6. uKhahlamba – Drakensberg

It’s hard to believe, when you’re standing on the rolling green foothills gazing at the Drakensberg that, about 160 million years ago, all this was windblown desert and enormous dunes.

About 30 million years later, forces from deep within the earth pushed magma through numerous fissures in the sedimentary beds, Successive flows of basaltic lava – the greatest outpouring the world has ever seen – covered a vast area well beyond the present southwest coast about a kilometer deep. Windswept desert was replaced by a black, desolate nothingness for about 10 million years, until Gondwanaland began to split up.

While the eastern coastline formed, bringing with a ocean winds, higher rainfall and cycle of erosion, several episodes of upliftment pushed the lava plain upwards. Fast-flowing rivers tumbled down the new steep gradients, causing rapid erosion and whittling away an escarpment parallel to the coastline. This was the Proto-Drakensberg. As erosion continued the escarpment from the coast at a rate of 15 centimeters a century.

Huge, solid and as lazy as a sleeping dragon, it’s hard to look at the Drakensberg today and imagine it somewhere else. But when humans first began to pad barefooted around its foothills about 100 000 years ago, the Berg was on average 200 metres east of where it is today.

Tags: Adventure, Africa, Getaway, Hiking, Holiday, Safari, South Africa, uKhahlamba – Drakensberg

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