heeey campers

So I survived my first week of classes while managing to do no homework whatsoever, but unfortunately I need to do some tonight. booo. But I've have a week filled with camping and hiking, so I can't complain. On Wednesday I went with the hiking club up Lion's Head Mountain, which is one of the smaller mountains next to Table Mountain, for the sunset. They claimed it was an "easy" hike but there were part of it where you had to use chains and rock climb straight up so I hate to see what their idea of a hard hike is. But at least it only took about an hour to get to the top and the view was amazing. We were actually in the clouds for a while, but you still had a view of the entire city, plus a bunch of the beaches and surrounding mountains and the sunset over the ocean. We ended up stumbling down in the dark a little bit, but it was worth it to see the sunset.

Then the same club had their "freshers hike" this weekend and 150 people ended up going! We drove about two hours outside of Cape Town to a really remote area and hiked a little bit up to a dam to go swimming. Apparently, though, it is a tradition for people to jump off the dam into the water, which was 30 feet high. Jumping off of high objects (usually cliffs) into the water is actually a really popular thing to do in South Africa, and they call it kloofing. At first I was very happy to just watch other people and hear the awful sounding SMACK when they hit the water, but then my roommate Zoe jumped, so I decided I had to. I know I can be kind of a wimp when it comes to heights but this was really realllly high, especially when you are looking straight down (bad idea). So I was just nervously debating up there and finally convinced myself to crawl under the railing, looked down, almost had a heart attack, turned around to climb back over, and the guy next to me just yelled "JUMP!" really loud, which half-startled me off the edge anyway, so I just took a breath and jumped. I think the worst feeling was the first second when you're in the air and you're just thinking "what did i just do?!?" and knowing it's too late. But you also expect the water to come must sooner that it actually does. But needless to say, I was just fine, so I'm glad I did it. We spent the rest of the afternoon climbing up to our campsite, where there was a river to swim in and lots of open space to just hang out. We slept under the stars, which were absolutely unbelievable. I've never seen so many in my life. I can't wait to do more hiking/camping trips!