2
Heaven and Earth , on Foot
“Some valleys you drive into. The best ones you earn—step by step, breath by breath—until heaven and earth feel as if they were always within walking distance.”
John Sparks
THE ASCENT
By seven the family is gathered in the kitchen, boots laced, water bottles filled, the younger boy still replaying yesterday’s drone footage to anyone who will stand still long enough to watch it again. Below the villa, the bay is quiet. A few blows, lazy and far out. The whales are having a slow morning too.
Today I have promised them something different. We are going into the Hemel en Aarde Valley—but not the way most people do. Not by car. On foot. Up the mountain behind Hermanus and over the top.
From the parking area at Fernkloof the path wastes no time, tilting upward toward the folds of the mountain. This is fynbos country—the Cape Floral Kingdom at its most concentrated—and within minutes, town falls away. The sounds of traffic and coffee cups dissolve into wind through restios and the distant hush of the sea.
The trail runs first to the waterfall and then on to Adder Ladder. It is well made but honest. It climbs, eases, climbs again. We go slowly, listening to our knees, testing each section. They complain less than expected. The surface is kind—earth, sand, rock—no jarring concrete, no endless, uniform steps.
For long stretches, it feels as if the entire Fernkloof massif has been reserved just for us.
No voices float up from below. No hikers crest the ridge ahead. Just the sound of our breathing, the crunch of gravel, and the continuous, low breath of the ocean far beneath.
A GARDEN THE SIZE OF A TOWN
At the first proper bend I stop, let everyone gather, and crouch beside the path.
“Before you look at the view,” I say, “look down.”
At first they see what most people see: low, scratchy green bush.
Then, slowly, the detail arrives. Tiny ericas hanging like pink and white bells. A protea half open, its bracts stiff as a crown. Restios rising in thin, rust‑coloured stems. Something yellow no bigger than a fingernail. Something purple smaller still.
“This whole reserve is about eighteen square kilometres,” I tell them. “You could walk across it in a day. On a map of the Cape Floral Kingdom it’s barely a pinprick. And yet more than twelve hundred and fifty plant species have been recorded here—close to a fifth of the entire Kingdom, on one mountainside. There is nowhere else on earth where so many different plants grow this close together.”
The daughter looks at the slope again, differently now, as if someone has switched on a light in a room she thought was empty.
“Fynbos,” I add, “comes from the old Dutch fijn bosch. Fine bush. Small, tough leaves, often rolled tight against the wind and the summer heat. Everything up here has learned to do a great deal with very little.”
Then come the proteas, and even the children stop talking.
The pincushions first—cousins of the protea—low bushes studded with orange and yellow blooms that look exactly like their name: hundreds of fine styles standing up from each flower head, as if someone with a great deal of patience has pushed pins into a cushion.
Higher up, the black‑bearded proteas: tall, slender flower heads wrapped in pale bracts, each one tipped with a fringe of dark, velvety hair, as though the plant has grown a beard to keep out the wind.
And then, on a rocky shoulder just off the path, a king protea.
It stops everyone. A single flower almost the size of a dinner plate, its pink and silver bracts opening around a soft, domed heart. It looks less like something that grew on a mountain and more like something a jeweller might make if they were trying to show off.
“Our national flower,” I tell them. “The king protea. It’s why our cricket team is called the Proteas. There are dozens of different proteas in the Cape, and this is the one that gets to wear the crown.”
The younger boy photographs it from every angle. His father simply stands and looks. “I’ve only ever seen these in a florist’s bucket,” he says quietly.
“Now you’ve seen one at home,” I reply.
The mountain is busy with small lives. Sunbirds work the flowers in quick, metallic flashes. On a good morning a Cape sugarbird will perch on top of a protea, its tail longer than its body, swaying like a question mark. Dassies sun themselves on the rocks, and somewhere along the cliffs black eagles hunt them. Klipspringer and grey rhebok live up here too, though they are shy, and the porcupines and genets only come out once everyone has gone home.
You don’t need to see them all to know they are there. That, too, is part of the pleasure.
MEETING ON THE LADDER
On a slightly steeper stretch between Lemoenkop and the waterfall we meet them: a Dutch family of four, carefully picking their way up.
The children’s cheeks are flushed from the effort; their eyes bright with that rare mix of pride and slight fear that real landscapes give children.
We trade places on the narrow path.
“Goedemorgen,” the father nods, his accent unmistakable.
“Beautiful, hey?” I say, stepping aside.
The mother glances back at the view—bay, town, red and white vygies, the world rolling away in blues and golds. “We told them,” she says, “they will remember this more than the hotel pool.”
The younger child is cradling a fallen wildflower like treasure. The older is already planning “the next mountain, higher than this one.”
As they pass, one thought settles: how lucky are all these children?
Parents trading screens and shallow distractions for gradients and horizons. Gifting them memories that will flare up years from now, when their own lives feel too small.
I glance at the three children in our own group—one striding ahead, one stopping for every second flower, one quietly matching his father’s pace—and think exactly the same thing about them.
We say goodbye. Their footsteps fade. The mountain is ours again.
THE TOP OF THE MORNING
The last pull up Adder Ladder is the steepest of the day. Nobody talks. Then the slope eases, the wind finds us, and the whole coast lays itself out below.
Hermanus unfurls like a living map: the Old Harbour a comma, the town’s grid soft in the morning haze, the cliff path a dark thread stitching land to sea. Walker Bay lies flat and reflective, a sheet of hammered silver in the early sun.
And there—small, white, unmistakable—a blow. Then another.
“They’re still there,” the younger boy says.
“They’re always there in September,” I tell him. “We just had to climb a bit higher to see how many.”
To the east, the curve of the coast runs past Grotto Beach toward De Kelders. Inland, the land relaxes and softens toward Stanford. Far down the line of sea and cliffs, Gansbaai sits just at the edge of knowing—a suggestion caught in the clear morning light.
My phone is heavy with images—dozens of attempts to pin down what the heart understood the moment I stepped onto the path.
Ninety minutes up, with plenty of stops. Taken gently. Knees accounted for. No heroics required.
This is not a trail reserved for athletes. It’s a path for anyone willing to trade their time for a bench, a view, and the quiet, private satisfaction of having chosen the mountain for the day.
HEAVEN AND EARTH
Then we cross the top, and the other side of the world appears.
Behind the mountain, where the town can’t see it, the Hemel en Aarde Valley lies folded between the ridges like a secret kept in plain sight. Vineyards run down the slopes in long, disciplined rows, the vines in fresh September leaf—small, bright, almost translucent when the sun catches them. Between the rows, cover crops soften the soil in greens and whites. Fynbos climbs the higher ground until the rock takes over.
“Hemel en Aarde,” I tell them. “Heaven and Earth.”
The older boy considers this for a moment. “So which one are we standing on?”
“This morning,” I say, “both.”
The name is far older than the vines. For most of its history this valley grew other things. Then, in 1975, someone looked at these cool, sea‑brushed slopes, a few kilometres from the Atlantic, and decided they could grow serious wine. That first estate is where we are heading. Today the valley’s pinot noir and chardonnay are poured in London and New York, and the families who followed have turned a quiet farming valley into one of the most admired wine addresses in the country.
But we are not arriving at a tasting‑room door. We are walking down through the fynbos, onto a farm track, and toward a stretch of water that doesn’t appear in any brochure.
THE DAM
The estate’s private dam sits in a fold of the land, edged with reeds, its surface so still it holds the sky and the mountain we have just crossed.
Nobody needs persuading.
Boots come off. Clothes are stripped down to swimming costumes.
The children go first—of course they do—launching themselves in with shrieks that skip across the water and roll away up the valley.
The adults follow more carefully, then less carefully, then not
carefully at all.
The water is crystal clear and fresh off the mountain—cool enough to make you gasp, gentle enough to make you stay. After ninety minutes of climbing, it feels less like a swim and more like being forgiven.
We float on our backs and look up at the ridge we walked over an hour ago. From down here it looks impossibly high.
“We did that,” the daughter says, half to herself.
“You did,” I reply. “Nobody carried you.”
On the bank, a table has appeared in the shade of a tree, as if the valley itself decided we had earned it. A late champagne breakfast for the adults: cold bubbles, warm bread, cheeses from farms down the road, fruit that tastes of the season. Something wholesome and hearty for the children, who eat as though the mountain has hollowed them out—which, in the best possible way, it has.
We sit in towels with wet hair and full plates. Nobody checks the time. Breakfast drifts gently into lunch, and nobody minds.
A GLASS YOU HAVE EARNED
Later, when hair has dried and shoes are back on, we walk the last few hundred metres through the vines to the cellar.
Inside, the air is cool and smells of oak and stone. The tasting is unhurried. Chardonnay first—clean, bright, carrying that faint mineral edge people like to say comes from the sea air and the stony soils.
Then pinot noir, lighter and more delicate than most red wines, all red fruit and quiet persistence.
“Pinot is the difficult child of the wine world,” I say. “It wants cool nights, patient hands and a place that doesn’t shout. This valley gives it all three.”
The children are given grape juice from the same valley and hold their glasses up to the light with enormous seriousness, swirling and sniffing like seasoned critics. Their parents laugh. So do I.
Every glass tastes better when you have walked to it. There is a difference between visiting a valley and arriving in one. When you drive in, you look at it. When you walk in, it is already under your skin.
THE LONG, LAZY AFTERNOON
Our vehicle meets us at the estate gate, and a short drive later we are back at the villa, the mountain now a dark shoulder behind the house.
The afternoon has nothing in it. That is its genius.
The boys test the pool with a series of increasingly ambitious cannonballs. The daughter claims a lounger and a book and does not look up for an hour. Their father falls asleep with a hat over his face and denies it afterwards. Their mother sits at the edge of the water with her feet in the pool, watching the bay.
I do the same, a coffee beside me and my notebook open on my knee, writing almost nothing.
Out in Walker Bay, the whales keep their own schedule. Every so often a blow rises, hangs, and drifts away on the breeze. Nobody jumps up for binoculars now. They have become part of the view, the way a church bell becomes part of a village.
There is a kind of luxury that has nothing to do with thread counts or wine lists. It is the luxury of an afternoon with nothing to prove—of legs that have climbed a mountain, skin that has swum in a mountain dam, and a family that no longer needs to be entertained, because the day has already filled them.
WHEN THE VYGIES CLOSE
As the light begins to fall, the vygies in the garden below the terrace start to close—red and white petals folding inward, their daylight blaze dimming to muted patches. Streetlights flicker on in town, echoing the first stars appearing above. The breeze cools, carrying fynbos and salt down from the mountain we crossed this morning.
From the terrace I can just make out the ridge line against the darkening sky. It seems a long way up. It seems a long time ago.
Yesterday the sea came to us: whales in the bay, close enough to change the way the family sees the ocean.
Today we went to meet the land: a garden the size of a town, a family of strangers on a narrow path, a valley named for heaven and earth, a dam, a glass, a pool, and a whole afternoon with nothing in it.
The children are already asking about tomorrow. They know what’s coming.
Horses. A long white beach. The sea again, but from a different height.
For now, though, there is only the soft click of the pool filter, the murmur of the town settling below, and a family on a terrace, quietly tired in the best possible way.
Some valleys you drive into. This one we walked into—and I suspect it will walk with them for a very long time.