Best Hikes In South Africa: The Otter Trail

The Ultimate Bucket List Hike

7-11 January 2013

The Otter Trail needs to be booked a year to 18 months in advance — if you’re lucky.

The only thing harder to get in South Africa (and much more overrated) is a Two Oceans Half Marathon entry.

I did this hike in January 2013.

Let me start off by saying I am not a ‘Bucket Lister’. I am also not a ‘Bandwagon Jumper’. In fact, I will avoid doing something precisely because everyone else is jumping on that particular bandwagon.

Crowds. I don’t like them. That’s why I go to the bush.

But the Otter Trail is a beautiful hike and in 2013 would be only my second 5-day hike. Two weeks earlier, in December 2012 I did The Outeniqua Trail with MA (Mountain Ascent) Hiking club.

The Outeniqua remains one of my best hiking memories. 6 incredible days. A fire has since destroyed some of the huts and the route has been shortened to 4 days.

The Otter Trail was not on my bucket list. (At the time I didn’t appreciate how difficult it was to get a booking).

At the time I was more focused on my upcoming trip to Nepal to do Everest Base Camp.

But we were lucky to get a booking at a time that suited everyone and so, why not?

Also, we would be holidaying in Knysna for a few days afterwards.

Hello Bandwagon!

We were lucky to get the dates we did at the end of the summer school holidays, peak period.

Everything fell into place.

Out of respect for their privacy, I won’t mention the names of anyone else on that hike. If you are related to me, you will know them.

If you’ve known me long enough, you may have deduced already.

For their own reasons at the time, nobody wanted to speak to the media, which I didn’t agree with then, and still don’t.

I hope memories have faded long enough for those who do recollect the incident to have forgotten the participants, but not the lesson.

For my part, I may have remembered a lot of things incorrectly, dramatized things that were not dramatic and downplayed things that should not have been downplayed. I blame my aging memory. I do not intentionally wish to misrepresent anything that happened that day.

I have recounted the incident many times over the years. It’s a good story. More importantly, its a cautionary tale.

I said this at the time, and I will repeat myself. The reason I tell the story, the reason I still tell the story is simple: To remind people that in nature things can go wrong quickly. Do not be complacent. Take nothing for granted.

The story is important, not to lay blame, because no-one was at fault. No-one did anything wrong. We were caught in a perfect, literal, storm.

Things happen. Just this week a group had to abandon The Amathole Trail because severe rain made the trail un-hikable. That’s one of the risks when playing outdoors. You are at the mercy of the elements.

We have no pictures of the hike. The camera was water damaged and the photos destroyed. I took one picture of the ocean, not a particularly good one. And I have a video of the rescue that’s not worth uploading. Too noisy.

My winning letter was a response to an online article. At the time I had no idea it would be published in the NSRI magazine.

We Did Everything Right

“We did everything right. We did everything we were supposed to do.”

Those are the words I invariably start off with when I recount my experience of The Otter Trail, in particular, my experience crossing the notorious Bloukrans River.

The Otter Trail is not the hardest hike in South Africa. Not even close. It is one of the most beautiful. It is undoubtedly the most popular multi-day hikes.

The challenge of the Otter are the river crossings, not the hike itself.

Mother Nature is temperamental at the best of times. You can never take anything for granted. I recall vaguely days 1 & 2. I remember Day 3, when we crossed The Lottering River, because Papa Grizzly had told me of his experience crossing The Lottering years before.

Sound Advice

On his advice, I asked our group to make sure they packed rope. When Papa Grizzly crossed The Lottering, they encountered a flash flood which separated him from his group.

They were not able to cross, leaving him stranded with no bag and no way to go back.

The following day, the rangers came to his assistance. The others had abandoned the hike.

I was wary of The Lottering River on Day 3.

But on 9 January 2013 we crossed The Lottering River in near perfect conditions. The river was as clear and flat as a sheet of glass.

For shits and giggles, we separated into two groups, (this was our intended strategy to cross The Bloukrans River the next day) to do a dry run.

We wrapped our backpacks in survival bags and tied them together in 2 batches of 4 before floating them across the river. Once on the other side, we dumped the bags and went for a swim.

Test run successful!

Nothing like Papa Grizzly’s experience.

It was early afternoon. We decided to sleep early and hit the trail before midnight. Low tide at Bloukrans would be 7.40am the next morning. To get there we would have to walk through the night.

We had lunch and prepped dinner before going to sleep. I must have slept because I woke up around 11pm. We had supper and prayed before setting off into the night.

Day 4: Bloukrans Crossing

I was wearing only a light windproof jacket as we started to walk.

It was a beautiful night and I noted the fireflies lighting the way ahead for us. A short while later, it started to drizzle.

The night was too beautiful to rain for long.

Wrong.

It rained the entire night. Fortunately, the trail markers (Otter paw prints. Nice touch SANparks!) are luminescent at night, for this very reason, and we carried on slow and steady in the dark.

I could hear the roar of the ocean from the clifftop but saw nothing beyond what was illuminated by my headlamp.

It rained softly but incessantly. That is my abiding memory. We were soaked. All raingear had been rendered impotent.

At dawn, when we had to stop to pray, we resembled human water rats; cold, wet, bedraggled.

We reached the Bloukrans River at 7am. By then the rain had stopped and it was overcast.

I remember descending to the river mouth. It’s a spectacular sight and one of the trail’s most Instagrammable moments. I was grateful the long, wet night was over and we could dry out and relax a bit before crossing.

The tide was going out and the water in the river mouth was ankle-deep. My spirits lifted immediately. This was going to be easy. We stopped to refresh, change our clothes and eat something.

The Crossing

Once again, we wrapped our backpacks in survival bags, although it seemed superfluous. There was but a short section on the other side we needed to (maybe) swim across. One, two strokes.

We were laughing, splitting into our groups, and someone shouted, ‘Survivors, Ready!’

I took a step.

That’s my last memory before literally being swept off my feet and into the ocean.

I felt no fear. I did not panic. I don’t know what I looked like. Maybe my face told another story. But inside I was incredibly calm. Maybe I was too scared to panic.

I do know that the other 3 people tied to me, saved my life that day. Somehow, I could see nothing. The survival bags blocked my line of sight. They were appropriately red.

I told the rest of the group that I couldn’t see a thing. Everyone kept their heads. I hope I kept mine. If I didn’t nobody has ever said it to my face.

I was instructed to raise my legs and when he said kick, to kick. That’s exactly what I did.

What I later learned is that a wave was washing us towards a rock in the middle of the ocean.

But he read the currents accurately, using the power of the waves to push off the rocks and drive us back into the river mouth.

Otherwise, we would have been smashed against the rock.

The same wave that knocked us back in, knocked the second group further out into the ocean. Later we would learn that they let go of their bags and scrambled up one of the rocks.

Had they not, they would have been washed out into the open ocean.

When we were swept back in, we managed to grab onto a small sliver of rock poking out of the sand, fighting the waves trying to knock us back out.

The current was so powerful, 4 grown adults barely clung on.

We were safe. All four of us.

We managed to retrieve one of the others from a nearby rock but three of our party remained stranded in the middle of the ocean.

At the time we were all learning to scuba dive so used the dive signals we had learned to communicate over the roar of the ocean.

There was another group of 3 people (German tourists) sharing the trail with us. Two young men and a young lady.

The men had crossed and thrown a rope to the lady to pull her over. I watched in wonder as the current threated to pull all three of them into the ocean.

After an interminable while we realised the three on the rocks couldn’t swim over and the ocean was too rough for us to attempt a rescue, even the rope we brought would be inadequate.

The water swirled between the rocks like a washing machine. We could see their red survival bags bobbing in and out of the water. The sea foam was easily 20 centimetres high.

The Rescue

We reached out for help. My Blackberry was the only phone that had service. Within minutes SANParks rangers found us using the escape route at The Bloukrans River mouth.

SANparks reached out to the NSRI who attempted a boat extraction. However, due to high swells, the boat was unable to reach the people on the rock and had to abandon the rescue.

Now what?

We stood on the trail, watching the rescue operation, anxiously aware that the tide would be coming back in again.

The sea was rough and in no mood for hostage negotiations.

How long before our people would be swept off the rocks by the incoming tide?

I may have stress-eaten all my remaining snacks.

Eventually a chopper was located to attempt an airlift. The delay was caused by the Plettenberg Bay AMS chopper being unavailable due to routine maintenance.

We had to wait for another chopper to come from Oudtshoorn, which is about 153 kms inland.

I hear the cacophonic noise of the chopper rotary blades to this day.

It was the worst sound. But music to my ears.

The airlift lasted a lifetime. One by one the rescue team winched them to safety. It was like watching a movie. Except I was in the movie.

The three patients were flown to Face Adrenalin, the famous Bloukrans Bungy jumping venue. Face Adrenalin had the closest helipad to land the helicopter.

The rest of us hiked the remaining 4kms to the hut. Shaken. Nobody spoke. If they did, I don’t remember what was said. I know someone lost a contact lens and shoe. Minor things.

The entire ordeal had lasted maybe 4 – 5 lifetimes.

Headlines

But We Did Everything Right!

As with any traumatic event, hindsight is 20/20. I have replayed that day, those events countless times. Every time I retell the story, its cathartic. Mostly.

I wonder what, if anything we could have done differently.

Where did we go wrong? The truth is we did nothing wrong.

In fact, we did everything right. We did what we were supposed to do.

We crossed at low tide.

We crossed at the low tide mark.

We tied our bags and tried to float them across.

Mother nature had different plans for us.

There was no way we could have known how strong the undercurrent from the river was. The gully where the river ran into the ocean had been gushing through the night due to the rain. It was the river that spat us out; the ocean just pulled us in.

We were lucky. Of course, we were. We are grateful. It’s a story I never tire of telling. Yet as I write this, nearly 10 years to the day, I feel the current pulling me out to sea. I was weightless. Free.

There but for the grace of God.

I could have been washed into the ocean. I may not have survived. I am not the strongest swimmer. And I have great respect for the ocean.

Could We Have Done Anything Differently?

In the same circumstances, 9.99/10, we would have done what any sensible hikers would have done, the sensible thing, the right thing, which is to say we would have done the exact same thing.

After a decade of ruminating, the only thing I think we may have done differently and had a different outcome, may have been to cross higher up the river, and not so close to the river mouth. And perhaps waited for the incoming tide before we crossed.

Shudda. Cudda. Wudda.

I remain deeply grateful for the people with me that day. I am not being falsely modest when I say they saved my life.

I am grateful to the SANparks rangers who came to the hut several times to check up on us and managed to retrieve the 4 bags that had been lost in the ocean.

To the NSRI and AMS and to the team at Face Adrenalin for aiding in the rescue.

Words are inadequate.

Journalists were calling. How did word get out? We hadn’t even informed our families. The NSRI publishes all their rescues. Who knows?

We felt bad because our families worried when they read the headlines. But we were fine and still able to enjoy a few days holidaying in Knysna.

Edit: In my original post, I was in a hurry and didn’t mention the advice we received from the SANparks rangers, viz. when crossing The Bloukrans River, to send your strongest swimmer across first, alone, without a bag, and preferably attached to a rope.

Alternatively, use the escape route, or use a flotation device, such as an inflatable baby pool to haul people and/or bags across.

(Although this is good practice, in our defence, the undercurrent from the river was undetectable.)

If that person can cross, they can help the others across, with or without rope, depending on the tide and how the tide interacts with the river.

I write this on 29 Dec 2022, having just completed The Otter Trail a day ago, and crossing Bloukrans 2 days ago. At low tide, safely, without survival bags. AFTER two people (including the strongest swimmer) crossed first.

However, after crossing and going back to play in the water, we witnessed a whirlpool created at the river mouth and crazy mercurial currents that are unpredictable.

Do Not Mess With Mother Nature.

Please Consider Donating

There are many heroes in this tale, not least of which the individuals below:

Please click on the links below if you are able to make a donation to help the organisations below with the sterling work they do every day saving lives:

NSRI

AMS