Mhlabatini (Magaliesberg) Sep 2006

Gordon came to my flat from where we left, just after 7am, Saturday morning, in my car. We followed the directions to Mhlabatini, as I’ve been there only once before with Darrell, 3 years ago. The entrance is a dirt road about 1.5km short of the Bergheim entry and points towards a cemetery.

Day 1 (9 September): Arriving at about 08:30, I parked the car and paid the R20 parking fee. We quickly sorted out all the equipment and started hiking. Beyond the dam wall we picked up a path leading up next to the stream. This path quickly disappeared and we gave up looking for one. I walked on the GPS co-ordinate I obtained from the last time I was there and from the parking it only showed about 600m to go. After climbing a little, we started traversing across a rock slab, guided by the GPS. With 20m to go, we walked straight into camp! We dropped our packs and started discussing what to do and where to go. While we were busy, a group of three people showed up. They were part of the MCSA group that was going to weed Crofton in Mhlabatini. We chatted a bit before setting off down the kloof, hoping to reach the first aid dump without needing technical gear. However, we were stopped short about 100m into the kloof by a chock stone and wall to wall pool. We decided to turn around and walk along the top to enter the kloof from the top. The walk proceeded well and soon we were entering into what seemed a major tributary of Mhlabatini. This kloof proved hard to go down in since there was a narrowing of slippery quartzite at the bottom which looked a little hard to cross. Two attempts to skirt this section by traversing higher proved unsuccessful and we eventually climbed out completely and approached the top of Mhlabatini itself. At this point the kloof was very shallow. We started down, skirting thick bushes and trees along the way. Soon the bottom started to drop and it became a proper kloof. On the way down we ended up rigging 3 very short abseils to get down tricky boulders or chock stones. The last one was the chock stone with the large pool that stopped us on the way up the kloof. Abseiling into the water, we swam across and dried out before carrying down the kloof, back to camp. We arrived at 2pm and spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the shade. The other MCSA people got back from weeding at about 5pm and we chatted a bit before preparing dinner: onion, green pepper, bully beef and noodles. We got into bed by about 19:30 but the mosquitoes annoyed us the entire night, since we slept without tents.

Day 2 (10 September): We had sandwiches for breakfast before taking a walk to the cliffs right behind the campsite. I set up a nice 30 meter abseil and we both had a quick abseil before I ascended all the way up again. We abseiled a second time and then I instructed Gordon on ascending and let him have a go at it. Just before 10am we walked back to camp and went down to the river where we ate and drank a little while chatting. I decided to walk back out and visit Fern kloof quickly to confirm arrangements for the group I am to guide the following weekend. We met Otti Nesser again up at the camp. She explained to us what Crofton weed looks like and said we could walk back along the stream which is a bit more interesting. We decided to follow her advice but where the stream walls narrowed to a lovely deep gorge of about 20m with a wonderful pool at the bottom, we decided our packs were to heavy to skirt the slippery upper wall and we climbed higher to get around it. At the weir we spotted pulled-out Crofton and finally knew exactly what it looks like. We were back at the car before noon.