Climbing Table Mountain

Well, now I really know how fit I am. Not very!

As if we hadn't punished ourselves enough with our 21hr day, me and Marcin decided to go and climb Table Mountain, all 1,000m of it! So, after spending the morning in the Sunday Market down by Green Point (where every 3rd stall is pretty much selling the same trinkety crap), we hopped into a taxi and told him to head for the mountain!.

Our starting point was a place called Puttaclip Gorge, one of two ways to climb up, and the closer we got the more I wondered how the hell you get up to the top. The bottom half of the mountain is a steep enough slope, but the top half is nigh on vertical! Once we got to the bottom though, we saw that the gorge sort of cuts into the side of the mountain at an angle, so it's not vertical (just pretty damn close to it). So, we started climbing!


It wasn't "real" mountain climbing I guess, as there was a path with steps cut into it, but it was a lot of very steep steps! I also made the mistake of letting Marcin (who goes hillwalking for fun back home) lead the way, and I had the backpack with the 2 2-liter bottles of water in them! the temperature was hovering up around the 30 mark as well, which didn't suit me very much. The pain started pretty quickly as a result, and after the first few hundred meters I was having to take breaks every now and then.

Naturally we weren't the only ones on the mountain, and pretty soon we got into a sort of a leapfrogging rhythm with a few people - we'd stop for a break and they'd overtake us, and then a few mins later they'd stop for a break and we'd overtake them! Of course there were a few people as well who were a lot fitter than us who overtook us and then just disappeared up the mountain! We also ran into a few people who were literally running down the mountain - were bouncing down the steps at full speed! These folk apparently run up it as well, whereas we're busting a gut just to walk up it!

Took us about 1h45m to climb the thing, which is not too bad - they say it normally takes anything from 2h to 2h30. Was fairly puffed when I got to the top, and the 2L of water we'd brought each was just about all gone! The view from the top was great as well, we could see all of Cape Town, Camps Bay and as far south as Hout Bay. After only about half an hour on the top though, the clouds started to roll in and the opportunity for good pictures started to get a bit less. So, we decided to head back down again. This time though, we took the cable car!