Trail Tarts Part 4

Woke up on Day 4 feeling very spritely, notwithstanding the fact that I was still as stiff as a board, I think my body had adjusted to this state as being normal. It had started raining at about 3am that morning and continued without letting up so we decided to start off anyway after waterproofing what we could.

We crossed the first river, just below the hut, the Kleinbos, and, what a joke, we all took our shoes and socks off because it was ankle deep and we didn’t want heavy sodden shoes. What a waste of energy because within ten minutes our shoes were sodden anyway. I took to walking right through the middle of the puddles. There were two reasons for this, one that it used up less precious energy than walking or climbing around the puddles and two, I was convinced that frogs prefer it on the banks to sitting in the middle of puddles. This is called denial in psychological terms I believe.

We spent the morning climbing yet another long, forgotten uphill and then a steep descent into another forest. Once again I was too busy applying frog-avoidance strategy by making sure I was walking through the deepest part of the puddles that had now become pools, to notice the scenery. We reached the Witteklip River where we would have had a swim if the sun was shining, however this was completely unnecessary as we were all soaking wet anyway. We found the front runners pacing up and down the bank in frustration. The river was a raging torrent and any attempt at crossing would have washed us away in seconds. We tried to find other ways to get across, like fallen trees, but decided this was too risky. I would have tried anything because I just couldn’t face the thought of climbing back UP the steep decent we had just come down, however, good sense prevailed over desperation. Which was just as well because we would just have been stopped by the next river and been out of cell phone range. So back through the forest we went, which I just knew was infested with hordes of hopping frogs but my psyche was effectively preventing me from seeing them and then it was back up that dreaded mountain. The path by this time had become a running waterfall which we had to walk up against. Peering through the mists we could make out some magnificent waterfalls cascading down the cliffs and into the rivers, effectively flooding them.

Eventually, cold, hungry and tired we arrived back where we started at that little river, the Kleinbos, the one we had removed our shoes for that morning, to be greeted by a familiar sight: the frontrunners pacing up and down the bank of a raging river in full flood. The hut was a mere five minutes away yet we couldn’t get there. We managed to phone the Bosbou “stasie” who arrived on the hut side of the river an hour later. Once again we were lucky we'd walked back to one of the two huts that were accessible to vehicles. By this time the tension and the cold had reduced some who had given up smoking to start puffing again despite having to puff under the backs of other peoples raincoats. The two guys from Bosbou attempted to reach us by tying a rope across the river but the one guy was so nearly washed away it was frightening. And he was huge. They then called for reinforcements who arrived with a chain saw and found a place further up river where they could saw down huge pine trees. They cut them down so that two fell across each other over the river and they then helped us climb across that way. Luckily these okes were huge and strong so I felt quite safe once I reached their helping hands. Theresa was so upset because she forgot to get the one hero’s phone number. She was quite willing to marry him and bring him his lunch in a little metal suitcase everyday while he lumberjacked. A pulley system was rigged up to get the bags across and of course mine was the only one to get dipped into the river after managing against all odds to keep it relatively dry the entire drenchingly wet day.

They took us in two bakkies onto the next hut, Sleepkloof, but could only get within 3 km’s of it so we had to put our packs back on and trudge through more water in the dark to get to the hut which was situated overlooking a beautiful forested gorge and surrounded by magnificent mountains which we couldn’t see through the mist and rain. On arrival everyone hauled out their stoves and made cup a soup, wonderful stuff, and then we all huddled around a huge fire, drank any alcohol we could scratch out of the depths of our bags, ate pasta and argued about whether we could have made it over the first river or not. In all we walked 16 sodden km’s though we did miss one massive mountain climb, the highest of the trail.

Day 5.....the last stretch to a cold beer....