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Thursday, 17 February 2011

Tweede Tol

Tweede Tol is about an hour and 15 minutes away from Cape Town on Bain's Kloof Pass. It's in a nature reserve (Limietberg), has camping sites, a picnic area and rivers with rock pools. During the holiday seasons you have to arrive at the gate way before open time (8am) because space is limited and people start queuing from the night before (I'm not joking). For the rest of the year, try to get there before 8am at least. Space is limited and they have no qualms about turning you away when they've reached capacity.  Begging doesn't help.

You'll pay  R30 (each) to get in then you can park and head towards the picnic site. There's no shop at Tweede Tol so come prepared. They do sell toilet rolls for R2 but bring your own as well just in case they run out of stock. Yes, there are toilets.

The picnic area is a large grassy/sandy area with trees and braai spots scattered all over. Next to this is the Witte River with an awesome rock pool suitable for swimming or chilling. There's also a huge rock you can jumpoff into the water - if you feel like being adventurous.

If you're camping at Tweede Tol, you have access to a another river and a series of rock pools. We didn't camp there but we snuck past the guards (there weren't any) and just kept walking like we belonged there. I think most people do that anyway.
The route we took to get to the pools



The first rock pool and waterfall is beautiful. It's easily my favourite pool (even though I only know of two).  It's got blue/green cool water (depending on the angle you look at it) with little waterfalls trickling into it. If you're brave (not like me) you can jump from the top into the pool.


Mmmmmm

Jumpers

The face says it all

I like this pool so much I'm going to add more pics (sorry).  :-)



Jumping in a different style


After splashing about in that pool, we walked on to get to the (apparently) better pool. I still like the first one more. The next one's a much bigger pool with a few jumping spots as well.
Pool number 2





There is a trail you can walk along to get to the pools but we decided to walk along the river. It's a bit tricky at times and you're most probably going to slip a few times but it's refreshing to walk through the water here and there, especially on a really hot day. You WILL get wet - sometimes hip-deep.