Climb the Cape Kili

The two-day Arangieskop Trail near Robertson, nicknamed Kilimanjaro of the Cape, is a tough route that has reached cult status among hikers. Are you up for the challenge?

- SVEN HUGO

We’ve only covered 5 km and already we’ve gone up and down three, four, maybe five big hills. I’ve stopped counting. There are more up ahead. Robertson is behind us, forgotten, and Arangieskop towers ahead, quiet and majestic.

“I’m sure this trail has made many a hiker give up his hobby,” says Wadda Louw, echoing my sentiments.

Arangieskop, in the Dassieshoek Nature Reserve, is part of the Langeberg range, and its slopes offer an abundance of natural scenery: fields of sugarbush, forests, ferns, murmuring streams, dizzying heights, and a howling wind at the top.

I’m hiking with Wadda, Charl de Wit, Roland Truter, Gerrit van Deventer and Francois Albertyn. We’re nowhere near as brave as the travellers in the The Lord of the Rings, who journeyed to Mordor to throw a ring into the fires of Mount Doom, yet it feels like our group of old school friends is also on an epic journey – our own baptism of fire.

Day 1: 10 km

It’s a chilly Saturday morning. We left Cape Town early so that we could start hiking by 9 am. It should take five to eight hours to get to the overnight hut near the summit, which is 10 km away.

The trailhead is at the Dassieshoek 1 Hut, and the first 2 km section from there into the nature reserve is a good warm-up. I move a water bottle that’s jutting into my ribs.

We cross a girder bridge. At a yellow route marker, we start going up the first hill at a snail’s pace. Barely a kilometre further, we stop to take off our jackets. I’m grateful for the cooler weather – it must be a sweaty slog if the sun is out in full force.

The sugarbushes next to the first part of the trail still show damage from a veld fire in 2017, but the other fynbos plants wave in the breeze. Almost an hour after we started, we reach a plateau and the hut at the trailhead disappears from view.