8115 Orlando West earlier in the day.

Hiking and biking in the Northern Drakensberg, South Africa

Only a three hour drive from Durban and I arrived at Amphitheatre Backpackers in the Northern Drakensberg, a mountain range that runs along the border between Lesotho and South Africa. First things first, get out on one of the hostels bikes to stretch my legs! There were a few trails around the hostel so I headed out for a couple of hours, the scenery and weather brilliant!

The following morning I took the hostel shuttle to the Royal Natal National Park which was about 25km away, I paid my park fee and got a trail map. All the walks in this park are surrounded by an amphitheatre of peaks and cliff faces. I walked up to Gudu Falls, it took me about three hours, the waterfall itself didn’t have much water flowing over it as it just coming out of winter, and it only fully flows during the rainy season. The weather was great and the walk was beautiful, it took me through dry arid hillsides into the Gudu forest, I isn’t see many animals, only a lone Eland and a few Rock Hyrax quickly running off, there wasn’t another person on the path!

The hostel run a few different tours, I joined their Amphitheatre tour, which took me round the back of where I had been the day before, to the top of the amphitheatre that had towered above me. It was about a 2 hour drive to Sentinel car park at Witsieshoek via a town called Phuthadjhaba.

From the car park, it was a few hours walk zig-zagging up and around the mountain side to the gorge, the gorge was the only steep part of the day. When we came out at the top of the gorge we were on top of the amphitheatre, alongside Sentinel Peak. The view from the top was amazing, out over Royal Natal National Park, where I had been the day before, it was a bit hazy, but you could still see for miles!

We walked along the top of the amphitheatre to Thukela Falls, the falls are the highest in Africa, but, there was no water running at all, they only flow in the rainy season, which is just beginning. There were a few pools of water in the bed of the approaching river, some with ice on top, because there was no water you could sit right on the edge where the falls would go, and look over at the long drop off!

You could see some of the hills below were green, some black and some where brown. The brown was just due to it being winter, the black was where they had been burned by fire, whether purposefully or, sometimes not. The green hills were covered in new shoots coming through after having been purposefully burned, the burning is carried out during the months of May to October. One of the nights I stayed at the backpackers I could see bright lines of flames across the hillsides where the fires burned all night. In the daytime you could also see smoke from the fires.

Couple of sunny days in Coffee Bay

The hour long drive to Coffee Bay from the main road was amazing! The green hillsides were scattered with colourful homes, some round with thatched roofs and some square with corrugated iron roofs.  It was raining as hard as I’ve seen it rain for months, and the entire landscape was offset with rainclouds and rainbows, which made it look very atmospheric.

Coffee Bay is a small village on the Wild Coast, I was staying at the Coffee Shack, which sits right on the beach front, if there was an extremely high tide… it would probably get flooded!

I took the three hour walk along the beaches and cliff tops to Hole in The Wall, where the Robberg paths had been well signposted, here I had to follow intermittent white arrows on the grass, for the most part the path was visible ahead, up and down the cliff top hills and across beaches. It was a beautiful walk, the entire way I could hear the roar of the surf, I went through small villages, and herds of cows, sheep and goats, I also cam across quite a few grasshoppers on the path, one jumped right at me!  I had to cross a couple of beaches on my way there, but the tide was in on my way back and I had to go via the cliff tops instead. Hole in The Wall is a small seaside village which takes its name from a hole in a rock which sits just off its shore, I sat and watched the waves crashing through the hole in the wall, it was quite mesmerising, the power and noise that came from them was immense!

The weather was unseasonably sunny and hot, so I spent a day on the beach just round from the hostel, watching surfers get thrown about, even in the smaller waves. While I’ve been in Coffee Bay, even on the cloudless days, there has been a haze over the land, this was very noticeable at sunset.

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