The Cederberg Mountains!

Hello again!

So this past weekend was absolutely incredible. We left Stellenbosch a little after 6:00pm on Friday and arrived at our destination in the Cederberg Mountains around 10:00pm. The car ride was nothing short of terrifying. Our driver was relatively nuts, even by South African standards. I can sum up the first three hours of the drive by saying that we went in reverse down an off ramp because he took the wrong exit. We thought that was frightening, but the last hour of the drive was really something else. The ‘resort’ that we stayed at can only be reached by a windy, narrow dirt road and we were in a 10 passenger van that doesn’t handle well. We were following two other vans that left with us from the university so we had to stop occasionally because they would kick up enough dust to completely block our vision of the road. It was late at this point so seeing anything in the dark was hard enough, though we were able to see the huge cliff to our left. My friend Chris was in the back with me and we kept looking from the road to the cliff to our driver and back again. We were all saying prayers while our driver was cruising around corners at 100km/hour. We were convinced that any other driver would be safer for the return trip on Sunday, but we were proven wrong and spent the first hour of that ride sweating too. It turns out the cliff is even bigger in the daylight and the vans tend to fishtail whenever you brake going down a dirt road.

I could elaborate more about the absurdly scary car rides but I’m still alive to tell the tale so that’s neither here nor there. Once we made it safely to the Sanddrif Nature Getaway we joined the braai that had started a few hours earlier when the first three vans arrived. Hestea, our resident director who plans all our excursions, had sausages and salad ready for us. After dinner two students took out their guitars and we had a little sing-a-long for a couple hours. My roommate Casey and I were pleasantly surprised when we went back to our little house for the night. We stayed with a few other people in a house called Mars which had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen/living area, and a beautiful river running through our front yard. The beds were so comfortable we didn’t want to get up the next morning. But we did eventually get up and make our lunches before heading out for our hike with the rest of the AIFS group. The first hour of the hike was very steep but had awesome views because we did a zig-zag pattern on the outer edge of the mountain (very different from any other hike I’ve done). When we reached the Wolfberg Cracks we waited for everyone to catch up with us and Hestea announced that we were the fasted group of our size (roughly 45 people) to reach the first checkpoint. Once everyone was together some people decided to turn back and head home, another group took the ‘easy’ route to the top of the cracks (though it’s not very easy), and a third group took the adventure route. Hestea explained the challenges of the adventure route and most of us thought it sounded fun so we went with her.

I’m not a huge fan of hiking, but the rest of the way up the mountain was awesome because it was more rock climbing than hiking. We had to shimmy up rock walls, walk sideways through narrow passages, slide underneath a fallen boulder, make our way through caves, and eventually we made it to the top of the cracks. After some free time exploring the top of the mountain we were given another option. Some people were going to head down the mountain immediately, others were going to hang out for a while on the top, and a third group was going to hike another hour further. I decided to keep hiking so thirteen of us went out in search of the Wolfberg Arch. This part turned out to be more of a brisk walk than a hike because the top of the mountain was relatively flat. This extra adventure was worth it because the views from the arch were incredible and it was a lot easier to hike with a smaller number of people. The trek back down the mountain was tiring and by the time we reached the bottom we were all exhausted. We spent a total of 7 hours on the mountain, about 5.5 hours of hiking and 90 minutes of food/water breaks.

We got in our van at the base of the trail and drove back to our houses which were just a few minutes down the road. As we were approaching our main house we saw several baboons on each side of us. Two of them were just walking through the woods, one mother was tending to its baby, and another really big one was running around some guy’s tent. The guy then came out of the tent with a big stick and chased it away. I used to think of baboons as really cool animals (like Rafiki in The Lion King), but they’re mean. Their teeth are bigger than sharks’teeth and they do not fear humans. One of Hestea’s friends joined us on the trip to help with cooking and cleaning and she had both of her side mirrors ripped off her car by baboons. So, needless to say, they’ve quickly become a much more frightening animal in my mind.

Once the baboons ran away a few of us decided to go swimming. My friend Adrienne and I jumped in by my house and floated down the river for a while. It was absolutely amazing to be in the crystal clear water surrounded by mountains. The water temperature was perfect and I wish I could have captured the sights and sounds of our swim on camera. Afterwards we were supposed to go on a wine tour in the nearby vineyard, which is owned by the same family as the resort, but it was cancelled. It turns out there were seven noise complaints by fellow campers the previous night and the owner wasn’t very happy with our group. He actually asked us to leave on Saturday morning but Hestea was able to convince him otherwise. It came as a surprise to her because she said we were actually really quiet compared to previous groups (she’s taken students there 23 times before), but there were a lot more people in close proximity to our main house this year. Anyway, because of the complaints Hestea made a deal with the owner that if we could stay another night we’d all be inside a house by 9:00pm. So we had an early dinner and I was more than happy to get to bed fairly early because I was exhausted. For dinner Hestea and her friend made potjie which is a delicious stew of beef, potatoes, and fresh vegetables served over rice. I could literally eat it every night for the next month and be happy.

On Sunday morning we packed up, made lunches, and headed out to see the rock art of the San Bushmen. Hestea taught us a little lesson on this tribe and showed us a bunch of paintings that are over 80,000 years old. We spent a couple hours exploring the caves and climbing the huge rock formations. I hadn’t been told about this climbing opportunity so I had sandals on, but I was able to make it to the top of a fairly large rock (if you look near the center of the last picture at the end of this entry you can see my friend Dustin on top of a rock formation... I was up that high a few minutes before I took the picture). After eating our lunch we hit the road en route to Stellenbosch. Everything about the weekend was awesome, even though our drivers were slightly terrifying. Here are a few pictures but none of them really capture the true magnificence of the Cederberg Wilderness Area.

Thanks for reading this long entry!