Tundavala Gap

Plateaus & HighlandsHuíla,Angola

The edge where Angola's high plateau stops and falls 1,200 metres to the plain, unfenced, with morning cloud often filling the lowland below.

September·Peaking now

May–Sep

The cacimbo: cool, wind-scoured and the year's clearest air — June skies run clear roughly nine days in ten, and nights drop near 8°C.

Year-round The 1,200-metre cliff, the walk-out fissure and the escarpment view stand here every day, on a free paved road with no gate; the fog sea, the clear cacimbo air and the green plateau are seasonal.

The Tundavala Gap is the edge where the high plateau of Angola stops and falls 1,200 metres to the coastal plain, a fissure in the escarpment fifteen kilometres from the city of Lubango in Huíla province, unfenced, with the morning cloud of the dry season often filling the lowland below so that the rim stands above a white sea, and it is walked out to along the split between two walls of stone until the rock simply ends. The escarpment is the boundary between the provinces of Huíla and Namibe, the great step of southern Africa where the plateau of 2,200 metres drops to the desert coast, and the stone underfoot is roughly 1.79 billion years old while the cliff is young, cut back by the rivers of the plain; the gap is a slot cut back into the clifftop between two walls of stone, followed out over broken ground to a point with nothing beneath it, and from the rim the land opens across some 10,000 square kilometres of the plain, ridge stacking behind ridge into the haze, with the road to Namibe winding down the face at the Leba pass to the south. The name does not describe the view but comes from the Nyaneka word for the place. In the cacimbo, the dry season of May to September, fog off the cold Atlantic pushes inland and fills the plain 1,200 metres below the rim, burning away toward midday on many mornings, and the grassland of the plateau goes copper in the late afternoon light. Birders travel a long way for the Angola cave-chat, a cliff-crevice nester recorded at only about eight sites on Earth, which breeds in the crevices of these cliffs from September to November, and the rocks hold the rock hyrax and the baboons. Lubango below the plateau is the city of the Christ statue and the Portuguese settlers, and the gap is its Sunday outing, with picnics at the edge and no rail. Tundavala is the place where a country's tableland ends, and the drop is the whole view.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Nothing fences the edge — the lip is broken and undercut in places, and the updraft off the plain gusts hard without warning. Keep well back, and take particular care around the fissure itself.
The cliff faces west, so at sunrise the rock is flat and shadowed and only lights up in the last hour of the day. Pick your hour by what you actually came to see.
A paved road runs right to the rim and any car makes it — there is no gate, no ticket and no shelter of any kind once you are up there.

Things to do

1
Walk out between the walls of the fissure
The split cuts back into the clifftop between two walls of stone, and you can follow it out over broken ground until the rock simply ends. The updraft comes straight up the face, cold and loud enough to hear over the wind on the plateau. The last few metres are yours to judge.
2
Stay on the escarpment until the grassland goes copper
The escarpment is the boundary between Huíla and Namibe, and the land opens across roughly 10,000 square kilometres of it, ridge stacking behind ridge into the haze. The rim empties late in the day, the grassland goes copper, and the wind off the drop turns genuinely cold within minutes of the sun going.
3
Look for the Angola Cave-chat in the crags
Birders travel a long way for this one: a cliff-crevice nester recorded at only about eight sites on Earth, Tundavala among them. It works the rock faces and the broken ground below the rim rather than the open grassland. Scan the ledges and the crevices, and give it time — it will not come to you.