We were on a three day hike with the first day starting at Monk's Cowl office and hiking up Ship's Prow, a daunting 22km with the highest pass at 3300m in the Drakensberg! I was eager to leave Monk's Cowl campsite as I knew this was going to be a tough day!
By 6.50am the first people started hiking and the faster ones were soon separated from the slower hikers. We climbed all the way to Blindman's Corner where we took a 20 minute breather. There were five of us: Fernando, Anthony, Brigitte, Bernard and I. By the time we were ready to leave, the others had not caught up with us. We carried on along the contour path which was another 10km to Ship's Prow stream. Ship's prow Pass has two forks at the top and we had to take the left fork as the right one was nearly impossible to climb!
When we arrived at the bottom of the pass at 12pm, we saw Peter coming towards us in the distance. He soon caught up with us, as we were having lunch - he was so glad to have found us, he didn't want to get stuck with the slower crowd of 14 people.
We had a 45 minute lunch break to replenish and were about to leave when we saw the masses arrive in the distance. We waited for them all to get across the river before heading into the bed of boulders and bundu bashing.
The stream was flowing quite heavily. At times we found what seemed to look like a path only to lose it again and get stuck in the bushes. Our legs got scratched and the packs got stuck in the lower branches.
Eventually we got closer to where the pass narrows and the steep bit of serious boulder hopping starts, when Anthony could see a feint path leading up the left hand side and considered that route better than sticking in the boulder bed.
We filled up our water bottles for the last time and headed up the steep path. There we found the first of many cairns.
We followed this path all the way, going on and on and on. We were climbing in the mist by now and could not see the top of the pass but luckily we had 3 GPSs amongst us and we could keep progress of how much further it was. We were exhausted and still had 600 vertical meters to go!! We would have to take a rest every now and then. The higher we got the worse we felt. Eventually we would walk five steps and stop to catch our breath and rest our legs! Its not that we aren't used to altitude, all of us are strong seasoned berg hikers!
Finally the mist lifted and we could see the top...YAY!! Only about 100m. It took us over an hour to get up that last bit. 6.15pm we finally topped out, utterly wasted! I have never felt soo tired before!
It had become extremely cold, so we quickly put on warm gear, got out our headlamps and walked to the right over the ridge and down to the river. By 7pm we dropped our packs for the last time that day and pitched tents immediately. A cup of tea revived me again, but I struggled with the supper, I was simply too exhausted!
I was in my sleeping bag dozing off when I heard voices, someone said not to answer in case it was basuths, but then we saw the headlamps and realised it was our group arriving at 9.30pm. We couldn't believe it, we thought they would have camped on the way up the mountain somewhere, although that would have been difficult. They hadn't even had supper yet!
When I looked out of my tent the next morning, there was "tent city", buzzing with people. They all wanted to take a walk back to the pass to see it in daylight. Anthony, Peter and I, however, had breakfast, packed up and hiked towards Grey's Pass, a mere few kilometers away.
From the escarpment down the world was covered in mist so the views that are supposed to be so fantastic, were not to be seen. We climbed down carefully as it was wet and the rocks were slippery. Two hours later and we were down the pass with keith's bush camp to our right. We continued to the river and stopped for lunch.
Another 10km of contour path, most of it on a gentle rise, which was quite tiring after the strenuous previous day. Eventually we arrived at Blindman's Corner campsite and pitched our tents. We were sitting around having tea, when Stephen and Keith arrived. They had turned back the day before, as Keith was cramping and Stephen was struggling with altitude. We had a lovely evening with the mist closing in on us, chatting and eating non stop.
Sunday morning was an easy one hour stroll down the mountain back to our cars.
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