Just wait, the Urban Dictionary’ll list it one day. Maybe even the Oxford, who knows? If “Britnification” can make it (the less-is-less way of adolescent dressing, borrowed from Britney), then so can Gollum the Verb.
Either way, Golluming is what happens to the leg of a rotisserie chicken after you’ve spent nearly six hours on The Mountain in the mist and rain. What happens to the chocolate cupcakes is about as grotesque to watch, but just as satisfying to do. The walk started with a mid-week email from a friend: “going up India Venster Saturday morning, down Platteklip. Wonna come?” Actually, this was the wonderfully articulate David le Page speaking, so his email was far more erudite.
You bet! But with some wintery weather creeping in over the peninsula, it looked like we might have to spike the idea... mist, rain, mist, wind... cableway shut...
But by 10am we were picking our way up towards the contour path on the front of The Mountain and on towards the sometimes harrowing scramble that is India Venster.
It was an utterly beautiful walk through drifting mist (the leader of the group knew the route and we kept a close eye on the weather, so we were pretty safe) with red ericas flowering here and there, and the dimpled surface of the sandstone rocks catching the wet from the clouds. It’s not a gruelling walk (we took a slow three hours; though you do need to be relatively fit), which ambles up rocky steps, easy contours, some hairy scrambles up steep rocky sections (not for beginners!), bit of rock-hopping and then back onto ambling pathway.
The mist was gloriously thick up at the top of the table, and clung to the buildings around the cable station which was closed for the day, giving the place an eerily quiet, haunted mood. Lovely to have a low-traffic day on a tourist stop that, at this time of year, is usually as congested as an un-fibered colon. But we had the place to ourselves, just a day or two after the 20-millionth visitor ascended the cableway.Then the walk back down via Platteklip Gorge. And the heavens, they did open – torrentially and without warning. So much for my splendid shan’t-be-named-but-locally-branded rain jacket – it got so wet I was wringing water out of its sleeves.
About half way down we came across a tahr, happily grinding its way through a mouthful of something fynbos-ified, right on the edge of the path. It was so comfortable with our approach that it almost seemed like it’d let us reach out and stroke it... but then it turned around, its shaggy rump swaying unhurried into the mist. This confirms a number of reports that the endangered Himalayan critter, which is “alien” here, hasn’t been eradicated from the mountain.
Two hours down, most of which were in squelching shoes. I’m happy to report that the soles of my shan’t-be-named-but-well-worth-the-cost-imported-trail-running-shoes performed a lot better in the wet weather than my rain jacket did. I clung to those steep rocky steps like a gecko. We descended out of the mist into a beautiful Cape Town day... with an appetite not to be quibbled with, hence the sudden and irreversible end to that leg of chicken. But it’s evident that The Mountain is a good place to solve many of modern civilisations pressing issues... peak oil and the energy crisis not the least of them.
Pictures: copyright David le Page
