The trail continues

Within half an hour of starting the uphill climb, we were in the lee of the mountain and soon started to shed outer layers of clothing as the body warmed. The trouble with today's lightweight jackets is that they are synthetic and so unable to let out excess body heat, resulting in one perspiring and soaking it up in t-shirts and whatnot. This exercise would be repeated in reverse a number of times over the next four hours. The famously unpredictable Cape weather brought us freezing wind, cloud cover, fine rain, blazing sunshine and finally cold wind again, not great considering the damp clothing! However, this did not dampen the enthusiasm of the hikers.
This is meant to be a really slow hiking group, but our intrepid leader heeds not the grumbles of lesser mortals and strides out unhindered by the steepness of the climb or vagaries of the weather. He is over 80, and as the youngest there, I found it slightly mortifying to be at the back, due to my general unfitness and lack of exercise over the last 40 years or so, but it was never my intention to make this a time trial.
The views were stupendous, stretching from False Bay and Seal Island down to Cape Point, looking down on the dam on top of Red Hill, the lighthouse at Kommetjie, Long Beach to Noordhoek and Chapman's Peak, and ending the circle overlooking the Constantia valley and Table Bay in the distance. So worth the climb.
After a coffee and munchies break at Muizenberg Cave, we headed back towards the car park, thinking it was all downhill from there. But no, we turned right instead of left and the next two hours saw us clambering up to the top of Steenberg Peak (534m), following by a steep descent on the other side, overlooking the trail of cars doing the bend on top of Ou Kaapse Weg. How we pitied them! The paths are extremely well maintained, with smooth slabs of rock all the way down, making it much less likely to twist an ankle and break a hip!
Despite the good-natured grumbling (mainly by me), there were lots of laughs, and it was an amazing outing to be cherished in the memory. So cross about the camera.