Die Kogelberg

Come Saturday morning and I decided to do a little scouting trip to the Kogelberg Nature Reserve. I am driven by the need to get fit - fitter than I am right now, that is, and an insatiable curiosity. I had gotten this idea into my head and I just couldn't wait
to go and check it out! So, after dropping off my weekly laundry at the laundromat, I was on my way. 

I zeroed the odometer as I passed the place where the cooling towers used to be, which must have been at about 09h00. There was no rain forecast for Saturday - and, ever since they had the weather  radar installed at the airport, I have learnt to trust the weather predictions implicitly.

 

So I motored down the N2, took the Broadlands Road turn-off, right,  to Somerset West and then the R44 which goes to Hermanus via Gordons Bay.  Winding along that mountain road after Gordons Bay, with the ocean on my right, and that environment so pristine, so clean, was really therapeutic. I passed through Rooi Els, then Pringle Bay, unspoilt fynbos as far as the eye can see, until eventually I made Betty's Bay. As I drove into Betty's Bay, at 80km/hour, a troop of baboons broke and ran over the road, and I had to stand on the brakes to avoid hitting a female carrying a baby slung under her belly. A good day had just gotten better!

I found a restaurant, in that main drag, called, 'The Whaling Station', and decided it was time for breakfast. The people there were really warm and friendly, and it surprised me that I was the first customer for the day, and that at 10 o'clock in the morning! I sat waiting for my breakfast, and watched Bob Jordaan & Co., all over the adjacent roofs, through the big plate glass windows. The proprietress was complaining vociferously about the baboons and the havoc that they can cause, but that was just what I'd come there to see: a real wild place with real authentic wild animals! 

Breakfast, I have to admit, was rather excellent. I can highly recommend 'The Whaling Station'.
  
The turn-off to Kogelberg is just a few kilometers further along the road out of Betty's Bay, and consists of a 2 km long gravel road through privately-owned farmland. The gravel road is in real bad shape, too, so that one has to proceed fairly slowly.

At the Cape Nature reception office they have a large relief map mounted on the wall with all the hiking trails marked on it, so one can see exactly what the nature of the terrain is. None of the hikes is radical, except maybe for the 24km one, and then only because of the distance.

In fact, I did the hardest part of the 24km hike; the first three or four kilometers is all uphill, and the rest of the hike is either more or less level or downhill, and the rise/fall in elevation is not all that much, maybe 500m, if that.

Considering that here we are in July, just two weeks or so after the winter solstice, the weather was absolutely unbelievably good. There was a bit of a southeaster blowing over the sea, but up in the Kogelberg it was almost flat calm. I wound my way through the fynbos, and suddenly I was in the forest, in the indigenous forest, with streams and waterfalls all over, and birds singing and frogs all a-croaking. That was so cool, I felt all that stress evaporating, and, I thought, if I was lucky, if I was very lucky, I might just catch a glimpse of a leopard. Yes, there are leopards in the Kogelberg, but they are extremely shy creatures and, until fairly recently, it was thought that they may actually be extinct because of  being hunted and wiped out by stock farmers, but Isak Kalmeyer, the Cape Nature guy at the gate, told me that, in a very recent nature conservation project that involved placing unmanned surveillance cameras in strategic locations, Cape Nature has catalogued 46 individual leopards in the greater Boland area!

Of course, I didn't get to see a leopard. The leopards in the Cape are the same species as the ones up north in the Kruger Park, but, for some reason that scientists have yet to figure out, in the Cape they are much smaller, maybe twice to three times the size of a domestic cat, and they pose no danger to man whatsoever.

There has been a veld fire in the Kogelberg recently, and part of one of the hiking trails is closed for repairs, I think the one that runs along the Palmiet river, apparently a footbridge was damaged or destroyed. The fire, according to me, was not bad, only the big shrubs got burnt, down on the ground where it's always wet there wasn't any discernible damage that I could see.

What, according to me, makes this hike special is the pristine, unspoilt environment. It's far from the madding crowd of Cape Town - far enough to still maintain its purity, although, measured from the place where the cooling towers used to be, it is not quite 100 km! Entrance fee is R30-00 per person, gates are open from 07h30 to 18h00 in winter. 

Isak says the Palmiet River Hiking Trail ought to be open sometime in August.