Mountain Special: South Africa's Table Mountain

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Issue 33

A place at high Table: there’s a new way to appreciate Cape Town’s most remarkable landmark. South African National Parks have devised a series of guided walks which give hikers a fresh perspective on Table Mountain, complete with places to stay en route. Judy van der Walt jumped at the chance to lace up her boots and hit the trail. She’s been standing in my backyard forever. From my house in the heart of Cape Town I’ve plunged into her windy wilderness, walking to her fern-laced waterfalls hundreds of times. I’ve hiked up her gorges and ravines, over her saddles and peaks and down her flanks. When I’m away, I miss her like a loved one. Yet, here I was, blinking in the pre-breakfast sunlight on a Saturday morning in the Waterfront, along with over a dozen other stragglers, on a mission to discover and conquer a new side to Table Mountain. It was the start of the brand-new three-day Table Mountain trail. As we chugged around the harbour in a flat little boat I squinted up at the mountain and suddenly got a fresh view. Yes, I could imagine the shock for those explorers who sailed into Table Bay five hundred years ago and saw half of the sky blocked out by a cliff face. We were trying out one of the Hoerikwaggo trails, meaning ‘sea mountain’ in Khoisan. Our journey was to pack in three must-sees for visitors to Cape Town. On the first day the trail includes the Waterfront and a four and a half mile historic walking tour of the city; the next day a trip up Table Mountain in the cable car and a five and a half mile hike on top of the mountain; and on the last day the same distance again, ending at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden. Best of all, we were going to sleep on the mountain, the first time visitors to Cape Town would officially enjoy this privilege. But right now we were fastening our shoelaces for a stroll through the city: through the Malay Quarter, where brightly painted houses were packed like sweet boxes into the streets of the 18th century slave district; to the Grand Parade, where a megaphone preacher tried to save our souls. At the District Six museum I slowed down enough to read the plaque on the wall: “Remember with shame the many thousands of people who were forced by law to leave their homes…” It was a chilling reminder of the forced removals under apartheid regulations. We ended the first day in Deer Park at the foot of the mountain, at the Platteklip Wash Houses, where, two hundred  years ago, slave women used to pound their masters’ laundry on flat stones in the stream.  To subscribe or buy this edition, click here The wash houses have been restored and converted into compact bedrooms with crisp white linen and witty contemporary African décor. You couldn’t call these quarters an overnight hut. They called for more elegant words like rest house. Dinner was a traditional Malay banquet with chicken curry, crisp raw veggie sambals and heaps of flat bread. The stragglers that had met on the quayside that morning were bonding fast around bottles of wine, but we soon fell over like toy soldiers, one by one, and took ourselves off to bed. An early morning guinea fowl chorus and a solid boost of bacon and egg saw us up and ready for a short walk to the cable car station. Below us the city lay sleeping under a duvet of Sunday morning fog. Sunbirds raided plump yellow proteas, and Grabeth Nduna, our Xhosa guide, told us they were called nxunxu, pronounced with two loud clicks. The glossy little birds always sing from the top of a bush and only drink water from a fresh stream. If you think you’re better than the rest, you’ll quickly be known as a nxunxu, he said. After a six-minute ride in the revolving cable car to the top of the mountain, we walked across to Maclear’s Beacon, the highest point on the mountain. All around us the fynbos, the unique flora of the Cape, was in full bloom. Tiny purple lobelias swayed in the wind, insectivorous patches of red sundew had sprouted white blooms and watsonias splashed pink on tall stalks. In a shallow little pool, tiny frogs plopped into the water. “They’re the endangered Cape platanna,” said Grabeth, pointing out their clawed and webbed feet, “the only frog that can swim backwards.” Little by little, he was showing me new pictures of the mountain I thought I knew so well. We walked the length of the mountain’s tabletop with enough ups and down to realise that it’s far from flat. When the sun slanted into long shadows a stone house appeared like a grandfather of the mountain in a sheltered valley below us. It was the Overseer’s Cottage, built at the turn of the last century for the manager of the waterworks on the back table of the mountain.“Touch the earth lightly” is the Table Mountain National Park’s policy and they took special care not to enlarge the footprint of the Overseer’s Cottage during restoration. Wooden decks were added to the front and to its side cottage, which together have room to sleep twenty souls. Stunning local crafts were sourced for the interior, like the colonial cliché of antelope heads on the walls finding a modern reincarnation in mosaic antelope sculptures. With ice clinking in our glasses of gin and tonic, we gravitated to the decks. Mountain ranges serrated the horizon in the distance and the large blue puddle of False Bay sparkled in the late sun. Then a fat silver moon rose and we shivered in the magic. Below us the city of three million people spread out like an IMAX movie of city lights, but up here there was only us, sixteen hikers and their guides, now a tightly-knit group, all new best friends. Then the wind came up and howled around the corners of the cottage and we huddled around a long table with wine, lamb cutlets and huge bowls of salad and veggies. Grabeth and his two fellow guides Antonio and Noluthando did a ‘charge like a black rhino’ skit, shaking and snorting, holding their hands like horns in front of their faces. As moonlight washed through the windows, they ended the evening with an African lullaby. The next morning, with the wind still whipping our hair around our faces, we went to explore the mountain’s back table before hauling our aching limbs down Nursery Ravine towards Kirstenbosch. Half an hour from the end Grabeth gave our shaking knees a break next to a waterfall splashing onto big flat stones. He asked us to close our eyes for five minutes, “so that you can take something of the Hoerikwaggo with you.” As the sounds of water and birds seeped into me, I realised that far from me conquering the mountain, she had conquered me, again.

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