My friend Al has been describing this amazing, terrifying hike which follows India Venster up Table Mountain for some way before cutting straight across the right front half (Africa face) of the mountain inside the rock face and on little ledges barely wide enough to walk on. So we finally set a date for this last Sunday. For some reason everyone flaked (I’m not calling anyone a wuss or anything!) besides Al, his wife and myself. The day started off in perfect summer fashion- deep blue skies and the air already shimmering with heat. As such I didn’t think it was such a great idea to meet at noon, but Al was calling the shots. So off we set in the midday heat from the cableway straight up, and I do mean straight up, to the contour path. Whenever I hike Table Mountain I always wonder what possessed those first pathbuilders to blaze the straightest path. Did they have something against zigzagging? After much huffing and puffing (only me, the other two could manage to keep up a conversation) and many ‘view spots’ we finally got to the point where we would leave the India Venster path and head across to Africa face (interestingly enough Al told me that apparently when you look up from the city bowl the mountain face framed within the buttresses looks a bit like India and hence that face of the mountain is called India face, and the same for Africa face! [note to self: check this out from the city bowl]). Our first section of the traverse quickly petered out into a narrow section from where we needed to drop down to an equally narrow section via a dodgy scramble line. Being a climber I wasn’t too worried until Al told me the rock I was holding on to was loose and I shouldn’t put any weight onto it! Eeek! After many small cautious moves, being extremely careful about where we put our feet (and to think those Himilayan tars just hop all over the mountain!) we felt safeish (for most of this hike we only felt safeish as all of it has a rock face on your right and massive 100’s of metres drop on your left). From here we entered a large crack in the rock to find that you could walk quite comfortably with a slab of rock between you and the drop and the entire mountain pushing down on this slab. It was a bit like caving only with more light, very cool! Soon we popped out into the sunshine again as we exited the secret tunnel to have made a fair bit of progress on our traverse. Al tells his wife that that was the worst of the hike (she’s not too fond of heights) but he was very quickly proven wrong as the fairly wide ledge we were walking on narrowed to a foot wide that ended in the middle of nowhere with nothing in front. I can’t say that I was happy to hear that I had to climb into a much narrower crack in the rock face, starting just over a foot up and no handholds to pull you into it. I tried not to think about the plummet behind me as I did that step up into the pitch black. Luckily my eyes adjusted quickly as we entered he much narrower passage behind the rock and had too squeeze through sideways- I tried standing square on but my hips would not fit in the passage! Luckily it was not very long and the scary (but fun) part was over. We soon stopped for lunch with breathtaking views all to ourselves (few souls are brave enough to attempt what we did and even if they were the route is really overgrown so if you don’t have a guide you’re unlikely to find the track). Before long (funny how quickly you cover the horizontal paths eh?) we had reached our point of descent, down Yellowstone ravine. Al claimed it was so called because the stone looked more yellow but I couldn’t see it! I think going down was the worst bit- constantly putting the brakes on really tired out my poor legs, so I was grateful to see the contour path that led us gently back home. I came home tired but very very happy, what a walk!
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