Waterval Boven

Hey folks –

Wow, it feels like I was just updating this. Time sure flies here – I’m pretty sure the Swazi days are at least a couple hours shorter. Every day seems to finish before it’s supposed to. Perhaps it’s a good sign – shows that I’m doing a lot of stuff… right?

The highlight of this past week has definitely been my weekend trip with the climbing team to Waterval Boven, South Africa. Boven is the second largest sport-climbing venue in the world, and it regularly attracts prominent climbers from all over. There’s something like 600 bolted routes throughout the area... so yeah, it’s like the Disneyland of climbing. And it’s only two hours from school. Win.

We woke up early Saturday morning and packed up a combi (big bus-van thing) and hit the road pretty quickly, since we only had one weekend to climb. We arrived at around ten, set up camp (man, I forgot how much I love camping), and set out to climb.

Oi, the place was gorgeous. It reminded me a lot of the Grand Canyon, in many ways – it’s pretty much flat all around, but when you get closer to the climbing area you just see a huge lush canyon that looks like it’s been scooped out of the ground with an ice cream scooper. Twas just super beautiful. The canyon is hours from Joburg or any other big city, so it’s really isolated and quiet. It was all just so very… natural.

Sorry, I’m not doing it justice with my writing. It was great.

We wasted no time, and hiked down into the canyon at around eleven to start climbing. We all started with a lead climb on an easy route to get warmed up, and even though it was easy it was still kind of frightening to lead climb – it’s really something that takes some getting used to. How I used to bring myself to free climb on hikes, I’ll never know.

We all then broke up into smaller groups and tackled different climbs. There’s so many good climbs at Boven that, of course, we couldn’t even scratch the surface of the vast number we wanted to approach. But we all essentially climbed until our arms felt like they were going to fall off, and then climbed more. We met a group of climbers from Canada who where familiar with the UWC in British Columbia and who had spent time in Tucson before (small world). Awesome. We made our way back to camp, cooked burgers over the fire, laughed about the Danish accent (sorry, Lykkfry :) , and went to bed, super content.

The next day was essentially the same, plus one added encounter with a snake that almost ended REALLY badly, an incident with a stolen bathtub, and my co-year from Bangladesh getting stopped at the border because his name rhymed with a suspected terrorist’s name. All in a day’s work!

Monday I was hit with a bollock’s load of schoolwork, plus some outside application essays and junk. I get the feeling this week will be busy... but this is something I’m going to have to get used to fairly rapidly, I suppose. I’m standing here on the internet right now taking a break from my schoolwork, as a cat (hopefully non-rabid) rubs against my legs and purrs contentedly.

Shoutout to Nick (and Amory) for the letters and CD – thank you so very much :) I’m working on responses right now, amidst errthang else. Considering the speed of post, expect them sometime in June… 2012.

Missing folks tremendously, hope all is well in tuc-town (or wherever you may be). I’d expand on how much I miss you all, but I’ve got to go snag the cat, who just jumped on my desk and is now knocking over my speakers and putting its mouth on my toothbrush. Yum.

Cheers,

Eli