The Drakensberg's Amphitheatre is a single wall of rock about five kilometres long and more than a thousand metres high. Off its rim the Tugela Falls drop some 948 metres in five clear leaps — long ranked the world's second-highest waterfall, and by a 2016 survey perhaps the tallest of all. The wall is the raw edge of the Great Escarpment, where hard basalt caps softer rock that has worn back beneath it. The lava went down about 182 million years ago as Gondwana broke apart. The dark basalt rests on a band of pale golden sandstone, and that lower rock is where the caves and shelters are. The Zulu named the range uKhahlamba, the barrier of spears; Dutch settlers saw dragons in the skyline and called it the Drakensberg. This is the highest ground in Southern Africa.
Light reaches the wall first. At dawn the basalt face turns copper-gold while the valley below is still in shadow; on summer afternoons thunderheads swallow the peaks and fill the gorges with rain. The classic walk climbs the Tugela Gorge to the foot of the falls, boulder-hopping the last stretch and crossing a swaying cable bridge into the spray. In the wet months the Tugela thunders; by dry winter it can shrink to a thin silver thread. The Sentinel path leads to two sets of chain ladders bolted up a near-vertical face, and at the top the ground simply ends at your boots. In rock shelters below are the paintings of the San, who lived here for thousands of years: more than 35,000 images across hundreds of sites, the largest concentration of rock art in Africa south of the Sahara. Antelope graze the grassland beneath the buttresses, and in fine rain the whole escarpment turns silver and quiet.