The impossible road

Even in a decade of feverish road building round the Cape Peninsula, it didn't seem reasonable to contemplate a road along the breathtaking cliff face of Chapman's Peak between Hout Bay and Noordhoek. But some people don't take 'no' for an answer.

A road linking Hout Bay and Noordhoek along the coast was impossible. That was the view of the commissioner of public works in a letter to the Cape Peninsula Publicity Association dated March 1910. Such a road, he insisted, would present "features of extreme difficulty, there being in one section over a mile of perpendicular cliffs to contend with." These cliffs, he wrote, "drop for some two to three hundred feet sheer into the sea and deep water . . . it would appear that no passage over this portion is practicable, even on foot." Merely surveying the route had required men "crawling on hands and knees for long distances." Such a project, anyway, would entail "enormous outlay."

On the possibility of such a road the commissioner was wrong. Two months later Sir Frederick de Waal was elected Administrator of the Cape, a man who not only delighted in road building but was bloody minded enough to attempt the seemingly impossible. He hired a mining surveyor, Charl Marais, who had just completed a survey for the Komati-Selati railway line. (He had also been among those who helped convince President Paul Kruger to establish the Kruger National Park.)

Marais was an equally thorough man and the towering cliffs did not deter him. He employed a worker to chop footholds across the face and to hack out platforms on which to place his theodolite. In some places he was forced to suspend himself from a climbing rope and work like a fly on a wall. On one occasion he slipped off the face and just managed to save himself by grabbing a protea bush.

But his hard labours paid off and, in the course of his survey work, he discovered something that was to make the road a possibility. The whole of Chapman's Peak, he realised, was comprised of horizontal layers of sandstone and shale resting on a gently sloping dome of granite. If the road was to follow the interface of these geological sequences, he said, the many cuttings needed could be carved out of the more workable sediment above.

Marais estimated the cost of the road at £20 000, a considerable sum at the time. But De Waal was undeterred. He raised the capital, organised 700 convict labourers and sanctioned the project. Work began from the Hout Bay end in April 1915, and in June the following year from the Noordhoek side.

Much credit for the daunting road must go to its engineer, Robert Glenday. With equipment which today would be considered extremely crude, and with unskilled and often unruly workers, he and his team chipped and blasted their way along the cliff face with dynamite, picks and shovels. In many places workers had to be secured by ropes as they hacked at the vertical rock. Landslides were an ever-present danger, and remain a problem to this day.

The first four kilometres, from Hout Bay to the lookout point, were opened in 1919 but it took another three years to deal with the even more daunting cliffs beyond that. The completed Chapman's Peak Drive was opened to the public in 1922 after Prince Arthur of Connaught, South Africa's Governor General at the time, drove through a silk ribbon strung across the road. The prince said he thought the attraction of the drive "would more than compensate for nearly being blown out of your car in a southeaster."

The Tramway Company used the occasion to advertise special coach trips from Cape Town along the coast to Noordhoek for 12/6, including lunch at the Hout Bay Hotel.

A reporter from The Cape Argus recorded the trip in lyrical, if unusual, terms. It was in many ways, he enthused, "a feminine road - always changing, luring, and at moments giving you a quick sense of danger."

He added that, as Cape chauffeurs had the air of being able to "drive a motor car along the edge of any old precipice," it was as well to make sure of your driver on the pass.

It was good advice that many have ignored at their peril since then. In a cleanup operation in 1989 a helicopter plucked 22 car wrecks from the rocky shoreline below the road. The same year an East London businessman had a lucky escape when he lost control of his Mercedes on the drive. It hurtled over the edge, bounced and fell 100 metres to the rocks below. The driver stepped out, unhurt. The Mercedes Benz company was so impressed they sent another of their cars over the same edge with cameras inside - and used the resulting footage in a television advertisement.

A few years later a newspaper headline, "Boulder hits magician's car on Chapman's Peak" alerted the public to dangers which threatened from above during the rainy season. The magician was on his way to do a show when a huge boulder landed on his car's bonnet. He was only slightly hurt but the car was a write-off. No amount of magic would lift the embedded boulder and the breakdown service ended up towing a double load.

But the pleasures of the drive far outweigh its dangers, and on any day of the week you'll find people at the lookout point staring in amazement at the looming cliffs and roaring breakers below. Those satiated by the natural beauty might try a bit of exploring along the way. A well-known sentinel at the Hout Bay end of the drive is a large, time-tarnished bronze leopard staring moodily across the bay. Sculpted by Ivan Mitford-Barberton, it's a tribute to the many of its kind which used to prowl the mountains and valleys of this area.

A little further along, just below the road, is the East Fort Battery built by the British in 1796 to rout enemy ships which might try to shelter in the bay. There's a well-signposted path to the battery, but it is said to have originally been supplied only from the sea. The story goes that an interior, secret stairway existed, leading from the battery to a cave on the coast below. It was thought to have been blown up at the time Chapman's Peak Drive was built, but its remains have never been found.

At the Round Table bungalows further along the coast - which offer some of the best sunset views in the Peninsula - are three graves. Two are those of convicts who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic while working on the road, the third is that of an unknown woman whose body was washed up nearby.

The peak which looms overhead was not named after a governor or brave mountaineer, but a lowly ship's pilot. In 1607 the skipper of the British ship Contest found his vessel becalmed in what is now Hout Bay and sent his pilot, John Chapman, to row ashore in the hope of finding provisions. The pilot later recorded the bay as Chapman's Chaunce (chance) and the name stuck, becoming official on all East India charts.

Jan van Riebeeck, caring little for British tradition, renamed the bay t'Houten Baiejtjien (Hout Bay), but the name of the mountain beside it remained Chapman's Peak.

Having driven the winding road beneath its cliffs, most would agree with the reporter who undertook the first autobus trip along Chapman's Peak Drive back in 1922: "It is a picture which is impossible to paint in words without the use of meaningless superlatives." But as the setting sun bathes the cliffs in gold, roaring breakers thread white ribbons through the blue-green water below and spring flowers squander colour on the hills above, it's tempting to try. It is, after all, one of the most beautiful coastal roads in the world.

Article reproduced with kind permission from author Don Pinnock and Getaway magazine: http://www.getawaytoday.com/gateway_article.asp?FEATURE_ID=242