My first hike on Table Mountain. Oh em gee. Well, if you don’t know what table mountain is look it up, it’s cool. This was one of the Arcadia planned trips in which they pay for everything involved. Thumbs up on those. So we embarked on our journey at 9am, so early. Our plan was to take the cable car up the mountain and then have a leisurely 3 hour hike down in which we would pass cool waterfalls and awesome flower patches. Yeahhh…. Didn’t really go as planned. Here is what really happened.
The cable car was fabulous, really cool to be in because the outside rotated so you could always see out to see the beaaauuuuutiful view which was chill. Once we got the top there were a bunch of different paths you could take around the top to see off the different sides and take it all in. There was also a café and gift shop at the top. We all decided we should probably go to the bathroom before we hiked down so we went to use them and they were just like airplane bathrooms but at the top of a mountain. I was so confused/I hate airplane bathrooms, almost phobic actually. So that was a scarring experience. We walked around the top for about an hour and then started our descent down to the bottom, or so we thought. We seemed to be going the right way, for about an hour and then we realized that we hadn’t really gone down at all yet. In fact we were actually climbing up. Right. So we got to this point called Maclears Beacon, had no idea what that even meant. As we are all taking pictures of it and what not they told us it was the highest point on Table Mountain. Highest point? Right so we hadn’t begun our descent at all.
Here's a pic of my attractive self at the top of the mountain. You can see the clouds in the background, they are ALWAYS hanging over the mountain. Becuase they are always there they have obtained the name of the tablecloth. Weirdly enough they are always moving and bellowing over the mountain but you cant tell from far away that they are even moving. weird.
So we turned around and started back tracking but realized it was just bringing us back to the cable car. At this point people were nottttttt too happy about the situation so half of the group decided to take the cable car back down and half of the group including me decided to keep hiking down. We turned around and some how ended up off the beaten path where there were zero yellow footprints (these are what tell you that you are actually on a path) and it was SO cloudy/ foggy at the top that we couldn’t see anything around us. Sweet. Somehow after about 10 minutes of trying to get Google maps to work we found some yellow footprints and continued on our way. We got to the edge and realized that we had gone in a big circle and were going in the opposite direction of the leisurely hike they told us we would be going on. Once again, sweet. So they figured out how we were going to get down but didn’t tell us anything about it. We ended up in this gorge that was about an hour and a half hike down that was literally completely vertical. There were people crying off to the sides and falling down, not real life. I ended up leading the group and was going as fast as possible so we could just get to the bottom because we had been hiking FOREVER. After five and a half hours we FINALLY made it to the bottom and none of us could walk we were so tired. Not cool.
Since we didn’t think we would be gone for that long none of us packed any type of food or snacks of any sort so by the time we got to the bottom we were all starving. Our program advisor took us out for the best burgers EVER in my life afterwards at this place called Hudsons in the city of Cape Town which was a fannnntastic end to a far from successful hike. We finally got home at 5pm and were all pooped, so the evening included a 7 11 trip which turned into 3 as the night went on and love actually. Early and lackadaisical night round 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment