backpacking in the hex mountains

March 5, 2009

This past weekend I went on a backpacking trip to the Hex mountains, which are about 2 hours north east of here. It was a trip with the Mountain and Ski Club so it was all UCT students. There were about 30 of us and it was awesome! We had to leave on Saturday morning really early. Me and Bubba got in a car with 3 Capetonians, Daniel, Emma and John. They were all really nice. I ended up hanging out with John a good amount later on when we got to our spot in the mountains and he was really cool and pretty into trance so hopefully we are going to hang out again sometime. Anyway, I managed to fit everything I needed into my LL Bean backpack, although I found out that its actually really cheap to get good backpackers backpacks around here (only like 300 rand which is under 30 US dollars!) so I think I'm gonna go get one of those pretty soon. The land we were on in the Hex Mountains is actually owned by UCT. We drove to this big field and then hiked about 30 minutes to a dam. You can jump off the dam into the water. Its about an 11 meter drop which is around 40 feet! I did it but it was definitely pretty scary. I've done jumps off of quarries in New Hampshire before that was about as high but for some reason this scared me more. It REALLY hurt my ass when I landed, haha, I guess I didn't land very well. Anyway that was really sweet. Then we took about a 4 hour hike up the mountains until we reached this valley type area. There was a raised portion in the middle of the valley (this whole valley area, by the way, was completely surrounded by mountains, it was ridiculously beautiful) that we slept on, and at the food of the mound there was a stream and a gorge that the water drops down into and creates a waterfall and a swimming pool. It was so ridiculously beautiful I felt like I was in a movie, especially when everyone was swimming in it and the sun was setting. Watching the sunset that night was unreal. The stars were like nothing I've ever seen, even in more rural areas of the States. Here you can't see the big dipper, but you can see orion's belt really well as well as the southern cross. That was cool actually because Bubba has that tattooed on her leg cause her dad is Australian and its on their flag. Anyway, we slept on the ground overnight, and a bunch of the South Africans brought a bar up (which, by the way, I can't believe they carried. It was kind of an intense hike with huge backpacks on our back!) which was really funny. Everyone was walking around with their head lamps on. I got to chill with a lot of locals, which was pretty cool. I have noticed though that the mountain club is majority white, which is interesting.
About the terrain - going up was actually pretty hard. Evidently we took the harder route there, going straight up and over the mountain to get there as opposed to around. We were literally climbing upwards on huge rocks and through massive fynbos bushes. Let me tell you something about fynbos, which is the local brush in a lot of areas around here - they are spikey as shit. My legs are really cut up right now. The combination of that and a minor sunburn was not pleasant. I made it though and it was totally worth it.
I also started SHAWCO this week. SHAWCO is the largest student run organization on campus and they organize a tutoring/mentoring program with underprivileged kids in the area. A lot of programs go to the townships, and mine goes to an orphanage. Its all girls and we are tutoring them in math. Firstly, I like it because I am the only American in my group of UCT students, and I am going every week so I will definitely be able to make some friends in my group. Also, the girl that I tutored on Monday was named Zinzi, and she was sooo sweet and good. She is 14 and in grade 8 and I really enjoyed working with her. I know some of the girls are more difficult (they have all suffered some form of abuse and/or neglect) but overall I got a really good feeling from the place. Some of the girls are older and they all seem to have good spirits and we had fun playing and hanging out with them towards the end. I can tell they love it when we come, and they love the boys especially which is pretty fun. I am really glad I'm doing it and I look forward to doing it every week for the rest of the semester.
It has been kind of hard to motivate myself to do work here, although I do enjoy most of my classes. My religion class is really cool, and Afrikaans is pretty awesome. I'm hoping to be able to have a conversation pretty well by the time I leave here. Two thirds of the Western Cape province population speaks Afrikaans so I can definitely practice it here. We have had two social-economic development classes so far and I can tell that I'm going to like that class too. We are actually doing a volunteer placement for that class where we will be volunteering once a week for 6 weeks a social welfare/development agency. That should be really interesting so I'm excited for that.