Walk with whales: a slackpacking trail in the Western Cape

Day 1 (Arniston, 5km)

It’s a cold and windy afternoon on Arniston bay. Its famous blue waters are grey and riddled with sea horses that ride colourful little boats home with catches of roman and yellowtail. Some of it will go to the hotel and the guesthouses that pucker the shoreline, the rest will feed the little postage-stamp village of Kassiesbaai.

Originally built out of the wooden “kassies” that washed up from the many wrecks that dot this coastline, it is now a lime-washed monument to a simple lifestyle that has fiercely maintained its independence despite the tides of curious interlopers.

There is a cute little curio shop, a bar with a view and a few newish looking bed-and-breakfasts, their backs strangely turned to the sea. It’s picturesque but forlorn. My hip hurts and I’m worried that tomorrow I might be, in a term already tossed about the bus, the “weakest link”.

After roast chicken and wine around a fire, I go to sleep in a room surrounded by ocean on two sides. I think about whales, about the whales we’ve seen today, rising like shadows to break the surface in mysterious spumes or visible, further out, in tell-tale plumes that blow across the water like smoke.

Some have speculated that their massive brains have been specifically designed to contemplate the universe. I like the idea. I do know they’re out there sleeping, with one eye open.

Day 2 (Damara trail, 16.9km)

It is said that you should walk as if you were kissing the earth with your feet. Walking in the faint imprint of our guide Aaron Stemmett’s footsteps, I watch mine turn to formless craters of trudgery.

Gone are the sprung boardwalks that skirt the De Mond estuary, the early morning bonhomie, the joyous sightings of black oystercatchers. Now is the hour of the beach, reduced for me to an interminable internal dialogue about whether it is best to walk on the hard sand closer to the ocean’s edge but at an angle, or whether to plough through the soft sand on the straight higher up.

The best walkers in this group don’t seem to care. They have that air about them of what Henry Thoreau called saunterers, for whom walking is not about getting from one place to another but an aspiration to be at home everywhere. For them this pristine wilderness is a playground, full of wild flowers and curious flotsam and jetsam.

We pass a dead baby whale. And finally make the sanctuary of some shade cast by giant black rocks. I eat my chicken wrap. It tastes wonderful. And I drink a beer. And it tastes wonderful.

We leave the beach and head up into the hills, where it is cool and we look out over beautiful ocean vistas and sometimes think we see whale. We pass ingenious tidal fish traps built by early Khoi and San strandlopers, and then descend in the heat of the sun down to the Waenhuiskrans cave.

Much bigger than you’d expect, and wetter, it’s beautiful in a cathedral of sound type way, but in the absence of any archaeological relics and the sense that it must only have been a very fleeting refuge for passing foragers, it seems a fascinating portal into a world that never quite was. Maybe I’m just tired.

I set my sights on our house on the hill and put one foot in front of the other. I feel like the weakest link.

Day 3 (Agulhas, 6km)

Micro-climates, I’ve learned, are ever shifting around Cape Agulhas, and the only thing to do is lean into them, which we do. But spitting rain quickly turns into a furious squall. I can’t see beyond the waterfall off the brim of my hat. My Driza-Bone jacket is soaked through and my shoes are full of water.

The support bus meets us on the road and we are given a choice. We can either continue regardless, or choose the road less travelled and live to fight another day, perhaps after lunch. I see Bianca, the most experienced hiker among us, immediately climb onto the bus and I immediately follow her.

We retire hurt to Needles, a swish new restaurant that anchors the newly opened tourism precinct around the Agulhas lighthouse. They kindly let us monopolize the fire as we try to dry out all our wet gear without burning it. There are coffees, some brandies and some unexpected jollity. I suspect the lone All Blacks’ supporter might be the weakest link.

And then the skies clear (well, sort of) and we amble down a boardwalk to Africa’s southernmost edge. It is a magnetic place, literally, in that early Portuguese navigators called it the “Cape of Needles” because magnetic north and true north aligned here. But one is also mysteriously drawn to this perilous clash of oceans, where unpredictable weather and sharp needles of underwater rock earned it the nickname, “Graveyard of Ships”.

We gambol among the puddles on the amazing map of Africa installation, traversing vast distances between landmarks with but a few steps, before heading back up to the lighthouse.

A lighthouse, as it turns out, with its own perilous history. In brief, it almost wasn’t, then was, then almost wasn’t before it was what it is today. The 71 steps to the top are not wheelchair friendly, but give out on vertiginous views and head-shearing winds. Looking out over the jagged ocean, you can see how sailors might need a light at night, and I wonder whether there is any truth to stories about ‘wreckers’.

Day 4 (Struisbaai to the Meisho Maru; 14.5km)

Today we walk in the footsteps outlined by our guide Jacques de Vries. This is a beautifully unique place, he tells us, in which to understand how early humans, about 150,000 years ago, harvested the nutrient-rich Agulhas shelf and took an evolutionary leap out of Africa.

Crucial to this was the element of play. These early humans became so adept at meeting their nutritional needs, mostly involving brain-expanding fatty acids, that they had the leisure time in which to invent better ways of doing it. Think of it like an evolutionary flywheel. And how did they roll with it? They travelled.

I love the intersection of travel and play. And it’s what I love about our beach walk either side of Struisbaai, where we find lots of shellfish, indigenous plants and other supporting evidence for Jacques’ argument… one of them being an unopened can of Vietnamese beer, which we resolve to taste later. And then we are up into the hills.

I feel strong for the first time, as if I’ve walked myself into walking, and I know this because I’m walking without thinking about it. Some of our group are nearly blown off the high paths and turn back, and others hang back so everyone else can catch up.

I carry on, nonchalantly at first. But soon, I’m setting a blistering pace to music in my head. A loop of Bowie’s Wild is the Wind turns into Dylan’s Idiot Wind, when I discover that I have taken an inadvertent shortcut and a bus has to come and rescue me, while the rest of the group enjoy another few hours on their way down to the wreck of the Meisho Maru 38.

But for a while there, I’d had my own walk into thoughts I hadn’t had in a long time and some I might not have had before. And I thought I should do more of this walking stuff.

Supper is a beautiful thing. Steak and lots of red wine and late-night starry navigations about how to read a Southern Cross that points at you.

Day 5 (Stanford Cove to De Kelders, 6km)

Today, we are on the whale highway. After a short stint on the beach (kind of like an on-ramp) we’re into the cliffs, skirting a Walker Bay full of sunshine and whales frolicking in the deep waters just off shore.

It’s our last day and a gentle sadness keeps us company, a kind of nostalgia for a present that isn’t yet past. I’m going to miss Aaron and Jacques, who have known when to stop and where and have kept us safe on this wild Agulhas plain. I’m also going to miss some of the people I’ve got to know and will probably never see again.

I look out at the whales and marvel that they have existed for some 30 million years. I wonder whether they will survive us as a species, or whether there will one day be a man who sees the last whale.

Not that that is going to happen any time soon, judging by the mob of whales crashing the blue waters below. We follow little rocky paths, undulating through fynbos, eyes peeled to the sea.

And then just below where the old De Kelders hotel once stood, we descend into the mouth of some ancient caves, one of them now privately owned, we’re told, but previously occupied by early humans who, clever as they might have been, could never have imagined us in all our high-tech promenade. Meanwhile the whales get closer.

Here, “pod” seems an inadequate collective noun. I have a friend who knows a man who lives in a house nearby, and he complains about how noisy the whales are, how they keep him awake at night, and how he can’t wait for the season to end. For him, he tells me, it’s more like a “conversation” of whales, or a “party”.

We stop for the last time, and look out on one of the world’s most breathtaking bays, and somehow I find myself thinking that our own evolutionary leap is curiously mirrored in the leap of whales, whether in playful breach or flash of tail.

I go home, a little more evolved.

Plan your trip

The walk: Walk with Whales is a five-day guided slackpacking trail exploring the coast around Arniston, Struisbaai, Cape Agulhas and De Kelders. It starts and ends in Hermanus, with vehicle transfers between walking areas. The planned total distance is approximately 53km, but daily routes and distances may change according to tides, swell and weather conditions. Luggage is transported; walkers carry daypacks.

When: September and October, during peak whale-watching season. Bookings are open for 2027.

Fitness: Participants should be walking fit and able to spend at least six hours a day on their feet.

Cost: In 2027, shared accommodation with shared bathrooms costs R12,950 per person sharing; private en-suite accommodation costs R16,750 per person sharing.

Included: Accommodation, guides, luggage transfers, scheduled transport, most meals, selected drinks and conservation fees for South African citizens. Two restaurant lunches, airport transfers and parking cost extra.

Book with: Wild Wellness, a member of Cape Country Routes. See wildwellness.co.za/whales or capecountryroutes.com.

• Stephen Haw was a guest of Wild Wellness.

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