David Bristow - Been There, Done That: A South African checklist for the curious and the brave

While we might lack the dramatic snowy landscapes found in colder climes, South Africa has a rude abundance of just about everything else nature can bestow mountains, deserts, waterfalls, forests, endless beaches, soaring rock structures and many ancient geological features. Its a naturally wonderful place.

Like the Little Engine That Could, Pilanesberg in North West Province is the Little Volcano That Burped, and then subsided. What is left behind is known as an alkaline ring complex; there are only three of them to be found on the surface of our planet and this one is the biggest. The ring formation is best seen from the air, as a perfect circle of hills with a fracture line that cuts it cleanly in two, offsetting the two semicircles. In appearance its very much like the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, but technically it does not belong to the same geological family.

Theres a story that when hotel mogul Sol Kerzner was looking for a place to build his great fantasy hotel complex, he flew over the Bojanala region, looked down to where the fault line creates a nook on the outer perimeter of the ring of hills and said something like: Thats where Im going to build Sun City. The inside of the ring complex is of course Pilanesberg Game Reserve once the only national park of the short-lived Bophuthatswana homeland, but now a provincial park.

www.pilanesberg-game-reserve.co.za

One of the most significant events in the planets geological past was when Gondwanaland broke up and Africa drifted southwards. In the process, the southern shore of Africa crumpled, like a carpet someone had tripped on, to form the Cape Folded Mountains, while inland the mantle cracked and quaked, and lava spewed out from the guts of the earth. Some of it was forced in-between the many layers of rock underground where it formed iron-like dolerite dykes and sills (which, where exposed, now constitute the Karoo koppies). But the main act was the biggest pyroclastic fireworks earth has ever seen: for two million years molten lava intermittently poured out and covered just about the whole of South Africa in an icing of pumice-like basalt up to 5 km thick in places.

Erosion has whittled away the soft rock, and now what we can see left of it makes up KwaZulu-Natals Drakensberg Escarpment and Lesothos Highlands. But what a glorious escarpment it is, including all of Southern Africas highest peaks; the loftiest is Thabana Ntlenyana, just northeast of Sani Pass, which soars to 3 482 m above sea level. The Voortrekkers called the range the Drakensberg, meaning dragon mountain, while the Zulu people called it uKhahlamba, or barrier of spears go and see why.

The Amphitheatre, Drakensberg

www.drakensberg-tourism.com

While it is hard to appreciate with anything but a keen geological eye, given that today it just looks like a vast stretch of rolling bushveld, the Bushveld Igneous Complex in Limpopo is one of the worlds geological marvels. Its what has remained of a vast intrusion of igneous rock that had been squeezed up from the earths core into the mantel some two billion years ago about half as long ago as the planets birth. The complex is essentially made up of tilted fragments of the original lens of rock, around what appears to be an ancient geological basin.

What makes it so exceptional, however, is that it contains the worlds largest reserves of platinum, palladium, osmium, iridium, rhodium and ruthenium, as well as vast deposits of iron, tin, chromium, titanium and vanadium. Just mentioning the Bushveld Igneous Complex to a mineralogist is enough to make him or her obscenely excited.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushveld_Igneous_Complex

Laid down as sea sand in the ancient Agulhas Sea, around 450 million years ago, compressed beneath kilometres of further sand and shale deposits, rent by heat and friction, buckled by continental warping, and then, finally, slowly ground down by water and gravity: the creation of the distinctly flat-topped Table Mountain was a massive feat of nature. Although its impossible to say just how old it is, what we know with certainty is that for centuries perhaps even millennia its been a geographical icon and a landmark for explorers.

Table Mountain is jealously loved by Capetonians who live around its edges; so much so that they are sometimes unwilling to show off its many splendours to others. It is also a national heritage site, the focal point of the Table Mountain National Park, part of the Cape Floral Region World Heritage Site, and just about the most awesome green lung of any city in the world. Its hard not to love, even looking beyond its comely shape.

Table Mountain, voted a natural wonder of the world in 2012

www.sanparks.org/parks/table_mountain

Like so many things in the colonised world, the place we know as the Hole in the Wall on the Wild Coast has had a perfectly good Xhosa name for centuries: its iziKhaleni, the place of thunder. The sound being referred to is that made when the Indian Ocean gushes through the cavity. Silly people who try to swim through it invariably lose their lives, or other bits of themselves.

The big rock island through which, in its times of spate, the Nzulwini River (although stream is more apt) has bored a tunnel is a whaleback of dolerite that has become separated from the mainland through coastal fracturing and erosion. Dolerite is otherwise known as ironstone, and is formed by magma cooling and setting underground so you can appreciate just how dogged the forces of erosion are.

www.wildcoastholidays.co.za/hiking/three_sisters.htm

The northern section of the Wild Coast, or Pondoland, is the really rugged part, with deep, forested gorges, stunning coves, few homesteads, high cliffs plunging into the sea, and a pervading sense of wilderness. Without a doubt, the two most amazing coastal formations are found about 20 km north of Mbotyi, and just several kilometres south of Lupatana Bay.

The Cathedral Rocks look as though a medieval master stonemason tirelessly sculpted the cliffs here into a basilica, complete with arches and flying buttresses. At Waterfall Bluff, the Mlambomkulu River has scooped out a bowl about 20 m deep into the top of the 90-m-high sandstone cliffs. The falls drop another 60 m from that cut out, directly onto the onrushing swells as they crash into the cliff face.

Waterfall Bluff

www.wildcoaster.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid

There are not many places where you can see evidence of the raw muscle power of the planet manifested in rock, but this series of mountain ranges which run more or less from Vanrhynsdorp to Port Elizabeth is one of them. Drive any of the many passes that cut through the Cape Folded Mountains (the Swartberg, Tradouws, or Seweweekspoort passes are the best examples) and youll see successive bands of sandstone and shale that were contorted, twisted and tightly folded like the bulging biceps and triceps of a giant, fossilised weightlifter when Africa ripped clear of Gondwanaland, starting around 100 million years ago.