Mountain Quest

TRAIL REVIEW Bamboeshoek 4x4 track: 24km WSW of Sterkstroom, Eastern Cape

  

When you’ve just completed the five highest passes in South Africa, and been bombarded with jaw-dropping views over svelte mountain scenery for three days, your expectations on reaching a relatively unknown 4x4 track venue near the small town of Sterkstroom are understandably tempered. But how wrong assumptions can be.

It was while gazing mindlessly at the rising slopes of the Bamboesberg in front of our converted barn cottage that I caught my first glimpse of the 4x4 track that my co-pilot, Harvey Tyson, and I were to tackle the next day. I only noticed the route when I chanced to see a horseman’s head bobbing up and down through the thick bush on the sharply-angled track.

Deciding to walk the start of the steep 4x4 track later, I continued reading some of the reference material I’d brought with me, and learned how many San (Bushmen) had made both the Bamboesberg above me and the nearby Stormberg their home until the early 1800s, when they were all but exterminated by the commandos that rose up against them. (I later learned from farm owner, Chris Bartlett, that there are several rock-art sites on the farm to which he will lead guests by prior arrangement — a must on my next visit.)

These two magnificent mountain ranges — they rise from the high plateau of 1400 metres ASL to around 2100 metres ASL — apparently also provided the Boers with a refuge from Lieutenant-General Gatacre’s forces which were based in Sterkstroom during the second Anglo-Boer War. And it was from strategically placed ledges in the Stormberge that the Boers sent Gatacre’s column back to where they’d detrained a day earlier in Molteno. It was another disastrous “reverse” suffered by the Brits, one of an eventual three including Magersfontein and Colenso, which led the English press to dub the period “Black Week”