24/08/2024
HIKING A MAJESTIC WONDER OF NATURE: TABLE MOUNTAIN
PLATTERKLIP (Flat Stone) GORGE Hiking Trail:
- Location: Cape Town (South Africa)
- Starting point: About 1 mile from the Cable Car Lower Station towards the Devil’s Peak (15min drive from Cape Town Central)
- Length: 2.5 miles (4.02 km) out-and-back
- Average duration: 3h:45
- Difficulty: Challenging
- Highest elevation (Maclear Beacon): 1086 m above the sea level
- Safety: Safe
- Advantages: easiest, most popular, recommended, magnificent views, spectacular rock formations, flowers, plant life, birdlife, wildlife like Rock Hyrax/Dassie, agama/lezards, ghost frog, klipspringer, snakes, …truly exciting.
- Free parking available
- What to bring:
+ enough water
+ hiking shoes
+ fitness outfit
+ Dress warmly (Winter)
+ Camera/Phone (pictures)
+ Sunglasses (Summer)
+ Mini backpack bag
Hiking Table Mountain is the best way to get in touch with the beauty, history & geology of this incredible mountain. Climbing boulders, threading your way past cliffs and rocky watercourses connects you with the beauty of nature.
Table Mountain formed about 260 million years ago -before the Himalayas and the Alps-, when South America scrunched Africa! It was part of a much larger mountain range; ice, heat, wind, erosion, Stone Age, reduced the mountain to its current shape of tabletop.
It was the water running down this Platterklip Gorge that led the Dutch (VOC) to settle at the foot of the mountain in 1652. They built a trading outpost that grew to become the bustling metropolis of Cape Town, Mother City to South Africa. Five streams rose on Table Mountain, draining down different sides of the mountain:
1. The first is the Varsche (Fresh) River, a confluence of three smaller streams on the front of the mountain: the Platterklip, the Silver and Capel Sluit. Cape Town owes its existence to the Varsche River.
2. The second stream, the Liesbeek, drains Table Mountain's luxuriant eastern slopes.
3. Third there are the Diep and Spaanschemat streams, both flowing southeast towards the False Bay.
4. Table Mountain's largest stream, the Disa, drains southwards into Orange Kloof before debouching in Hout Bay.
To the Cape's indigenous Khoe pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers, the area now occupied by Cape Town city centre was known as Camissa, Place of Sweet Water. Table Mountain was their home. The Koi and San tribes also hailed the mountain sacred because they believed that their god resided on the mountain.
When the Portuguese explorers arrived in the Cape in 1503, the bay at the foot of the mountain, present-day Table Bay, became known as Aguada de Saldanha, Watering Place of De Saldanha (Portuguese explorer).
The Dutchman Wouter Schouten, upon tasting the water on the mountain in 1665, stated the following about it: "We found it quite sweet and exceptionally pleasant in taste... Our heavenly liquid now tasted better than ordinarily does the most exquisite drink in the world.”
Join us and explore this unique “Gift of the Earth”.