Orange Kloof, Table Mountain
Before being attacked by a swarm of killer germs sparking virulent sinusitis and a shape-shifting tooth abscess, my loyal photographic assistant McCracken McCracken and I headed up to Eagle's Nest, in search of a geocache. Whether the name applies to the cache or the miniature peak tacked to the backside of Table Mountain is of little import: it fits.
Geocaching, like most things, can teach one much. Having climbed Elsies Peak twice and circled it clockwise the previous weekend, I again — on Saturday — fell prey to my propensity to take the shortest route linking A to B.
I'm a slow learner. Crows, which avoid my camera like the plague, are able to fly direct. McCracken McCracken and I should stick to charted paths. I've yet to find a short cut taking me to my destination in less than twice the time it would have taken me to get there had I followed clearly marked trails. "Yeah, but that's a cairn over there. It's definitely a path," I told her, before smashing my way through the fynbos leading to the base of the cliff beneath the peak. Stuck within 10 metres of the cache, we circled the rock, looking for a way up. Again, the "shortest distance between two points" principle applied and I led us up many a vertiginous dead end.
Eventually, sanity and my photographic assistant's good sense paid off and I slouched gloomily around the face and up towards the beacon topping the hill. "What a crap cache," I muttered to myself, trudging a well-worn track towards our waypoint. "We might as well have walked along the gravel road," I moaned, forgetting Kulwinder promised only a thirty-minute walk.
I'll learn. From the top, the view contradicted my grim outlook. Eagle's Nest overlooks the back end of Table Mountain and the Hout Bay valley, affording stunning views. Better still, lazily circled by cliff-nesting crows, it offers a contemplative overview of Orange Kloof, the forested depression behind Table Mountain, walled on one side by the crags of the Twelve Apostles and on the other, by the peaks and buttresses looming over the southern suburbs.
A short walk means few pictures. But so what? For mid-winter, it was a damned good afternoon out and a cache well worth finding.
