Beginning of March is the fire season in Western Cape’s mountains! Some plants need to fire every 10y for their seed to be spread. But when you get the fire on your way, it’s not so much fun!
The week I arrived, a lot of fire started in Muizenberg and other parts South from Cape Town. Some said it was on purpose. But because of that, the Chapman’s Peak drive, a wonderful road along the coast, is closed for a few days, so I cannot not ride it, and neither can all the bikers for the Argus: the biggest time measured bicycle race in the World get shorten from 104km to 47km!
That was just the beginning! Few days after, I enjoy an impressive long mountain bike trail downhill in Jonkershoek nature reserve, East from Stellenbosch. Actually the longest trail ever taken, over 4 or 5k I think! Just miss my good full suspension mountain bike to get the best of it.
Andreas, a triathlete from Bavaria, Germany and I continue that trail further down, when a fire starts ca. 100m away. First fascinated by that fire, we soon realize that the trail leads into it and the wind push it towards us! It get very scary when the flames are only some meters away, I feel the heat and the smell of my own burned hair. We hurry to get back on the trail, fortunately a flat part, but a kind of U form: the fire is on one end of the U, and the exit one the other end. The wind blows through, so we have to hurry to exit that U before the fire gets us on the other side!! And that’s how it looks like once out on the main road, the trail was along that trees getting burned, we were very very close to get burned ourselves, a question of some second, maybe a minute!
Two days after, the sky is apocalyptic: a gray sky full of ashes, as if a volcano were on eruption. But it’s the fire we saw the beginning that spread out for many km in the mountain. And it’s still active! All helicopter and plane we saw that day were not enough are still busy. One area just spread out with water, maybe 5k from the origin:
And a closer look at a burned tree:
