Tag Archives: gear

Giants Castle via Sherman’s Route: through the fire and the flames

Giants Castle is one of the most recognisable peaks in the Drakensberg. It can be seen from as far away as Harrismith, Ladysmith, Escourt, Hilton and Underberg. It is a peak I have summitted many times, and is one of my favourites. For many years I have looked at the eastern ridges of the peak […]

Pyramid Standard Route

The Pyramid is a large, well, pyramid shaped peak at Didima Nature Reserve in the Northern KZN Drakensberg. I first saw it in person on a hike in 2010. For many years I admired it knowing I would never stand on its summit, I would never take up rock climbing for a number of reasons, […]

Moroke: Rain Maker

On 5 January 2017 I completed one of my strangest, yet most difficult, mountain objectives: I completed a double Drakensberg Grand Traverse over 16 days. It was the hardest hike I have ever done and overall one of the most difficult challenges I have ever undertaken. While I have had big projects in mind since […]

Water, water everywhere

So on a Friday afternoon a team of four of us found ourselves at Injisuthi. The road on the drive in had been in a very bad state, but we had all arrived safely. We set off down the road in light drizzle. The river was flooded, and my choice of Boundary Ridge over the […]

Are you Redi?

Sometimes a hike report title is fairly obvious – and then something happens that causes you to abandon the easiest pun and provide a proper report name! In this instance, this report title was going to be allocated to a hike up Redi Pass in 2016, but the hike ended up going comically wrong and […]

Tropical Travels Part 12

After a good night sleep back at the Burgers’ house in Singapore, Matthew and I spent the morning chilling before I went off to the airport. Changi Airport was its usual amazing self – I was through all the controls very quickly, and decided to have a look at the shops while waiting for my […]

Tropical Travels Part 11

After our week in Mulu, it was nice to be back in Kota Kinabalu. We had our “free breakfast” – better described as toast and coffee – at Borneo Backpackers before heading out to the docks. The plan for the day was to explore the islands off the coast of the city. There are five […]

Tropical Travels Part 10

It was nice to be back at the Mulu Hostel. As basic as it is, and as awesome as Camp 5 was, there is something about being able to have a hot shower and meal! We both decided to try pancakes for breakfast this day. It turned out to be a mistake – the pancakes […]

Tropical Travels Part 9

We spent Monday morning buying some food for Mulu – knowing that supplies would be very limited and expensive over there. We quickly learned that the local shops don’t officially open before 9am, which would be more accurately described as 9:30am. After a pineapple juice from a street vendor, we made our way to Kota […]

My first speed Drakensberg Grand Traverse

Continuing my series of posting old hike reports that hadn’t appeared on this page – here’s a report from exactly 3 years ago. I actually named this hike report “a walk in the park” – the joke being that technically it is in a national park and therefore technically is a walk in the park. […]