Thursday, 24 June 2010

We woke up early and did our morning exercises and had breakfast. After we had packed up camp, we had to cross the river. Lauri had tied the rope across it, but it still seemed too big a jump for me. It took me a while, but in the end I managed it. But just another 15 minutes’ later there was another river to cross, this time without the rope. Scary!!!!

Throughout the hike I kept making mental notes to buy myself some proper hiking boots as, although I was grateful to Veronika’s mother for having lent me hers, the boots were too big and made me really unsure of my steps when climbing rocks or coming downhill on a rough surface.

Just before lunch we started to descend properly. The mountainside consisted of big rocks and half of them were not in place very securely. Joel was going ahead of us as normal and we had to follow his lead carefully as not to set off any rockslides. We had a snack stop on the rocks on the hillside and then finished our descent down to the river. The ground was marshy again. We were now at around 700 metres’ height.

We had lunch by the river and as the day was hot, we decided to wash ourselves a bit. When we had been up in the mountains, the river water there was only around 1 or 2 degrees Celsius – really cold. And as we normally stopped late at night when it was colder outside, none of the girls had gone swimming yet. So, we got our shampoo out and waded into the clear and warm (a whole 10C) water to wash. As there was a rope across (Lauri’s team HAD to have their lunch on the rocks across the river), we had the chance to hold on to it and let the river wash us clean. It was such a great experience!!! 

Then we packed our things and kept moving towards our evening camp site. A lot of that descent was marshy, but it was not too bad when we found a whole bunch of edible grass (hapuoblikad). It was sour and gave us vitamins that we had not had enough of during the hike so far.

At one point part of the group was yet again moving a bit faster and a break appeared between the two groups. I was the first of the second group and I rushed a bit to make up the distance. However, as I was trying to move faster, I stumbled and before I could put my hands down in front of my face, the heavy backpack on my back added its weight and I hit face first against a rock on the ground. I was startled and cried a bit. Joel came there straight away, got the medical stuff from my backpack, cleaned my face and put a plaster on the cut. Then he asked if I had lost consciousness and because I had not, they helped me get my backpack on my back again and we kept moving.

We came to a river/waterfall which had a bridge across it. But at that point it looked as if it was going to rain, so we stopped to set up camp. And sure enough, it started to pour down a couple of minutes later. Fortunately, by that time we were used to setting up our tents and it went quickly dispite the rain. Each team then found a place to make dinner at and Lauri's team, having used up all their gas previously, had to make a fire to make dinner. I had an early night and fell asleep to the sound of Lauri and Co singing really loudly.