Hiking in the Elgin Valley

During the last weekend in September, I went on a little holiday.  My friend Hananja and I joined a group from the Cape Union Mart hiking club in Grabouw.  Hananja and I met at work.  She is a dietician, and she works with students from Stellenbosch University who come to the care centre as part of their clinicals.  Hananja has become a good friend, in no small part thanks to this awesome weekend we spent together!

Grabouw is in the Elgin Valley, about a 40 minute drive inland from Hawston.  It's a lovely area, known for its apple farms. We stayed in a nice little backpackers lodge called Pippins, after the apple.  When we arrived on Friday evening, it was overcast, drizzly, and quite cool outside, but the view was still lovely.  I took this photo from the Pippins back porch.  My favorite thing about Pippins was the friendly critters who live there!  We were greeted by two dogs and a cat.

On Saturday morning, we set off for a hike around the Eikenhof damn.

It was still a little overcast and cool, but that makes for good hiking weather in my opinion.

Poor Hananja thought I was just snapping a photo of the view, but now she's on my blog!

We saw lots of prety wildflowers, including these spiky white ones...

... and some yellow ones, my favorite color.

We stopped for lunch along a mountain stream.

The stream happened to have a downed tree lying across it.

Which meant of course I had to climb on the downed tree.  I got my pants pretty dirty doing this, but that's the point of a hike, right?

By the way, do you notice anything strange about the water?

No, that's not a trick of the light, that's actually the color of the water!  I was a little grossed out by the strange tea color, but my companions assured me that this is natural for a mountain stream in the cape.  The color comes from the roots of the fynbos, which are the scrubby plants native to this region.  Many types of fynbos are thought to have medicinal properties.  Rooibos is a good example.  It's a type of fynbos that is most commonly used to make tea, but I've also seen rooibos beauty products and even rooibos flavored yogurt!  (Rooibos tea is wonderful, by the way.  However, I don't recommend rooibos yogurt.  It's a little weird to have your yogurt taste like a plant.)

It just so happens that we finished our hike just in time to catch the rugby match!  We had parked at a country club that had a public bar... the perfect place to watch the Springboks kick the Wallabies back to Australia!  This was my first rugby experience, and let me tell you, I thought it was pretty awesome!

It was so fun to see all these local people cram into this bar.  They brought in all these extra chairs, and people just lined themselves up in front of the TV.  Everyone was really into the game!

Well, almost everyone.

On Sunday morning, we had another great hike in a different area of the valley.

This spot had these cool pointy rocks poking up in different places.

We followed the ridgeline along and got some great views of the valley on one side...

... and occasionally a glimpse of the sea on the other side.  Then, all of a sudden, you round a corner and get this:

A fabulous view of the ocean from up high on the ridgeline!  Turns out we were hiking in the mountains you can see from my house!  In all those sunset pictures I've posted from my back yard, the mountains you see on the right side of the frame are where I was standing when I took this photo.  So the villiage directly below you in this photo is Kleinmond.  Halfway back along the coastline, you will see a white streak that breaks the brown and green shoreline.  This is actually the opening of the Botriver Lagoon, which separates Kleinmond on the west side from Hawston and Fishershaven on the east.  Further away in the photo is another mountain.  At the base of the mountain lies Hawston.  You can probably see my house from here, but it would be really tiny.

After the hike, Hananja and I headed back to Pippins, packed up our stuff, and said goodbye.  Then we enjoyed the rest of our day by stopping at a farm stand that had a lovely little cafe with excellent quiche.  On the way back to the Hermanus area, we drove past A BREWERY THAT MAKES ALES.  Sound the trumpets!  This was a HUGE discovery!  Lagers are the staple in South Africa.  It just isn't very easy to find a good ale.  I was overjoyed to discover that this place is about a 15 minute drive from my house.  Of course, we had to check it out.

Honingklip Brewery specializes in Belgan-style beer, but they also make a good IPA.

And they have two big yellow labs!

Hananja makes friends easily :)

What a great view!

So you can see, I had a really fabulous weekend exploring a slightly different area of the cape that is still very close to my house.  I hope you enjoyed all these photos, and I hope you learned something new about region where I'm living.  It's a pretty awesome place!