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.