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Published: January 15th 2006
Giant's Castle camp
Looking down the valley towards the campAfter following Tom on another 6 hour drive, going through a pass over the mountains again and dodging the speed cameras, we arrived in Giant’s Castle. The scenery was awesome and the hutted camp a delight.
We had 2 self catering chalets with mountain views from the decks. Sarah and Tom had been shopping (big time) and had brought loads of food for the braais. It was cooler in the mountains than it had been in either Jo’burg or the Kruger, but we could still sit outside on the deck and listen to the river in the valley below. We were amazed when we woke the first morning because all the clouds had gone and we could now see the full extent of the berg - a sheer rock face shooting up into the sky from the hills, which we had thought were the mountains the night before. We also had a good view of the eland (large antelope) grazing on the slopes opposite.
Giant’s Castle is renowned for its hiking and fishing. So we did as many walks as we could, weather permitting. On New Year’s Day we were all up bright and early (having gone to bed
Giant's Castle berg
The berg looks just like the walls of a huge castle at 10:30 the night before because we were so tired!) and Brian, Pam and Sarah set off at 7:30 to walk to Giant’s Hut, right underneath the face of the berg, a round trip of 19km (12.5 miles). Tom was more sensible and went fishing. We congratulated ourselves on our early start, the lack of strong sun and our rapid progress up the foothills. We were also pleased that the altitude did not seem to have much effect even though we were climbing from about 1800m to over 2300m (about 7 - 8,000 feet). We reached Giant’s Hut at about 10:30am, but had not seen any animals and hardly any birds. It was very quiet and lonely so far from civilisation. We were now on the return journey and we noticed the berg (right above us) was gradually disappearing into the clouds. After a while we came across a troupe of baboons. They were only marginally interested in us and kept out of our way. It was getting on for lunchtime, so about half a mile later we stopped and had our sandwiches. Suddenly we heard a barking sound and then a large male baboon rushed down the hill, passed
where we were sitting and then crossed below us barking all the time. Quite scary. So we quickly packed up the rest of our lunch and set off again to put as much distance between us and the baboons as possible.
About half an hour after setting off again, we suddenly heard a huge clap of thunder. The clouds on the top of the berg had developed into a thunderstorm and the rain was rapidly catching us up. We decided to see how quickly we could get off the mountain!! It’s amazing how, when you are supposed to be going down, you often find yourself climbing another hill and then another. We thought we would never get to the bottom. We did make it before the rain caught us up and got back in a record 6 hours instead of the 7.5 hours indicated in the guide book. The baboons did us a favour by making our lunch break shorter than we would have liked, otherwise the thunder and lightning would have been right on top of us.
The weather after that day was too changeable to attempt another long walk, dry in the morning and thunder by
The view from the deck
Spectacular view when the berg was not shrouded in cloud. lunchtime. We did a number of shorter walks including the one to the caves at the head of the valley where there are cave paintings done by the bushmen over many hundreds of years.
On 4 January 2006 we headed back to Jo’burg for the flight home that evening. We had a fabulous holiday and are now looking forward to doing Cape Town and the wine country in the Autumn.
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