footloose IN FYNBOS

The Walker Bay Diversity Trail is a leisurely hike with a multitude of flowers, feathers and flavours along the way.

- ANTON CRONE

For a slack-packing trail, hiking 10 kilometres per day seemed remarkably easy going, but after stopping to inspect a flower on our second morning, I understood why the distance was so short. As we paused to look over the fynbos carpeting the hills above Walker Bay, our guide, Christoff Longland, plucked a sprig from a bush nearby. "That's why they call it a poproosie, he said as he held it under a magnifying glass for us to inspect. Sure enough, the flowers on the sprig resembled miniature roses; Christoff’s magnified fingers were Goliath-like in comparison. Then an exquisitely tiny insect emerged from the folds of one of the little roses and I realised just how much life surrounded us. And how much time we’d need to appreciate it.

Along with three other journalists, I was on the four-night/five-day Diversity Trail, which explores the fynbos, forests, coastline and waterways between De Kelders and Stanford in the Western Cape. ‘Easy going’ was certainly the order of the first afternoon as we departed the small town of Stanford aboard the Lady Stanford on the Klein River. The next three days would see us trekking, ever so casually, through the fynbos and beaches of Grootbos Private Nature Reserve and Walker Bay Fynbos Conservancy, returning each evening to our beautiful base at Bellavista Country Place.