Idwala hiking trail Jul 2009

Nicola and I left from her place shortly after she returned from work on Friday afternoon. The drive was uneventful except for the pitifully poor road leading into basecamp. We arrived shortly after 4pm with a member of another group not long after us. We picked the hut closest to the kitchen and ablutions and settled in. The others arrived around sunset and by then I had already started the fire. After a braai we all hit the bed.

Day 1 (25 Jul): We got up early despite a cold and windy morning. With breakfast behind us we left down the 4x4 track to Hannes’s dam, crossed the dam wall and climbed out the other side. The path was not terribly well maintained but very well marked and we had no problems following it over rolling hills until we reached the escarpment edge looking down towards Loskop dam. We rested a little before carrying on towards the Shotgun loop climbing down into a pretty but dark kloof and walking right up to the dry waterfall at its end. Unfortunately it seemed the path stopped here and doesn’t continue to a chain ladder as promised on a map. We returned the same way and then walked a while longer on the escarpment edge before stopping for lunch. With lunch past we carried on – Nicola and I fell behind a little and walked our own pace. As soon as we saw the road leading back up to the hut, the path descended down into a kloof again, and then angled upstream out of the kloof. We walked slowly here and saw Black-headed oriole, Jameson’s firefinch and White-crested helmetshrikes. I got ahead of Nicola about two thirds through the kloof, walked up to the dam wall and waited for her there – I saw Madelein and Elize leaving the campsite and walk up the road. When Nicola didn’t show up after I sat for about 10 minutes I got worried and walked back down to look for her – I found her on the wrong side of the river, not too far away. She missed one of the footprints where it crossed the stream and subsequently lost the track for a while. By now it was quite warm and we were tired. We tackled the last section up the road and arrived just after 3pm back in camp. After some rest we had a good shower and braai that night. I also showed my Chile video to the group before we hit the bed.

Day 2 (26 Jul): We decided to do our own thing this day. Soon after the rest of the group left, Nicola and I went down the road again to Hannes’s dam and picked up the path from there going up the kloof east of base camp. It was quite interesting but still chilly so early in the morning. Nothing worth mentioning happened and before long we climbed out the top end of the kloof. We skirted the top edge back to camp, packed up and left for Middelburg.

Not a bad hike but the path can do with some clearing and maintenance in places.