#The view from the
hiking trail on the way to Tugela Gorge
THERE can be few
more humbling slabs of geography than the Amphitheatre, a mile-high citadel of
doom-grey basalt that looms over the Royal
Natal National Park. Viewed from the Tugela River’s innocently chuckling
lower reaches, this Tolkien-grade fortification looks as portentous as it is.
‘The Amphiteatre is like the mother of South Africa,’ says
Ncamy Dlamini. ‘We would have no farms, no food without the rivers that are
born up there.’ This is the loftiest stretch of the 600-mile rain factory known
in Afrikaans the Drakensberg – The
Dragon’s Mountain.
Ncamy is a firefighter. She and her squad are out on a
nine-hour training exercise in the park. ‘Most of our fires start with
lightning, and spread like it,’ she says. ‘You have to move fast to fight them,
and at 3,000 metres altitude that isn’t easy.’ She arches her shoulders against
the weight of her backpack. ‘But, you know, this is our homeland. It’s so
beautiful and so special, and I am always proud to be protecting it.’
The trek up the Tugel Gorge is by turns benign and wild. The
near treeless green valley is punctuated by the exotic blurts of red-spiked
bottlebrush trees. Then the vegetation an those black-streaked sandstone flanks
close in, and soon the rainforest whoops and croaks are drowned out by the
white-noise roar of rapid water.
Boots and socks come off for what the trail map blithely
calls a ‘boulder hop’, requiring hikers to zig-zag across the increasingly
excitable Tugela. Shed-sized rocks strewn along the tightening cleft pay
impressive testament to the river’s full-flow fury: it becomes ever easier to
imagine the Amphitheatre as this nation’s life-giving heart, and the Tugela as
its mightiest artery.
In the final stretch, chain ladders climb rock faces and the
gorge narrows to the spread of a hiker’s arms. The reward, for those who catch
the lords of the mist in benevolent mood, is a neck-craning view of the Tugela
hurling itself off the roof of the Amphitheatre, in the second-highest
waterfall on Earth. For a long while the summit is no more than a notion, lost
in steamy wisps; then a shaft of sun bursts through and for one brief but dumb founding moment there it is, a tiny
silver thread spooling down from the top of the world.
Billed as an ‘Afro-Swiss mountain village’, Alpine Heath
sits on the edge of the Royal Natal National Park, with large self-catering
chalets equipped with fireplaces and offering views of the escarpement. The
central complex features two swimming pools, bars, a grocery and two restaurants
(threecities.co.za/alpineheath).
