Words by Michael Baretta
Surprise, it’s Michael for a change! I want in on this blog action… So where did we leave off? Oh yes, the most difficult section of the trek so far… Little did we know.
The terrain was some how softened by amazing people that we met along the Garden Route. Our ‘in’ with the locals was a lady called Albie Burger who invited some of her outdooring-loving mates to trek with us.
One such mate was a guy called Galeo Saintz, who is a conservation adventurer (sounds a bit like a social change adventurer), and co-founder behind two of SA’s longest adventure trails. Galeo is currently writing a book on Robberg and we were lucky enough to get a guided tour, which was finished off by Galeo reciting the following verse by Edward Abbey (which couldn’t have be more pertinent for our trek):
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
I was really looking forward to doing the RETTO trail (Otter backwards) after doing it in the middle of last year. The scenery was as beautiful as I remembered it. I don’t know how the guys run it, some in 5 hours. Unreal. It took us two and a half days to walk. We used the escape routes to break up some of the legs. Speaking of which, I would hate to be walking with an unfit group if something happened to me because the stairs up those escape routes are killer.
We went from the Otter trail straight into the Dolphin trail sadly seeing none of either. The Dolphin is normally a guided hike so there are no markers and as a result we got horribly lost and arrived at the Fernery hot, bothered and ready for our rest day.
From Fernery we took a sharp left to the Elands River, where we were escorted by the owner of Cadeau Trails, Dries, who met us on the eastern side of the river and walked us to his tented camp for the night and then on to about 10 km before the Eerste River. This was for me the most challenging section by far. The consecutive steep rock formations were unforgiving and the bush thick and impenetrable. My feet really took a beating constantly walking on razor sharp rocks with the weight of the full backpack on my back.
It was however an amazing feeling to know that you are probably one of a handful of “westernized” people to have ever walked that stretch. We discovered an unbelievable Khoi cave that ran from deep in the forest to overlook it’s own private bay. As we walked through it you could almost feel a family living in it. The middens where intact and roof still stained with smoke. We looked for paintings but couldn’t find any.
The next day we decided to take the road (one of only a few times) because we were exhausted and to take on another day like the day before would have been opening ourselves up to careless mistakes and injury. We were back on the waters edge the next day to Oyster Bay, which was by far one of the dirtiest sections we’d seen.
We were joined by a jolly group of residents on our way into St Francis; A birder, a butcher and a tourism officer. We kicked up a bit of fuss with some of the other residents after showcasing their dirty Wild Side on our Facebook page and left the section to the kids at St Francis College to look after for us. We saw a pair of Cape Clawless Otters (our first) in the port, which made our visit!
From there, there were long white hard sand beaches, blue skies through Jeffrey’s Bay, across the gamtoos and into Blue Horizon Bay where dolphins welcomed us to PE. We had an incredibly successful cleanup where over 200 people came down to help us to collect over 900kg of litter on Kings Beach in just an hour and a half! Nampak kindly recycled 200kg’s of this for us. Some fun was had at the Bridge Street Brewery and at the vibey restaurants on Street and then we were back on the windy beach headed for Colcester and the Sundays river.
