The Giant's Castle

Image : Diane Selkirk

While staying in Durban we made a visit to the stunning Drakensberg mountains, specifically to the area known as the Giants Castle.

In this region the mountains form the border with Lesotho, and reach up to 3000 meters high, capturing snowfall in the winters.

These are stunningly beautiful mountains, forming a natural barrier to the central African escarpment, trapping much of the rainfall generated by moist air from the Aghulas current.

With Diane, Maia and Evan from the catamaran Ceilydh we drove and then day-hiked to see the cave paintings of the San people, the original bushman of Southern Africa.

A Visitor At Our Picnic Lunch

Thousands of years old, the paintings we saw had survived remarkably well, except where they were fired upon by British troops during the Zulu wars, who believed them to be secret enemy communications (!).

There are thousands of cave painting sites in these mountains - the site we visited was linked to the beautiful Giant's Castle Resort, run by KZN Wildlife inside the 34,000 ha Giant's Castle Wildlife Reserve, originally proclaimed in 1903 and now a World Heritage Site.