The India Venster Trail is the steepest of the walking paths up Table Mountain, talking a sinuous line to the summit under the cable car. If you google the trail you will see lots of articles about how spectacular it is and that it is advisable to hire a guide. However there is limited information on the intricacies of the route itself.
When Angus and I climbed it in March 2024 – just a few days before the starting the Cape Epic which we were riding together – we followed an alternative route. i.e. we got lost! So I can’t provide instructions of how to follow the correct and ‘official’ route. But I can tell you where not to go… and that it is advisable to hire a guide.
The path climbs 765 vertical metres from the lower cable car station to the top one.
It starts to the right of the lower cable station and initially climbs up to the main traverse path that goes around the base of Table Mountain.
Then there is a clear sign pointing up the route with a safety warning. The path onward is marked with yellow footprints sprayed on rocks.
After an initial climb we traversed rightward towards the base of a rocky gully. The path up it was steep, dusty and in the full glare of the sun.
There was another couple doing the walk and we traded places as each of us stopped to take photos and have a breather. The guy was wearing a ranger style hat with a badge and I initially thought he was an official guide. However, when asked he replied he was just in the Scouts. The badge may have imbued him with route-finding credibility and made us more likely to trust him…
At the top of the gully we all headed rightwards up to an obvious notch in the ridge.
Angus and I initially thought the route did not continue on the other side the notch but crossed through to take photos as this offered stunning views of Camps Bay. We could pick out our accommodation, The Crystal Apartments, far below and scope out the network paths and small trails through the bush above the town.
The couple followed us through the notch and, having commented on how nice it was to be back in the shade, headed off ahead of us along a path traversing underneath the cliffs above.
The warning signs were all there. The path was fainter than it had previously been and there were no yellow footprints… in fact we hadn’t seen any of those on the path up to the notch.
After a few hundred metres of traversing, the couple shouted that the path they were on had petered out. However the guy, who said he had walked up the India Venster Trail a couple of times previously, still seemed confident we were on route.
We found various other traverse paths but these ultimately all ended on the edge a spur – not far beyond Angus in the picture below – where there was no way forward. The cliffs beyond were too sheer to traverse without some difficult rock climbing. Given the reasonably well trodden paths we were following, a lot of people seemed had made the same mistake as us!
I scrambled up onto a ledge and found a couple of cairns but the trail, if you could even call it that, was very faint. Reaching the cairns involved some tricky scrambling so it clearly was not the regular path, but it looked like it may be possible to head up and left and weave our way through the rock band above. Angus and I decided to give it a go.
The couple went back to the notch. By now we were confident that the correct route climbed up from the other side of the notch. That is probably where the ladders and chains are too as we did not see any of those on our climb up.
So my key bit of advice is to avoid going through any notches… other than to take photos! The proper route does eventually cross to the Camps Bay side of the ridge but this is higher up, where the path traverses to the right underneath the sheer and imposing cliffs below the top cable car station.
Once we had following the cairns up through the rock band we ended up back on the main path where the traverse under those cliffs begins.
And almost immediately after we joined it, we saw a yellow footprint.
The photo below shows where we traversed after the notch, which was along the shaded section below the cliffs behind Angus. The correct route comes up on the right hand side of the rocky ridge as one is looking down it (as in this photo).
The footprints took us on a path that joined one of the main walking trails across the plateau of Table Mountain. There was a warning sign to prevent anyone going for a stroll from the cable car inadvertently taking the India Venster Trail down.
Once we joined the main trail it was an easy walk to the café at the top of the cable car. Along the way there were some fantastic views of Cape Town as well as the local flora, like this protea, nicely photographed by Angus.
It was disappointing to have made such a fundamental route-finding error, but our route was probably more fun that the official one. Our elapsed time from the bottom cable car station to the top one was 3 hours 10 minutes. As an unexpected bonus of thrashing around in the bush on the side of the mountain we saw a pair of wing-suiters, who were flying from the summit down to Camps Bay, streak by not once but twice.
The Strava track of our route is below. I can’t vouch for whether the paths marked on the Strava map actually exist.
This photo of Table Mountain from Camps Bay clearly shows where we went.
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