Lion's Head Hike

Cape Town is stocked with different places to take some risky and not so risky hikes. Lion's head is one of the easier ones in the area and has a great view the whole hike. To hike up Lion's head you literally like keep circling the mountain until you reach the top where it is flat and you can sit and... sit I guess? We were told the hike was very easy although that was not the case when we got up there. It starts off really nice with juts a dirt path, no crazy hiking or anything. When we saw this we were like oh yeah this is definitely going to be easy.

 Disregard the horrid picture, but as you can see the path seems like a breeze.

That path lead for some time and then the whole thing turned into rocks, still not very bad just hard to watch where you were stepping. Beautiful views the whole way up which was nice. This is the same place where I went paragliding so I had already seen most of what it had to offer, or so I thought. We only hiked about half way up, if that to get to the site for paragliding. I thought we had hiked further and figured I knew how hard the hike was going to be. Not soon after it turned into rocks instead of a path it turned into t minor rock-climbing adventure with places where the only way to keep going to climb a ladder and grab onto little divots in the rocks. I thought the hike was supposed to be easy? We came to the crossroad in-order to get to the top, there was either the "risky" route as it was called or the leisurely path to the top. We of course thought we were cool and took the "risky" path. A man also told us that his kids could do it so we definitely could. As soon as he said that we were definitely going for the risky business. It started off smooth until we realized that it was quite dangerous and at any moment if you took a wrong step or didn't grab onto the right part of the rock you were pretty much falling off the side of the mountain. Cool. Then we started thinking, we didn't even know what this guy's kids were like to base out decision to take the risky path. Right. So after about 5 ladders and 20 minutes of rock climbing we made it to the top! The view was awesome so worth the hike. We hung around at the top for a bit admiring the view and people watching everyone who was sitting at the top. There was quite the crowd because of how nice it was that day.

 "Risky route"

 

As you can see from the pictures that the hike was not as "leisurely" as I had expected with the ladders and chains that we had to hold on to. It was a quick hike down and it was also great people watching which made it go by much faster. Great start to the day.