While I was a freshman in highschool, sat behind a wooden flip top desk in English class, we were tasked to write an essay on whatever we desired, however it needed to be 'personal experience'. Now, at 13 years old I had had very little personal experience other than sunday ice cream outings to Carvel, and honestly, I didn't even know what 'personal experience' even meant.
And so, excited like a fat boy eager to bury his head in a sugar dusted jelly donut, I rushed home, reached for my yellow BIC pen and began scribing my opus.
It would be the late 80's early 90's, I would be clothed in khaki pants with side pockets and a matching colour-coordinated button-down shirt with yellow Camel Trophy badges emblazoned on my shoulders. I'd be wearing military utility boots. I'd have hitched in my velcroed top pocket my Swiss army knife from before The War, a soft pack of Camel filter fags, a box of timber matches, a picture of my girl back home, a pack of elastoplast plasters for the unforseen tyre puncture and, I'd be buckled into the driver's seat of a mustard-yellow Land Rover Defender 110, revved up, and torqued down to navigate and usurp the densest, wettest, muddiest terrain in a tropical jungle in Borneo in the elite Camel Trophy Challenge.
Thoughts of adventure of leaving my suburban home and tackling the mangled forests of Borneo excited me to write. My brain was all consumed by the idea of getting dirty, of roughing it. My writing hand took its cue from my imagination and began gushing streams of consciousness across the lined foolscap sheet of white paper. Blue ink dripped with excitement, adventure and daring.
As a kid clutching a winning Willy Wonka ticket, I was Michael-Jackson-fan hysterical to submit come Monday morning.
Having plonked my creativity onto the teachers wooden desk alongside a red apple, it was, after a week, returned to me... as a blood curdling failure.The teacher's red ink, splattered across the sheet like a Jack the Ripper crime scene, dripped off of the edges of the page weighing heavily on my submission. As I stood dead still, the world stopped, and silence blanketed the classroom. I was in a slasher scene of a friday the 13th horror movie but it was just a monday. It was a horror show, and I was being hatched with a blunt rusty meat cleaver.
Some 30 years later that rugged diesel powered hard edged mustard body of the Defender morphed into me, it's hard working BF Goodriches became my Hi-Tec boots, its halogen lights, my LED lightweight Pestl headlamp. It's iron-clad winch my erg-powered forearms, the modified suspension my rickety knees, and its roof rack, my 60litre Deuter backpack.
Though not in a Landy, it'd be my legs, my arms and my brain that'd get me through the most gruelling hike I'd ever endured. I was about to gain experience, personal experience.
The Amatola hike is a gruelling 6 day trek through rain forests covering 100plus kays with an elevation of 5000m. It is South Africa's toughest hike and it makes the Otter Trail a walk through the cheese section of Woolies. Cool, breezy, cheesy, creamy easy.
The Amatola hike is set in the Amatola mountains in the Eastern Cape inland. It begins and ends in Hogsback, a tiny little village that sits as a relaxed, tye-dyed, hippified, foot to the Amatola mountains. With its veins gushing with halucongenics, it's in stark contrast to the stress that awaits me embedded in the Amatola Trail.
Immediately we are enveloped by the embrace of the forest. It's trees loom, it's vines dangling as Rapunzel's plaited locks reaching down to the forest floor, its shards of grass have us entangled as we puncture the bubble of this biome. A daylight darkness shrouds the interior. Shafts of sunlight pierce the canopy, striking the ground to light our path. The cracks of twigs under foot rifle through the silence, sending hares scurrying, and frogs leaping-the only other movements in this still womb.
In this moisture saturated environment, this greenhouse, mushrooms burst from the rich dark soils packaged in Dr Seussian colours, larger than your garden variety, and easy to pluck. Hallucinogens are in abundance. Radioactive-glowing-green moss carpets fallen trunks like the dash boards and steering wheels of drifting box-car BMW's softening edges and offering comfortable seats for moments of relax.
The path we take each morning sees the detailed geometric webs of spiders strung precariously between mangled trees like slackliners tied tight across crevasses. Crayola colours splash across the backs of spiders.Red, black, and yellow specks like a Pollockian painting. These 8-legged arachnids sit still awaiting unsuspecting insects to come ploughing into their snare. As our troop marches forwards we machete our way through the swathe.
The hike courses through fast and slippery downs, up slow, cog-turning steep rocky inclines. Slipping, bruising, cutting, oozing, the blood drains from us as our bodies are pierced by jagged rocks. Our lungs expand, soaking up the oxygen-heavy forest air.Punching through the forest walls the trail plateaus, from here we see the light of day, fluffy clouds and the expanse of the trail. From up here we scout the villages below, white rocky outcrops, mottled nguni cattle and babbling brookes.
Waterfalls careen down the ravines of the mountains, plummeting with rapturous ferocity into a series of pools that slink across the trail down the mountains edge. The pools of ice-cold water that pepper the hike give us the opportunity to refresh as we unbundle our gear and make the plunge revitalising our spirits to go forth and trek on.
Rain on the trail slowly soaks our clothes, seeping towards our skin, catalysing goose bumps to prick up and ice bite. I see no joy in dancing in the rain. so i put my head down and pick up the pace towards the rudimentary,though dry, overnight hut. Foam mattresses sag on wooden frames await exhausted bodies.There is no stress, my mind is at rest for there is no thinking other than the number of rusks i'll be dunking at sunrise.
Towards the ends of the hike, we skirt the crown of the mountain, its rock face bears down heavily above us minimising us. Against the face of this wall of stone we are as minute little dwarves of Thorin's Company.
The trek took us way back to when life was simple and we had to work extra hard to achieve. No amount of tech could get us further, faster or higher. No amount of space saving weight reducing aluminium could assist us in gaining ground. Only the steel of our minds, the elasticity and strength of our muscles and the grit of our teeth would allow us to conquer the toughest hike in the country. Here we hiked dirty, we hiked raw. We hiked like it was the 1800's, a period of unchartered territory, a period of paving new paths, of cutting across swaths of overgrown brush, fallen trees, rocks littered haphazard as a kids fallen lego's.
The eastern Cape landscape from the air looks agrarian, peaceful, slick and clean, easily surmountable, easily caressed and beautifully drawn. the patchwork of farms and forest glow emerald green and sparkling. Scrolling into the terrain of the Ciskei reveals itself as treacherous, and rugged as Mordor.
As I sat down outside the backpackers on a stone slate floor, my scuffed boots sidled alongside me caked in mud, sweat, rain and salty tears,my hiking shirt encrusted in 5 days of grime, my toenails reflecting a Hobbitt's curling over days of dirt, I sat hugging my knees, shell shocked, maybe crying, reeling from PTSD from the experience i just endured.
as i shoot my hand up, seeking attention, i inquire, 'ma'am, may I resubmit my essay?'
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