0 of 2
It’s like Canal Walk shopping centre on Christmas Eve. That’s how Catherine Cartwright describes the foot traffic on Lion’s Head, as Capetonians take to the hiking trails around the city. Elsewhere, it’s similarly crowded. "Going up Constantia Nek or Table Mountain is extraordinary — the mountains are crammed," Cartwright, the founder of hiking meals business Mama Alles, tells the FM.
"I think it’s incredible. We want people to be healthy, to be outdoors and fit, and create space for physical meditation. It’s extraordinary that people are hiking in the numbers they are."
After months of being cooped up as a result of Covid — and mindful of the risks attached to meeting friends indoors — South Africans have, quite literally, headed for the hills. In doing so, they’ve provided a welcome boost for a relatively niche sector.
Take Mama Alles, for example. Cartwright started the business in June 2020, after testing her products on a camping trip to Namibia. "I wanted to hike, and really wanted to care about what I ate — I didn’t want junk food like salty noodles and tuna on crackers," she explains.
After a soft launch of the business at the end of that year, she started taking orders as they came in, working from the kitchen of her home in Gardens, Cape Town. As soon as she went online, her revenue doubled.
Just over a year on, Mama Alles’s light-weight, organic and locally sourced hiking meals are popular with hikers and nonhikers alike. The instant beetroot humus is particularly good, the dehydrated Moroccan tagine is the most-ordered meal, and most buyers return for the Central African peanut stew. A new favourite, jollof rice, is "super fragrant and flavourful, with deep layers of taste".
The flavours, she says, are about paying homage to "this beautiful country and continent".
It’s all quite a departure from Cartwright’s previous work. She has a background in social anthropology and environmental science, and a master’s degree in city planning. But after finding the pace in those fields too slow, she turned to industries that "could effect change faster", finding herself working in project management and doing NGO work.
Still, it bothered her that the work she was doing didn’t seem to have a direct social impact. With Mama Alles, she’s hoping that she can do her part to effect change through job creation.
"The one thing that anyone can do in this country is create employment," she says. "It allows people to buy a house or get health care — that’s the most important thing you can do."
After going full-time herself, Cartwright now has one full-time employee and three part-time workers, with room to grow. "There is potential to increase employment opportunities in the business," she says. "Everything we do is made from scratch, and cut and packed by people. It’s a business that relies on staff. My whole business model is not just about [creating] employment, but creating meaningful employment."
While hiking is a niche industry, requiring some disposable income, the market itself is growing. "When I started Mama Alles, we had one competitor. There are now six of us." And, she adds, "when tourism [properly] opens up, the international market will be doing all these hikes and trails".
As Mama Alles has become synonymous with hiking, Cartwright has become something of a go-to for people looking for information. So, what are the most popular trails? The Otter Trail is fully booked year-round, with 12 people starting the five-day hike each day. "And the Cederberg is extraordinary," she says. "The Oorlogskloof Trail in the Northern Cape surprised me. It’s run by the department of agriculture, land reform & rural development and is extraordinary."
Open spaces
However, getting into hiking — particularly the multiday version — requires a fair amount of gear (boots, rucksacks, sleeping bags and the like). That can amount to quite an outlay for someone who is not yet sold on the idea, or who needs to build their equipment more slowly.
Enter Scuttle, a camping and hiking gear rental company, founded by Jacques de Villiers in 2017.
De Villiers happened upon the idea when, on a trip to the US in 2016, he decided to camp in Yosemite National Park for $4 a night, rather than spend $244 for a hotel. "[Gear] rental in the US is a lot bigger than in the southern hemisphere because of the skiing option — it’s in their DNA," he says. "In SA it’s a new concept, and it’s taken a while to get people into it."
On the camping side, Scuttle’s popular offering is the combination of tent, stretchers, camp chairs, groundsheet and lantern. "If you have that, you’re set for the weekend," De Villiers says. Hiking-wise, backpacks are most sought after (the company uses the reputable Osprey brand). It also rents out some travel products, such as roof boxes. "They’re good products, but quite expensive," he says. Hence the incentive to rent rather than buy.
The business has branches in Cape Town and Pretoria, with gear collected or delivered to your doorstep, though delivery is limited to the Western Cape and Gauteng.
De Villiers says the business took a huge knock in 2020, when harsh restrictions were put in place and people could barely get out. But since then, there’s been a definite uptick. "I see a lot more people on the Cape Town mountains than previously," he says. "I guess it has to do with the past two years, when we’ve been locked in."
It’s allowed the company to bounce back — and then some. Compared with its pre-Covid level in 2019, Scuttle has doubled its business. "That’s not just about people getting out there," he adds. "It’s people getting to know the business and the brand."
Like De Villiers, Evan Sparks decided to get into the hiking business while on the trail. The former chartered accountant, who returned to SA at the end of 2019, was out walking with a friend when the two decided to set up an online booking platform for hikes.
"I am a hiker. I don’t go every weekend, but I was with a friend on a guided trail and we were chatting about the misinformation around bookings," Sparks says. As he explains it, a number of hikes have long waiting lists. While gaps often open up, people don’t know how and where to find these. There are also trails in public parks and on private land. "Generally there’s a lack of information on how and where to book, and a lack of budget to promote hikes," says Sparks.
The difficulty — particularly for nonenthusiasts who don’t know the ropes — is finding a place to hike and making a booking, in the absence of availability calendars. "For someone who just wants a quick weekend away, it’s a barrier," says Sparks.
To plug this gap in the market, he launched Afritrails "to make hiking more accessible to the masses". The company started with online booking for trails only, later adding other services, including accommodation and, working through Scuttle, equipment rental.
While some old agent sites operate a limited number of trails, Sparks says there’s no real-time online booking platform for hiking. While Afritrails offers booking info for a limited number of its listings in real time — it has 150 locations on its books — the company has invested significantly in new product development over the past six months that will ensure most trails can be booked in real time, he says. And when that launches this month, it’s hoping to double its offering. And it’s planning to expand into the rest of the continent in the next few months.
For now, though, most of Afritrails’ hikes are in the Western Cape — though it does deal with multiple trails in every province — and it doesn’t do day hikes at present.
A post-lockdown boom
One of the multiday trails benefiting from the increased interest in hiking is the Amatola trail — a gruelling six-day, 104km trek over department of agriculture, rural development & land reform property.
The trail is managed by Amatola Trails, a nature lodge based at Away with the Fairies in Hogsback. In part, the company started eight years ago because of interest in the trail. People would want to do the trail, but they needed the permit and wanted to know how to get to the start, where to leave their cars, and where to stay before and after the hike, Amatola Trails owner Dan Cornick tells the FM.
Cornick sells packages to hikers, including the necessary permits, shuttles to the start of the trail, pre-and post-hike accommodation and assistance.
Last year was a good year for the company. "It was a combination of people wanting to immerse themselves in nature, wanting to get out of their houses, to get involved with trees and waterfalls and the beautiful things in life — and they want exercise.
"It takes them out of the confinement of the cities," he says.
City slickers headed to Hogsback need to be prepared for a long and quite technical trail. "You have 5,000m of vertical ascent over six days. The days are long and they’re tough going. There hasn’t been one person in eight years who has come back and said there is another tougher hutted overnight trail in SA," says Cornick.
"But ... it’s diversity that makes it so special — you get a bit of everything. Apart from the sea, you start with indigenous forests, you go through ravines, countless waterfalls on top, a meteorite, you go down a cliff, [and] there are forests. The amount of change is amazing."
Between 2019 and last year, bookings were up about 50%, says Cornick. And this year looks like another increase, with bookings already flying in, and hikers booking in bigger groups than last year, too.
Riaan Oosthuizen, general manager of outdoor sports brand First Ascent, says the boom in the hiking sector is noticeable in the uptick in sales.
He first noticed an increased interest in outdoor activity in the early days of the pandemic, when people couldn’t travel but felt the need to get out. It started with cycling and running, he says, but "after lockdown restrictions eased, people engaged in a broader range of outdoor activities, of which hiking in particular became popular".
Robert Breyer, vice-chair of the Cape Town chapter of the Mountain Club of SA, makes a similar point. With gyms closed for so long, people had to "resort" to exercising outdoors. "All of a sudden, many South Africans discovered that hiking in particular is actually fun, not a ‘grudge’ thing like a treadmill session at a gym," he says.
"People discovered that one can easily hike up this thing called Table Mountain, or actually explore the kloofs or waterfalls of the Magaliesberg. Once that hiking bug bit, it was hard for most people to go back to a treadmill, even when the lockdown was lifted ... It’s almost like many South Africans never knew this ‘sport’ existed — and now they have ‘discovered’ it."
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.