The Hardest Way Possible

Hello Everyone!

Well, I am officially an Australian student. I had my first class this morning and it turns out that the first day of class is “syllabus day” no matter what country you are in. I don’t have any other classes today because not all courses meet the first week. It’s a very strange feeling to be in class when you feel like you are on vacation. I think that I will find my courses very interesting though.

After our exciting adventure in Sydney on Friday, we decided to lay low for most of Saturday. I took a quick trip to the mall with some friends and then spent the afternoon at the beach. The waves were the biggest I’ve seen them, so we all had fun body surfing them J

Sunday we decided it was time for another adventure. The tallest mountain (or it might be a hill) in Wollongong is Mount Keira. It’s about a 35 minute walk from the dorm. So, four friends and I began our trek to the mountain at around 10:45 Sunday morning. We had heard that the hike got a little long, but shouldn’t be anymore than 3 hours. Lots of people warned us about the leeches. . .apparently most people who hike Mt. Keira end up with at least a few leeches attached to their ankles by the time they get off the mountain. Before we left we grabbed a couple handfuls of salt packets in anticipation of the leeches—fortunately for us we never needed to use them.

We arrived at the mountain around 11:30 and the trail was pretty much vertical from the get-go. Luckily the climb wasn’t quite so steep the whole way. It didn’t take long before we got to a junction where we had to choose from a few different paths. We consulted a map and trotted down a trail that looked promising. The path promptly turned into a vertical climb over rocks and through thicket. Unfortunately, I was with four determined boys (actually, I was just as determined myself) and it took us about 1 km to finally admit that we had lost the trail. We climbed back down the rocky slope practically on all fours and got back to what appeared to be a path.

After multiple wrong turns and about 2 ½ hours of hiking, we finally made it to the summit only to find out that they don’t have water at the top. We ate our lunches though and took some beautiful pictures. The view was quite amazing and definitely worth the journey. After a little rest we began our trek back down. We hopped onto a little back trail that we though would deliver us down the mountain, but once again we found ourselves lost. We finally got to a point where we hit a dead end and admitted defeat. We stopped a car that was passing on the road and he pointed us in the direction of Wollongong. Little did we know that it was probably the longest possible way to get back to town. We finally made it into town around 4 pm and discovered that we were still an hour away from our dorm. It was at this point that we found a bus stop. The bus ride brought us to within around 20 minutes of our dorm. We were so tired by this point that we barely said 2 words to each other ask we walked the last 20 minutes.

We were all pretty proud of ourselves by the time we were finished. As one of the guys said, “We didn’t take the easiest route to the top- in fact we probably found the hardest possible way to get there.”

We are thinking about going to the Blue Mountains (a range about 2 hours west of Sydney) next weekend, but we learned a valuable lesson from this hike: Walking uphill does not always bring you to the summit and walking downhill won’t always bring you home.