Upper Olifants – A Two Day, 50 km Trip

This unknown section of the Olifants is not paddled very often. It was paddled on the odd occasion in the past but now the people who own the land at the Bobbejaan Hiking Trail will not allow us kayakers to use their land to take out on. Karl Martin phoned them up and they refused us. Quite weird actually, perhaps somebody, somewhere along the line pissed them off. Karl is a very friendly and diplomatic person but he couldn’t get them to change their minds. So we didn’t have a choice and would have to paddle to the low level bridge inside the Kingdom Farm. This would be a far paddle and cover a lot of ground.

Let me mention at this point that I have paddled this entire section in one day, with much less water, in a play boat, scouting only once, portaging one rapid, only stopping twice to rest for ten minutes and doing it in just over nine hours to cover the distance of 50.6km!!!!!! It was ZERO fun to say the least. In fact, it was absolute hell. There is enough flat water on the second half of the trip to make a grown man cry. The account of that trip is on this website, it was one of the first trip reports up on the site. This time at least I was in my trusty large Fluid Solo and we were doing it in two days, not one! Karl’s mom dropped us off as the put in as it was not very far from his house. We used Dave’s car for the purpose.

For the full article and loads of photos, click HERE!