Fear the Wall

Africa - Day 5 - Friday September 27

Wake up call was 6:30 AM,,, "Hello,, you are welcome to have wash water and tea."  The folks helping us on this trip are so nice and their English is pretty good.  Every morning they bring us warm water to wash with and hot tea right to our tent.  We dressed, packed and headed to the mess tent for breakfast.

By 7:30 we were on the "road" and headed to "Lava Tower."  For the first time on this trip we had great weather, unfortunately it wasn't going to last. The morning was warm, the sun was shining and we hiked in t-shirts.  We started at 12,610 feet and hiked to the Lava Tower at just over 15,000 feet.  The hike was easy in the sense of terrain. It was a slight incline along a ridge the whole way.  What isn't steep is long.  The total hike to the Lava Tower was about 5 miles.  Just before the Lava Tower the clouds rolled in and our beautiful day turned ugly real quick.  We stopped to put on our wet weather gear and then continued to hike.  

As we approached the Lava Tower my head started pounding. Our guide is no fan of medicine, he wants to make sure he can see how we actually are, not how we are on drugs.  Since the weather was such crap, the crew had our mess tent setup and lunch ready. We ate lunch, drank tea and hung out for about an hour.  After lunch we started our walk downhill to our next camp, Barranco Camp.  One thing to note, we ate lunch at the base of Lava Tower but we never got to see it.  We were in some thick clouds.

The walk downhill in the rain/sleet/snow wasn't too bad. The weather got nice again about half way down.  At camp we actually saw the sun.  We were once again greeted by our entire crew with song and dance.  After our warm welcome, we took a little time to walk around, enjoy the sun and recharge our batteries.  The total hike time (excluding lunch) took 7 hours and was exactly 7 miles.

Dinner was awesome, three courses.  The first course was sweet potato and corn soup with fresh made crepes for dipping.  The second course was spaghetti with a meat sauce and the third course was cut oranges.  The most memorable thing about dinner was the talk of the next day, Barranco Wall.  

The camp is called Barranco because it's at the base of the Barranco Wall, the wall we have to scale tomorrow.  From the time we arrived at camp until the sun went down, we stared at this massive wall we would have to scale the next day.  Our guide tried to explain the route but all we could comprehend was the sheer verticalness of it.  All 700 feet,,,, ughhh.  Evan and I aren't great with heights (understatement) so we were very nervous about the next day.

Off to bed....