The Magaliesberg

The Magaliesberg mountain range is in Northwest Province, which neighbours Gauteng (this is where I am; pronounced “HOW(with flem)-TENG”) to the West. It's nothing dramatic - about 120km long and a few hundred feet high - but it constitutes a number of parks and reserves, as well as some private resorts, and provides easy access to the outdoors from Pretoria and Jo'burg.

After dithering over coffee and waiting for a car to become available at Avis, Camilla and I made an afternoon dash about one and a half hours west of Pretoria and found ourselves (having stopped to ask directions from a number of people for whom“hiking”elicited only the vaguest of frowns and mumbled suggestions) in the“Mountain Sanctuary.” Feeling lucky to have made it into the mountains at all, given our late start and lack of any plan or destination, we picked up a trail that led quickly into a rocky river bed with some fantastic rock formations. We are nearing the end of winter now, which is the dry season in this part of the world, and the river was running very low, making for easy walking. We stopped along the way to scramble on the rocks (I was in heaven!), eventually making it to a sort of dead-end at a little waterfall pouring over a heavily overgrown cliff. We had a bite to eat while soaking up the silence and evening light, then hustled back down to get to the car before dark (which comes around 6:15).

We agreed that we would have to come back to this spot with some good friends, food and books, and spend a proper day playing in the river and climbing on the rocks!

More photos here: http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/philipkakins/album?.dir=/c162