Camp: Day 3

After a surprisingly good night's sleep, we got up to see the sun rise at about 6 a.m. (not as awesome as it would have been if we'd spent the night in a hotel, but any way...) followed by a quick first aid session consisting of using plasters meant for paper cuts for blisters about the size of R5 coins and cuts and scratches that ran up the length of our legs and arms.

Once again, we started up a mountain. My friends and I chose to stay at the back with the "nice" camp instructor, Rosie, who assured us that today would not be as long as the day before. True that, it was not "as long", but when we did, however finish hiking up about the third mountain, we found that our water supply was running low. And this was at a top of a mountain. We could see a river near the bottom of the mountain, and were told that we would be camping near there, but were not allowed to drink from it. Or wash in it. Okay, so help me out here, surely if the water in a stream is undrinkable ANYWAY, you're allowed to wash in it? It wasn't even toxic (we asked and then checked), but we weren't allowed to use our special expensive biodegradable soap... Ooooookayyyy... 

So anyway, we came across this cabin with a water tank and filled up our water bottles with mosquito-larvae infested water. Just imagine, a group of private school girls, the majority of whom use bottled water in their TOILETS, trying to decide between dying of thirst, and drinking a bug. Actually, several bugs. It was EXTREMELY entertaining to watch. 

After we filled up our millions of water bottles, we hiked down the mountain into the valley with the river which we were not allowed to use. We set up camp in an arbitrary place in the centre of flat land surrounded by mountains (I don't do Geography - I don't know what it's called). Even a stupid person could see that in the morning we would have to climb ONE of those to get out of there in the morning. 

After all that, we managed to convince the camp instructors to let us swim in the river (i.e. washing without soap - so we won in a way), followed by another first aid session, a two-minute noodles dinner, and attempting to set up a tent on a rocky ground. The knowledge that we had just two more days to go was not as soothing as it should have been, those two more days seemed like a lifetime, and toilets seemed like a distant dream.