Camp: Day 4

By the fourth day, the final full day of hiking, we had come up with the revelation that the faster we walked, the sooner we got home. This motivated us for about the first fifteen minutes of the day, before we realised we had to hike BACK up the mountain we climbed yesterday, to get more water, then down again and up ANOTHER mountain.

Once the water had been collected, and the process of deciding whether to drink a mosquito larvae or die of thirst was repeated, we started up our first, muddy mountain of the day. Drenched in mud and sweat, we reached about halfway. At this point, while the rest of us were moaning and groaning about various blisters and injuries, one of the more hyperactive, ADHD girls piped up, "Come on guys! Just think, over that mountain is a seriously hot guy waiting to massage your feet." She then continued to relay her fantasy of meeting some Italian guy named "Alfredo" (don't even get me started - we tried to explain to her for three hours that Alfredo was a PASTA, NOT a name, but she had her heart set on it) who would rescue her from this horrible nightmare and beat up the camp instructors with his pinkie... while wearing only a loincloth.

At this point, all five of us behind her protested profusely, to which she responded with a devilish grin and proceeded to make up hot, built foreign guys for each of us, and then tell the story of how we would be rescued. It took two hours for us to convince her to let the fantasy males be fully dressed, while she continued to rattle on about the food they'd bring us, the ice cream we'd eat etc. - and all in a southern belle accent. We were later told that, even though we were about 500m behind the rest of the party, they could hear how far we were behind them just by listening to the sound of her voice (she has a very loud one, which proved to be very unfortunate when she got the the "juicy" parts of the story, leaving us shocked and horrified that such a small girl had a large enough brain capacity for such thoughts). 

We suddenly stopped in a forest of blackjacks, and were told that this was our campsite. Too tired to argue, we hacked at the blackjacks with sticks, and eventually gave up and set up our tents. Cooking was veeeery interesting - have you ever tried to light a gas stove in the middle of a patch of blackjacks? Don't. 

The final day of hiking was over, and the prospect of home seemed so close we could almost smell the soap and our mothers' cooking, but maybe those were just the hallucinations brought on by the large amounts of Deep Heat being used.