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Published: August 10th 2007
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After leaving Skankolies Hostel (see the previous journal entry), we drove to Grahamstown for the night. Everything that we read about it said that it was an unassuming (and boring) type of place. We basically wanted to just break up the driving. I'm glad that we did, since we underestimated our drive on the 25th of April. We left the hostel at around 8:30am and didn't get to Grahamstown until 5:30pm at night. Most of the road (a national highway) was single lane, torn up pretty bad, lots of semis, some pretty hostile-looking towns, and animals wandering randomly into the roads. We were a little nervous, since we wanted to arrive before darkness fell (another common rule that we try to abide by on our trip).
Grahamstown pleasantly surprised us. It was a nice university town amongst some beautiful desert hills. We were originally going to stay in a hostel that had been converted from an old jail cell (not sure how I talked Erin into it) where upon arrival, they take your fingerprints and lock you in (literally) at night, but after staying at what could possibly be the worst hostel in South Africa, we opted for a B&B
Contemplation
...erin thinking about jumping Contemplation
...erin thinking about jumping(I hate that word...I have to start using guesthouse more) which was in a very old house with nice old wood floors (Jerry...and Joe, if you're reading this, both Erin and I agreed that it reminded us of Joe's old apartment in Kaiserslautern). That night we had some traditional Xhosa food (the main tribe from the region) which consisted of a lamb stew...it was very delicious. The breakfast was amazing (yet another common theme on this trip...eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled onion and mushrooms, lots of juice and coffee, and toast...I'm going to be a fatty when I get back).
We left Grahamstown at a reasonable hour (7am) because we wanted to arrive at our next stop early (Storm's River Mouth at Tsitsikamma National Park) so we could do some hiking. Fortunate for us, we didn't unershoot the driving time, and we arrive early afternoon (i think around 1pm). It was another beautiful day (thus far, it hasn't rained at all...well, except for about an hour while we were in St. Lucia), and after finding our forest cabin (see the inserted picture) which turned out to be 100 ft or so from the ocean, we set
Beautiful Coast
...all of these beautiful coastline pictures were on our walk to the waterfall off to go hike.
Beautiful Coast
...all of these beautiful coastline pictures were on our walk to the waterfall
Directly near our forest cabin, there were only two trails that we found on the map, so we decided to take the longer one, a 5.6km hike to a waterfall right along the ocean. On the trail sign, it said that it was would approx. 2.5 hours to do the 5.6km; Erin and I thought otherwise, being the skilled hikers that we are. We failed to take into account the multitude of English breakfasts, the fact that we haven't exercised much at all for the past 2 weeks, and oh by the way, Pops was with us for 10 days (which means I would open my first beer about 4 hours earlier than I planned to each day). So the hike took quite a while...Erin blames it on me stopping every 10 minutes to take pictures (but I told her she'll thank me later). Some of the trip (what I claim took so long) we had to scale all different kinds of rocks and boulders, which were pretty slippery from the seaspray (it reminded me of the boulder field climbing
Sweatmongers
...maybe you can't tell, but we were covered in sweat, as the humidity was aweful (unlike the Pacific NW) Long's Peak in Colorado). It was a beautiful hike and a very beautiful place. There was no sandy beach
Sweatmongers
...maybe you can't tell, but we were covered in sweat, as the humidity was aweful (unlike the Pacific NW)(which was it seemed like there was no one younger than 60 at the park), but the waves crashing upon the rocks, the beautiful meadows, and the tropical plants (amongst a setting reminding me of the Oregon coast) more than made up for it. Just take a look at the beautiful pictures...I have about 50 more.
That night we had a brai (did I mention that is my new favorite word...what South Africans call a Barbecue). We still had some charcoal to burn and the cabin had all kinds of silverware and plates, so we stopped by the camp store and purchased what we thought were hamburger patties. Nope. For some reason, after about 10 minutes on the brai, they weren't turning brown. We're not exactly sure what we ate that night, but I'm glad that we waited until the sun started going down (since I didn't really want to inspect the food and try and venture a guess what indeed
we were eating). I pretended it was hamburger, so it tasted fine. We had a very good sleep that night, as we were both kind of tired from the hike.
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