Adolf recently guided on our Walking South Africa JJa14 that visits the Drakensberg Mountains. This is his groups experience on the day they do the Tugela Gorge. The Drakensburg mountains have always lived up to its reputation of being one of the most untouched, beautiful places South Africa has to offer. One of our walks in the Drakensberg is called the Gorge Trail. This trail is a 12 km long round trip going along the side of the mountain, through waterways and into dense evergreen forests dominated by tall Yellow Wood trees and plants with edible fruits, not that it would fill you up of course.

We started the day as usual with coffee and a decent breakfast that needs to provide you with all the energy for the long walk ahead, first we got robbed by a big baboon taking half of our bananas and fleeing with them just to go gulp them down a few meters away. After we made our packed lunches that we will have at the waterfall we set out keeping an eye open for any wild animals that we might see against the hills of the mountains. We stopped and viewed the beautiful mountains taking pictures, when we noticed some animals walking in the distance, they were Eland. Elands are the largest of all the antelope species in Africa and can reach a mass of 800 kg. Despite their size they frequent the hills of the Drakensberg, walking on narrow paths that seem impossible for them to handle.

After about 2 hours of walking we reached our lunch spot at the meeting point of 2 separate streams. We soon started exploring the area, there was some chain ladders that we could climb and go to the top of the mountain, or we could try and swim in small pools of ice cold mountain water, or we could explore one of the streams that leads up to a long narrow passage.

We followed the path further and walked into a canyon, following the stream upwards. We had to do a bit of rock jumping and later had to take our shoes off and wade through the stream, nearly freezing in motion as we felt the sting of the cold water.

We got to a point where it seemed impossible to cross, but we tried anyway and we got to small waterfall that looked like something out of a fantasy movie!
We were amazed at the view we were looking at! Some of group where brave enough and went for a swim upstream and went up to the small waterfall where they had an ice cold shower in Cristal clear water that will certainly never be forgotten!