Hiking Lion’s Head and Table Mountain are musts if you do visit the city of Cape town, a port city on South Africa’s southwest coast. But before getting there I went with my German friend to the neighborhood of Bo-Koop, a district inhabited primarily by Indians and famous for its colorful houses.
From Bo-koop we walked walked for almost an hour to the entrance of the tram, which is the beginning of the trail of both mountains. This stretch can also be done with the MyCity bus, local vans, taxi, UBER or through the Hop on Top bus. Upon arriving on the beginning of the Table Mountain hike we have noticed it was closed.
This happened because of the amount of clouds, which did not allow to make the trail safely. We headed towards the top of the Lion’s Head trail and passed an interesting sign, the risk of mountain fire, which was in moderate status.
We could see indeed Table mountain completely covered in clouds after a few stops on the way we did for pictures, eating an enjoying the landscape.
You do have 2 different ways and can choose between a stretch of walk (slower way) or a stone wall with metal supports and chains (faster way). The park has signs to aware you of the risk of using the equipment and do not take responsibility for any incident. I chose the hard and faster way. After this stretch, a further 15 minutes of more intense walking on rocks, lead you to the summit.
After an hour and 20 minutes walk we came to our goal. The summit of this mountain is commonly used for sunset parties. It was packed with people when we arrived, about 40. Many bottles of champagne and wine being opened and the expectation of the sunset.
Since we were not equipped with adequate lanterns, we decided to go down before sunset. It was 6 o’clock in the afternoon and the reflection of the mountain in the city was visible.
In the descent a great flow of people against due to the time of the day. Many city dwellers after work will see the sunset at Lion’s Head.
In the middle of the trail we discovered that there was another path that only took 20 minutes and we used this one. We saw the sunset on the way down which was really is spectacular. A few minutes later we were back in the parking lot and it was already dark. From there I called a UBER, an application that searches for reliable private cars that work as taxi drivers and have a competitive price. Awesome trail.
