Lower Injasuthi cave (Drakensberg) Mar 2007

I met Gordon, Yolandy and Corne at work. We left my and Gordon’s cars there and left in Corne’s, arriving in Bergville just after 11pm. We slept at the tennis courts and got up the next morning at 6am.

Day 1 (24 March): As we didn’t have much walking to do to Lower Injasuthi cave, we didn’t rush. We arrived at Injasuthi at about 08:45, signed in and paid and left at about 09:15. It was almost completely overcast and cool. I decided immediately to take the upper path as it would take us past the river. We made steady progress and it wasn’t long before we were at the junction that splits off to Centenary hut. We walked past this, for my first time on a new path and soon after arrived at Battle cave. The entire area was camped off with barbed wire fencing and the access gate was locked. We discovered a hole in the fence, crawled through and walked to the top. The number of paintings were amazing and we took many photographs before leaving. Continuing up the path that almost immediately became very dense with vegetation, we walked about 500m from the cave before I decided to have an early lunch break. The clouds were dissipating slowly and it was starting to heat up so we didn’t wait very long before carrying on. The cave was quite obvious to spot and Gordon found a direct but very steep, overgrown and slippery path leading up to it. We arrived in the cave at 14:00. Taking a good rest, all of us fell asleep in the lazy afternoon, getting up around 16:30. Corne, Yolandy and I then walked down a different path to get to the river, fetching water in my Drom bag. Back in the cave we prepared dinner of spaghetti, bacon, braai relish and tomato soup. For pudding we had tinned peaches and custard. Gordon had his tripod with him and took some pretty good pictures of the stars we could see. Listening to the SA vs Australia cricket on a small radio Gordon brought, we played cards until almost 10pm, before we finally fell asleep.

Day 2 (25 March): We got up early, had breakfast and left before 8am, walking through the dense vegetation before Battle cave. Not rushing, we walked the last few kilometres without incident and got back to Injasuthi at 11:00. After a good shower, we were back in the car and on our way to have Nando’s