Week 9 and 10

Hello from a warm (ish) South Africa! It's been a very busy two weeks here since my last blog post and I have so much to share in this one. I'm going to break this blog up into the two weeks it covers as I actually already wrote the blog for two weeks ago but never managed to get it posted, so I've done a copy and paste job into this post. Grab a cup of tea because I fear this might turn into a book!

Week 9 (5th-11th November) - Project Trust Visit

Good afternoon from a sunny South Africa!

Last week was very busy here at Willow Point. We started the week with the monthly safety checks on all the equipment and I've included photos of Scott and Talitha safety checking the Jacobs Ladder. I asked Talitha to describe the Jacobs Ladder for my blog post - "I found out that I have no upper body strength...It was freaking fun."

On Wednesday night Peter and Hannah from Project Trust arrived for our country coordinator visit. It was really lovely to see them again and show them around OB, especially Hannah who has never been here before. Thursday night they took us out for dinner so we chose to go to Pomodoro - an Italian restaurant in Wilderness. The pizza was amazing.

Friday night saw all the board members of OBSA arriving for the AGM. We had a massive braai that night and it was super cool to listen to all the stories different board members had to tell and to find out more about them. We set up the trapeze the next day so the board could see it and for the new members to jump it, so we also got the opportunity to jump it too.

We've been swimming quite a lot this week too as it has been quite warm. The water seems to be getting warmer each time we swim which is always good. Lately, we've been climbing onto the whaler and jumping and doing flips off it. We tend not to swim too close to the other boat cause if we do the birds on it start diving down at us...though they seem to only go for certain people.

In some other news around base, the electricity in the ghetto is still off so I'm making my way through my torch battery pile and while we washed our clothes on Sunday morning, we spotted two antelope like animals walking down the road. And we also got let loose with machete style tools to chop branches down on the road.

Enjoy the pictures :)

Rachel

Reading that back today it seems like it all happened ages ago not just two weeks ago. I'm going to put all the pictures at the end in order of when they happened but until then here is the blog post for this week...

Week 10 - A Week In The Mountains.

As the title above suggests we spent this week living in the mountains. On Tuesday all the OB staff made the journey to Citrusdal, which is a town around two hours north of Cape Town. This is where we'd spend the next 5 days exploring the mountains in search of possible campsites, rock climbs, abseiling sites and hiking routes. 

We stayed at the community centre at the base of the mountains on the first night. There was a dam right next to it so some of us went for a swim which turned into us all sliding down the side of it into the water (it was a man made one so there was plastic all round the edges making it perfect for sliding down). Wednesday and Thursday were spent hiking in the mountains. We found two good areas for an abseil and a rock climb which was really good. The weather was very hot during the day and I'd say it would of been above 33°C each day. Even during the night it didn't get that cold which was good as we camped out for two nights. While we hiked we also went to see bushmen paintings on one of the rocks. This was incredible to see as not only is it amazing to think that people lived in the cave/rock structure they were painted on, so high up on the side of the mountain  but also that hardly anyone has seen them before. There was paintings of animals, people and even a house like structure. I've included various photos from the days exploring for you to see.

We arrived back in Sedgefield yesterday afternoon and now we have a bit of leave before courses start up again, so we've planned a few day trips for this week.

Enjoy the photos :)

Rachel