I climbed Table Mountain!

3 months in and the task is complete. I actually did this on April 22nd but my blog has been so delayed that it has taken some time to write about it. You would probably expect me to start raving about how exhilarating, exciting, beautiful, breathtaking, and pleasant climbing Table Mountain was, but in actuality it was…torturous? Maybe that is a little too harsh, it wasn’t THAT bad, but let me tell you, that two and half hour hike is not easy! I went with my roommates Andy, Joe, and a friend of ours, Thimo. I think we must have stopped at least 20 times along the way, just for a “little break.” The first thing we would say to anyone passing us going down would be “Almost there, right?” And after every response “No, no. You’ve still got at least an hour and a half…and it get’s harder,” we would reply “An hour and half? We can do it in 45.” And then an hour and forty five minutes later we would still be climbing. Now, I’m kind of making this sound like it was a bad experience…which it wasn’t! Not at all! The feeling of getting to the top, knowing that we had hiked up all the way from where we saw those little tiny ant sized cars and those dots that were people. Additionally, we had done it! Who can come to Cape Town and leave without ever having climbed Table Mountain? In a way, it is what Cape Town is known for, and we had finally accomplished it. It was an ongoing joke in my house that we would “do it next weekend…” and that we would eventually all leave without ever having done the big Cape Town things…Table Mountain, Stellenbosh, Robben Island, Distric Six Museum…(Still haven’t done the last two!) My roommate Joe and I formulated a list of some of the things we had to do, and we took the initiative to make sure at least a couple got crossed off on some of the days that we had off school! The view from the top of Table Mountain is unbelievable, and it really is amazing how after hiking completely vertically for 2 and a half hours, you at once come to a completely flat walking ground. You imagine yourself walking along that horizon that you see every day, and that is pretty incredible. Nira met us at the top via cable car, which was a brilliant invention. Needless to say, we took the cable car down (which took about one minute and made us feel silly about our long trek). With that said, hiking Table Mountain is something that I had to do, I did it, and I will never do it again.