Monday, October 29, 2018

A week in water

Good morning from a very hot and orange looking South Africa!

It's been a bit of a heat wave here as the temperature has been around or over 30°C for the past week. You could imagine our confusion when we woke up on Tuesday morning to discover it was 24°C before 7am, needless to say that it got to 37°C that day. Since we've not had rain for a while and it's been so hot everything is very dry which means forest fires are very likely and over the weekend there has been one near George and it's still going. As a result the smoke has been drifting and here in Sedgefield it's very smokey and it's made everything all orange and it's raining ash. It's very strange to be sitting in a restaurant drinking milkshakes while ash is falling but the locals don't seem worried about it. I'm somewhat glad of all the ash clouds as its meant to be 36°C ("real feel 39°C" - Google) but the sun can't get through.

As the title of this blog might suggest, we've spent a lot of time in the water over the past week. We've been practicing our kayak rolls lots and this is now one of my favourite things to do! Five weeks ago I wouldn't of thought I'd be saying that as I couldn't even spend five seconds under water. Me, Scott and Talitha have all mastered the 180° and 360° rolls and I've managed to even get some 'bombproof' rolls done. We've also been swimming a lot to get our fitness up for our water saftey LOC (levels of competencies).

Some of the things that the water safety LOC consists of is being able to pull unconscious and conscious people from the water, treading water for 4 minutes, swimming 50 meters without a PFD in under two and a half minutes (my time was 1 minute 55 seconds) and doing a long distance swim with a PFD. Our kayaking LOC included things like being able to perform five rolls consistently, rescuing people from kayaks when your in a kayak and also when you're not and also rescuing people in a double sea kayak. A lot of it was quite fun to do, but I'm still not convinced that kissing the nose of the kayak is a requirement for the LOC. I think it's just so the instructors can laugh at us trying and failing to balance on the kayak and then fall into the water. We were also signed off on our high ropes, climbing and abseiling LOC's so now we're all fully trained to help and support all the activities!

Saturday saw us heading to the market which as usual was very busy, and we bought passion fruit ice lollys for our walk into Sedgefield. After visiting the post office (still no sign of my new glasses that were posted out) and the pharmacy (Asda bite cream is useless against the mosquitoes here) we had lunch at La Piazza which is a restaurant/bar that we were told past volunteers frequently visit. We also found a DVD rental shop so we've been watching Narnia, Into the Woods and season 1 of Sherlock.

The other news for this week is that Tom the tortoise is actually named George - his second name is now Tom. We cooked macaroni cheese last night and me and Talitha have become expert mosquito killers.

Rachel

3 comments:

  1. What an adventurous week Rachel. I admire your bravery in the water, well done .You must be super fit by now !Love and hugs Granny x

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