Just Ordinary People: August 2011

Melanie fair

It was still dark when we left Grassy Park at 06h30. There was a slightly bigger turnout than expected, with most of the usual suspects joining us, although some of the usual suspects kinda lost their way and we didn’t hook up with them at all on the trail!

A really big surprise to me was six-year-old little Caitlin coming along. I would have thought a 24 kilometer hike in the mountains would be far too much for her, but I would have been dead wrong. Not only did she do it, she did it without even blinking, she did it effortlessly! Uncle Cedric is SO proud of her.

Roger, Carol & Caitlin

It was cold in the early morning. When we started walking, Melanie complained that her toes felt like blocks of ice, and, as usual, Uncle Cedric was overdressed, with four layers of clothing against the cold; twenty minutes into the hike and all those layers came off and were replaced with shorts and a T-shirt. Some people - when will they ever learn? Clothing that is no longer needed takes up far too much space in a backpack.

Due to having stopped to shed the clothing, I was temporarily behind the pack, but I soon caught up with them again by a stream, where they had stopped to have breakfast. Breakfast, for me, consisted of coffee and pastrami-on-rye sandwiches; it doesn’t get much better than that on a hiking trail!

There were three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn must die....
(Traditional English folk song)

The three wise men, or, should I say, three wise guys, Joshua, Taylor and Cole, were going at one heck of a pace, as befitted their teenage years. I keep telling myself, if you want to get in shape, just keep up with those guys!

Wally carries Caitlin over wet ground

After the indigenous forest, there is a fork in path, we took the sharp right turn and, from there onwards, the path went steadily upwards at a gentle gradient through some beautiful fynbos on the western side of the mountain we had to circumnavigate. Having to frequently stop to take pictures, I found myself once again lagging behind the group. Once I heard Roger calling my name, but decided not to answer and let them wonder where the heck I was!

Early in the morning

I really wish they would hand out better maps at these hiking trails, or that each kilometer would be clearly marked on the trail; this particular trail did not have distance markers, and one only knew exactly where one was when one came to a radical change in direction.

After the gentle upward slope, the path turned right at roughly ninety degrees and morphed into a jeep track, and I caught up with the group at about one o’clock in the afternoon. After a bit of a break, we set off again, and this time I kept pace with the three wise guys for a few kilometers, but the three wise guys cheated and took a short cut down a firebreak and stole about one kilometer on me. By this time we were on the back straight, if you compare the hiking trail to a racetrack. The fire that had raged here in the autumn had turned the eastern side of the mountain into a desert landscape where nothing at all grew, it was all bare rock and bare sand. I wasn’t inspired to take any pictures of that bleak landscape!

After a few kilometers of the frenetic pace set by the three wise guys, not to mention their cheating and getting the jump on me, I started to tire and dropped the pace and started to take more frequent rests. The rest of the gang caught up with me and we walked together for a while. If I got ahead a little, Caitlin would come up and make me hold her hand. In all the world, it’s my favourite hand to hold! And, like any six-year-old, she would ply me with questions. Would a leopard bite her? Why are some people confused about where they were? And so on, and so forth.

It had rained very recently, and there were little streams of water everywhere, including on the jeep track itself. At one point we came to a pool where we had to take off our shoes and wade through knee-deep water. The water was the colour of chardonnay, was cold and refreshing, and had little frogs swimming in it.

Carol & Debbie

At one stage we had a debate about exactly how far we had left to go. Wally produced a map that was a bit better than the Cape Nature one we had been issued with at the start of the trail, his had contours and everything on it. I told Carol confidently that I knew exactly where we were, and that we would be back at the start point within the next half hour. I turned out to be dead wrong, the half hour morphed into one-and-a-half hours. This trail is rated as an eight hour hike, we did it in eight and a half hours, with me coming home last at fifteen minutes after the rest of the gang.

Afterwards, we stopped for a snack at a pizza place in Gordons Bay.