"light" hike and near death

Today finally came! I got to register and I got into all my classes. Since I'm the only one in the faculty of science, I got to cut the line and get advising very fast. I also got my student card. It's fine, but the lady squished my picture to look like a conehead.

The woman setting up my internship invited me to go on a hike to the boomslang caves with other interns from the program. She said it would be a "light" hike. We hopped on a train to Kalkbaai (pronounced cock-bay)and then started our hike. After reading some of the signs, and losing my breath after 30 minutes of non-stop up, I found out it was a 2 hour hike and the signs said it was 13km. That's almost 8 miles! Yikes. There was a little river that we got to cool off in. Then we finally got there! Here was the view from the top:


To enter the caves, you have to crawl on your stomach for about 100m, then it opens up and you can stand up. Here is the hole you must crawl through army style.

Here's the view right when you enter the caves from the other side of the mountain.

I felt like I conquered the world.

At the top of the hill there was this little hole where I named it "Hayleys hot tub". Note my nasty dirty knees.

While we were busy taking all these pictures, the rest of the group who actually knew how to get down went ahead and were out of sight. We followed the little trail which led down, but then the trail disappeared and we found that we were bush wacking all over. We were lost, hungry, thirsty, and the sun was going down. Finally after 2.5 hours of being lost in the african bush, we found the trail and the rest of our group! I thought I was going to have to set up a hut and eat bugs, then tell my story to "I shouldn't be alive". At the bottom, we had dinner around 7 and then got on the train to go home!

We ride trains south african style:

Here is the moon. It was beautiful tonight!