Approaching from the east, with the glow of dawn in the rear-view mirror, the Drakensberg looks like a gathering storm: a brooding black mass seemingly too big to be earthbound. Stars disappear behind its nimbus-like bulges and flocks of hadeda ibis screech past, as though in flight from the coming tempest.
The road, though, is resolute, heading arrow-straight to the Amphitheatre — the dragon’s heart. Three miles across by one mile high, this is where the Drakensberg drops sheer into the Tugela Valley, leaving awestruck humanity gaping like ants at the base of a Titan’s doorstep.
I’ve seen big cliffs — El Capitan in Yosemite, Trollveggen in Norway, Auyantepui in Venezuela — but none slackens the jaw like the Amphitheatre. It beckons like a witch, daring foolish hearts to come inside. I’m so mesmerised by its menace that I almost miss the hitchhiker.
His name is Lwazi: a big man dressed in blue overalls, green wellies and a bobble hat. He is carrying a packed lunch and a dog-eared book, and he is on his way to work o1n a cattle farm on the banks of the Tugela. He doesn’t go into the mountains, he says, because God made mountains to be looked at. Some who had gone in had never come back: those cliffs and their serpentine gullies had been home to cannibals. They would capture travellers, cut their hamstrings to stop them escaping and keep them in caves until dinner time, he adds.
He notices me glancing at the lunch pail in his lap. “Porridge,” he says.
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As I drop him off, I ask about the book. “It is called Mountain Movers: Champions of the Faith,” he replies. “Are you a believer?” I confess that I am not.
Lwazi points at the looming escarpment, still enshadowed by the remnants of night. “When the day reaches those cliffs, my brother, you will be.”
Half an hour later, the sun sets the Amphitheatre ablaze. I stop the car and watch as the light tracks across the stage, picking out the relief and transforming what had been a blank, black face into a gleaming visor of fluted columns bookended by Sentinel Peak and the Eastern Buttress. I’ve always thought the Zulu name for the Drakensberg — uKhahlamba, or Barrier of Spears — was somewhat fanciful. Until now.
The basalt peaks of the Drakensberg extend in a 125-mile crescent along the border of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. Getting here just got a lot easier: BA’s new direct flight from Heathrow to Durban puts you a three-hour drive northwest from the mountains.
Say “road trip” and most of us think first of the empty highways of the US, or possibly Australia, but KwaZulu-Natal’s blacktops and gravel tracks knock the competition into a cocked hat. A two-week drive through KZN will take you to blood-soaked battlefields, wildlife-rich game reserves and monuments to the unfulfilled promises of the ANC. It will bring you to hippie beaches with pro-class surf and designer restaurants with world-class wines that come cheap with the rand weak against the pound (18:1 is the current exchange rate). Ultimately, though, the road will lead you to the Berg.
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Field Marshal Sir Henry “Jumbo” Maitland Wilson, who began his career here in the second Boer War, coined the phrase “Any damn fool can be uncomfortable”, and KZN’s innkeepers have elevated Jumbo’s maxim to art. Turn off the highway, bump down a dirt track for 20-odd miles, fording dry river beds and passing through dusty Zulu villages, and you’ll find outposts of indolence such as Three Tree Hill Lodge. With nine cottages, free-range cats, white rhinos in the valley and the Spion Kop battlefield on the doorstep, it’s as close to the perfect countryside billet as I’ve found (doubles from £320, full-board; threetreehill.co.za).
Closer to the Berg, there’s Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse, a luxury foodie retreat at the foot of the KwaMkhize escarpment, where the chef-owner, Richard Poynton, serves seven-course dinners (doubles from £270, full-board; cleopatramountain.com); and the Cavern, a family-run hotel beneath the cannibal caves of Usidanane (doubles from £140, full-board; cavern.co.za).
The best views, though, come at the lowest price. The state-owned Thendele Camp is at the base of the Amphitheatre. It has neither restaurant nor spa, just 26 thatched self-catering chalets set amid the yellowwoods and offering wall-to-wall views of the cliffs (chalets from £47; kznwildlife.com).
Wherever you stay, though, you can’t just sit and stare. The Berg demands to be explored, and the magic of this monstrous landscape is that it’s no harder to hike than the Lake District. The nine-mile Tugela gorge trail is the easiest walk and, by the perverse sorcery of the Berg, the most spectacular: a gentle wander through the fynbos, past the fiery red blooms of Natal bottle trees and the soft blues of wild agapanthus, with the colossal cliffs of the Amphitheatre in your face the entire way.
The wonder never wears off, but it makes the going slow. In the first mile, I stop nine times to take 30 photos, all of which are exactly the same. There are only two other hikers on the trail: Birgit and Eve from Düsseldorf, stripped to bikinis and splashing in the Vemvaan River. I leave them to it, crossing the bridge and suddenly finding myself utterly alone in the most benign African bush.
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There’s nothing out here that can eat you or chase you up a tree, just a rising, almost drunken sense of euphoria that makes me wonder if Lwazi is a prophet and I am undergoing an epiphany in South Africa’s Eden.
Darting shadows and the soft swish of wings make me look up. Not angels, but a pair of pied crows seeing off a jackal buzzard. Then I stumble across the devil. He is lying in the middle of the path, disguised as a fat berg adder. He pokes out his tongue and slithers off.
I stop in a patch of rainforest to eat an apple, then push on through the narrowing gorge, drawn by the splash and sun-sparkled flash of running water. No one had told me about the crystal pools of cool water hidden in this flood-carved chasm. I swim — baptised by the Berg — then push through the canyon to the trail’s end. The reward: an extreme close-up of the malevolent rock pinnacle called the Devil’s Tooth.
But what can God see from above? The next day, I drive up to Witsieshoek, on the top of the Berg, for the Sentinel Peak hike: shorter, at seven miles, than yesterday’s walk, but higher — topping out at 9,960ft — and tougher. The biggest challenge is the chain ladders: stairways to heaven up the sheer face of Mont-aux-Sources. One is 55ft high, the other 42ft, and if you make it to the top, it’s an easy wander across the plateau to the edge of the Amphitheatre’s sheer cliffs. The view makes you weak at the knees: eagles soar below you; blue spurs diminish into the far distance. Out there, the battlefields, the Zulu homelands and, 150 miles beyond the haze, the Indian Ocean. A fellow hiker — a big Afrikaner called Brendan, in short shorts, with legs like tree trunks — gazes with me.
“Makes you wonder how such beauty came about,” I say.
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“Massive lava flows 160m years ago,” he replies. “Simple geology, bru.” He holds up his phone, snaps a selfie, then opens a bag of crisps.
Some people can’t even see the divine when it’s slapping them in the face.
Let battlefield tours commence
Blundering foreign policy and a bickering proclivity for calamity are nothing new for the British, as pilgrims to KwaZulu-Natal’s battlefields well know. It was here, on the rocky kopjes and grassy veldt, that Her Majesty’s Government underestimated the opposition to its colonial ambitions not once but thrice, in the Anglo-Zulu War and the First and Second Boer Wars.
Fugitives’ Drift, a luxury lodge high above the Buffalo River, tells a story of disaster and redemption (doubles from £143, full-board; fugitivesdrift.com). Four miles northeast is Isandhlwana, where, on January 22, 1879, 1,300 British soldiers faced a Zulu army of 23,000. Just 65 redcoats survived. Five miles west is the mission station of Rorke’s Drift, where, on the same day, about 150 men of the 24th Regiment of Foot held out all night against 3,000 Zulu warriors. The histories are visceral and poignant: passionate storytelling by Mphiwa Ntanzi, whose great-grandfather fought at both battles, reduces burly men to tears (full-day tours visiting both sites from £70).
Three hours west, at Three Tree Hill Lodge (threetreehill.co.za), you can relive the catastrophe of Spion Kop. On the misty night of January 23, 1900, British forces stormed the hill and tried to dig in on the summit. Dawn revealed that they were not on the summit at all, but were pitifully exposed to Boer artillery and rifle fire that left 243 dead. Guide Brent Jansen van Rensburg tells the story like an Afrikaner Dan Snow (half-day tours from £35).
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Chris Haslam was a guest of BA, which flies from Heathrow to Durban three times a week (from £495 return; ba.com); and Cedarberg Africa, which has a two-week self-drive tour of KwaZulu-Natal, taking in the Drakensberg, the battlefields, the coast and the Imfolozi game reserve; from £3,125pp, including flights, car hire and boutique accommodation (cedarberg-travel.com)
