The Peanut Butter Cycling Diet
THE GREAT TRAIL DEBATE So – which province boasts the best/gnarliest/smoothest/ scariest MTB trails in SA? Who better to ask than Chris and Tim Whitfield, who’ve just spent the last year researching the subject for their newly- released book, On Your Bike
TTwentyyears ago, in 1997, Paul Leger wrote A Guide to Mountain Bike Trails: Western Cape. It was essentially a booklet – about 10cm wide, 20cm from top to bottom, and no thicker than this magazine – because back then, there wasn’t a lot to talk about.
In the Cape Peninsula, Leger highlighted Tokai Forest, Silvermine (when the south side was open to mountain bikers, not the north as is now the case), and Deer Park. In his “Trail Description” for all three, he doesn’t mention the word ‘singletrack’ at all. Trails, by the definition of the time, were mainly “dirt roads and secondary tracks”.
Further afield, Leger alludes to some “legal singletrack with challenging technical sections” at Jonkershoek; and even then,
Harkerville’s red route had “mile upon mile of weaving singletrack”.
But there’s not much else; evidently, the major impetus for mountain biking at the time was getting out into nature, and tooling around country areas on jeep tracks or gravel roads.
Today, we’re spoilt for choice. Want to hit some pretty technical stuff without leaving Cape Town? The new network of singletrack in Tokai will do just fine. Or drive 30 minutes, and spend hours on the trail network in Tygerberg.
And a little further afield there is Somerset West; or Grabouw, home to the fabulous ‘A-to-Z’ trail. In 1997, Leger informs us, the best part of the Grabouw experience was “a pacey plantation track with a few tightish bends to test your technical skills”. By which he means ‘a road through the forest’.
At about the same time as Leger published his book, a Johannesburg-based mountainbiker would basically have had a choice between Braamfontein Spruit and Braamfontein Spruit, and nowhere near as much of a trail as there is now. As one of us – okay, it’s Chris – remembers too well, this was a ride on which you needed to be as alert to human intervention as to difficult terrain.
Chris recalls a guy with a knife leaping out at him from behind a suburban boundary wall… and his subsequent adrenalin-fuelled flight. He’s convinced that if Strava had been around in the 1990s, he
would still hold the KOM for that section just below Emmerentia Dam.
KwaZulu-Natal
And in KZN? Well, the choices back then were just as limited. The options, for Durbanites, mostly involved deciding which cane roads you wanted to ride. The north of Durban saw the Ballito and Durban North crowd tracking back and forth through hundreds of kilometres of cane fields, while to the west the Hillcrest crew were doing pretty much the same.
A bit further inland, however, the Howick/Hilton/Karkloof area was providing some great forest riding, on trails that continue to be developed to this day. It’s probably not surprising that the Howick Classic and Karkloof Classic are two of the country’s oldest races, and are consistently well supported.
Much has happened in the past 20 years, and if Leger was so inclined, he could now write a vast tome on each area he mentions: today, there are literally hundreds of trails snaking across just about every corner of the country.
Events that change their route each year (the Absa Cape Epic, for example) can choose from a breathtaking number of areas with highly- developed singletrack routes. Others on more or less fixed routes, such as the Sani2c, joBerg2c or Wines2Whales, continue to add singletrack to their routes year after year.
All of which inevitably gives rise to the great debate: where do you find the best trails in South Africa? And what exactly makes a good trail?
Trails By Province
Local geography obviously plays a role. In the Western Cape, for example, you’ll find that trails are quite rocky and hard on the tyres, and there are lots of technical-trail opportunities. In KZN the surface tends to be more consistent and less rocky, giving rise to the charge that trails there are ‘overmanicured’. Gauteng has a mix, from the less- challenging urban routes to some really gnarly stuff not far from the city.
Chris lives in Cape Town, and is a big fan of the local trails: “I’m not sure there’s as much of a difference between the regions as people like to make out; but the surface conditions in the Western Cape do mean that you have to be able to handle the occasional rock garden and some technical stuff, which is great fun.
“Gauteng has a great mix, and there are some trails there that will challenge even the most technically gifted riders; while KZN’s have amazing flow, which in itself can be thrilling.
“Then again, I had a go at the cross- country circuit in Pietermaritzburg a while back, and the technical stuff there was very, very challenging. Though I think the difficult bits may have been made more challenging by human intervention?”
Chris’s brother Tim, however, is a KZN fan, and thinks the Kaapies are way too macho for their own good.
Tim’s (admittedly limited) riding in the Western Cape leads him to think Cape MTBers love their rock gardens, while his sophisticated KZN mates prefer their trails to flow without having to stop for silly sidewall cuts.
“The trails in KZN are definitely more prepared than those in the Western Cape. Giba and Holla are perfect examples of long rides on smooth trails, with hardly any technical riding. There are steep climbs, and some tight and tricky descents, so you have fun and a good workout – but you can get by without any serious skills.
“Inland – in the Hilton/ Howick/ Karkloof area – things are a bit different, with more technical sections mixing things up a bit. For me, that’s the Golden Triangle of KZN riding. Add in Cascades on the border of Pietermaritzburg, and in a fairly compact area you have enough riding to satisfy just about any rider for months.
“And of course the weather in KZN is so much better than the wet and windy Cape, so you can enjoy riding all year.
“Gauteng seems to be a bit of a mix of both. There’s some superb technical riding, as well as areas with a bit more flow – probably a result of the Gauteng riders either preparing to emigrate to the Cape, or looking forward to their next holiday in Ballito.”