The Garden Route and The Outeniqua Trail

Feb 26

After our ordinary time in Fish Hoek, we decided that another road trip was in order and the obvious choice for that around the Cape is the Garden Route. To sweeten the pot, there are two long distance hiking routes in the area (1) The Otter trail and (2) the Outeniqua trail. The Otter trail is famous and, as a result, books out a year in advance. I am not that kind of planner, so I assuaged my actualized FOMO by noting that the Otter trail looks nearly identical to Big Sur and then I called the ranger about the Outeniqua trail. Normally this trail is seven days with overnight stays in huts each night, but the first three huts are closed because of storm damage, so we started this trail near the last of the damaged huts and took five days. In talking to the ranger, I learned that the huts are always available - this should have set off alarm bells. It did not.

Anyway, with our hiking permits sorted, we set off for the road trip part with the first stop in Wilderness (a South African town, not, you know, “the wilderness”). This town is great; it has coffee shops and beautiful beaches, a river and good food. In reading about activities, we found a self guided, flat water kayaking tour followed by a short hike to a waterfall with swimming holes. That seemed like a fine way to spend a day, so we did.

Kayaking

The kayaking starts in the estuary of the Touws river where we enjoyed the weaver birds who’d taken up residence on islands and I schooled the boys in improvised sailing by standing up in the boat. “Dad, wait for us! We can’t paddle that hard!” Suckers.

Further up we came to a roped, pontoon boat used by hikers to cross the river where Joe enforced a very extended swim break. Em and I entertained ourselves by watching the Knysna Turacos and some feisty big fish corralling and munching on hoards of smaller fish.

After we’d had enough of watching Joe swim, we continued the paddle, landed the boats when we ran out of navigable water and walked the pleasant path to the waterfalls. The water in this area is all saturated with vegetable tannins that give it a deep brown hue - it seems gross, and in fact, tastes…not great, but it was pleasantly warm and made for an amazing swimming hole.

The kids play on the pontoon boat

Landing the boats

Joe and I climbed to the top of the waterfall

And found some deep potholes to explore

Outeniqua trail

After a few days lounging in Wilderness, we headed off for the Outeniqua trail. Since this is a through hike, we stayed the first night at the Harkerville hut, which is actually the trail terminus, left our car in the morning and headed to the trailhead in a hired taxi.

I should be honest, this was the worst hike we’ve undertaken this year. The landscape is dominated by two ecosystems, the first is Cape forest and the second is fynbos. Fynbos is the big sell for this hike and is the Afrikaans name for local scrubland that is exceptionally bio-diverse. While this biodiversity was amazing, it wasn’t so pretty, and of course, forest walking is often bland. Add to that the ruddy bad weather (90F+ followed by 36 hrs of pouring rain), a 4 day fever for me (not Covid, I later learned), awful tooth pain and a horrible rash for Joe that we think was caused by something dissolved in the water and you don’t have a great hike. In fact, a few days into this hike, we hadn’t seen a single other soul hiking this or any connected trail and it dawned on me why the huts might be free.

Starting out the trail in high heat

Despite the heat, there were lots of mushrooms. That should have been a clue of the rain storm that was coming.

Even strange fungi that seemed to ooze blood

The forest tea that was to give Joe a full body rash

Chameleon!

This is what the huts look like inside - bunk beds and no screens. Why, why does the rest of the world pretend like there are no mosquitoes?

The first available hut: Millwood. Sleeping room for 50 - we had it and all the rest of the “huts” to ourselves.

No screens? We brought mosquito nets so as not to get devoured.

Sugarbush flower with expansive fynbos

Suffering through the heat in the totally exposed fynbos

The road was lined with a huge variety of flowers, still blooming in the southern fall

The boys relaxing in the Knysna river. Joe opted for no clothes since we’d seen no one at all.

Forest walking. So, so much forest.

Rondebossie hut. We arrived 10 minutes before the rain, thunder and lightning started and we thought ourselves so very lucky. I joked with Joe, hah. It rained for the next 36 hours.

The view on the way up to the trail highpoint through the rain

This picture is a lie. A damn, dirty lie. We arrived at the highest point on the trail, meant to be an astounding 360 degree view. Everyone was soaked, cold, hungry and pissed. “Smile,” I said, and they did this. Nyuck, nyuck.

Great view

Elephant footprints! We also found droppings and heard one just out of view in the forest. Em was not pleased after our experience with elephants in Rwanda.

More huge mushrooms

More variety of flowers in the fynbos

This spider is on my hiking pole for reference. It’s about 1/2” in diameter.

While hiking in the rain, we moved through an exceptional tree fern forest. It was too wet to take my phone out, so I didn’t get any pictures, but this was pretty nice too.

Drying out our gear after 8 hrs of rain walking. I was very happy to have a fireplace and heaps of firewood at Diepwalle hut.

These enormous millipedes were all over the place

The sun is shinning again

Quality signage

We found many of these giant cockroaches and wondered why they didn’t just get eaten by baboons. Then we poked one and discovered - they smell, epically, like a dead animal.

The last creek crossing. Lily pads and frogs.

Almost done. Oh good, more fynbos.

Nelson Cave

After we hauled our carcasses from the Outeniqua trail to our Airbnb, dried out and showered off, we took some time to explore the area around Knysna. Mostly, it was beautiful boilerplate for this area - but, one place truly shocked us. When we went for an afternoon hike in Robberg Nature Preserve we drove by a sign that said simply “Nelson Cave”. The boys cheered, “Cave!” Emilee groaned, “Caaaaave,” but when we consulted the Robberg pamphlet, we learned that the cave was inhabited as early as 120k years ago! Whaaaaaat?!?! Even Em was willing to go in for that.

When we got to the cave entrance, I was watching my footing and started to notice a lot of limpet shells - it slowly dawned on me that we were looking at a huge trash midden that filled the first few meters of the cave entrance! Inside the cave, archeologists have made multiple exploratory trenches to map the extent of habitation. They’ve found several burials, stone tools, bead ornamentation, and waves of habitation where the foods consumed were affected by climate. They have retained one of the excavations, with a cross section showing the different diets throughout the ages. Most of the history is filled with limpets, lots of limpets, but some eras were dominated by giant snails, or fish, or even antelope (during the ice age, when the area wasn’t coastal). It turns out that we had stumbled on one of the oldest sites of human habitation in the world. Incredible.