Most people slow down long before 95. Sarel van Rensburg is busy hanging an art show. The Montagu-based painter and veteran mountaineer is presenting All the Mountains I Have Climbed, a solo exhibition of oil paintings drawn from decades spent on and around southern Africa's peaks — and a few far beyond them.
The show runs at the Montagu Country Hotel art gallery from 1 October to 30 November, with the official opening on Wednesday 7 October. It's a fitting venue: Montagu sits beneath the folded ridges of the Langeberg range, the mountains where Van Rensburg's climbing life took shape and where he still walks today.
His climbing CV is genuinely impressive. He is a familiar name in South African mountaineering circles, and remarkably, he summited Kilimanjaro and trekked to Everest Base Camp in his 80s. Closer to home, he has climbed Bloupunt, the Langeberg peak above Montagu.
These days his adventures have shifted gears — literally. He walks the lower rocky ridges around town, favouring the Kranskop route, and drives the region's mountain passes in his 4x4. He admits that bagging a summit by road isn't quite the same as earning it on foot, but the mountains haven't lost their pull. When his legs can't take him there, his brushes do.
Painting is a second career for a man of many lives. A former mechanical engineer, Van Rensburg works mainly in oils and also carves wood sculptures and tinkers with engines in his workshop. Music runs through his story too: he sang with the SAUK choir back in the 1950s and still performs with the Kierie Choir at Huis Uitvlucht in Montagu. He manages his own Facebook page and credits his longevity to humour, curiosity and finding joy in small moments outdoors.
For travellers, the story is really about Montagu itself. This Little Karoo town, about two hours from Cape Town, has long drawn visitors for its hot springs, Victorian streets and easy access to the Langeberg's hiking trails and passes. If you're in the region between October and November, the exhibition doubles as a reason to linger — climb Bloupunt or the Kranskop route yourself, then see the same mountains through the eyes of someone who has been looking up at them for the better part of a century.
It's also a nudge that adventure doesn't have an expiry date. A man who reached Everest Base Camp in his eighth decade, and now shows his summits on canvas at 95, makes a strong case for keeping the mountains in your plans however you get to them — on foot, by 4x4, or with a paintbrush.
