Cedarberg Mountains

We went on another weekend trip. This time to the Cedarberg Moutains! Once again, I had to run to catch the bus, but this time, the bus was late. So, I ran for no reason! The Cedarberg Mountains are located about 3 hours north of Stellenbosch. We spent about an hour of driving on a bumpy, dirt road too. It was fun though. The ride there was beautiful.

There were tall mountains and lush green fields, but the Cedarberg Mountains themselves look nothing like that! The Cedarberg Mountains look like something from Mars to me! Rocky... red... and jagged. They were beautiful in their own way though.

When we got there, we stayed in lodges/cabins. The rooms were freezing, but luckily I got the cabin that the caterers cooked out of, so the kitchen kept my room a little warm. After dinner, we played games.... "Truth or Dare", "Fingers/I have never ever...," and "Suck and Blow." My favorite game was "Suck and Blow" where you take a playing card, and suck in air to hold it to your mouth. You have to pass the card to the person next to you by only using your mouth. Of course, if you drop the card, you sometimes end up kissing the person. I know it sounds gross and like a quick way to pass around oral herpes.. BUT, it was really fun!

Halley and Noel passing the card around. And, after we finally got 1 card completely around the circle.. we felt really accomplished!

The next morning, we went for a hike up Wolfberg Cracks. I took the advanced hike, which went inside the mountains. It was really fun! Inside the mountain, we got to see really cool rock formations, and we had to squeeze between cracks. It was really hard at times. At one point, I had to push myself up in an awkward position against a rock, and then once I was squeezed in-between the rock and the wall, I had to completely shift my body into a another position. It took a few hours to get to the top, but once we got there, it was well worth it. I felt like I had accomplished something.

After we returned to the cabin, we were exhausted. I took a 30 minute nap before dinner, ate dinner, took another nap, talked about old television shows, and then went to sleep for good. The next day, we went to a winery and tasted wines. Wine in South Africa is really important. The wines at this particular estate were really robust. I prefer a semi-sweet or desert wine.The wines were pretty nasty to me, but I learned a lot about wines.

After this, it had begun to pour down raining. It was also still freezing outside. But, we still took one last trip to some caves in the area. One cave was used years ago by the government officials who implemented Apartheid to have secret meetings. Some of them had done like hundreds of other people and signed their names on the walls. No one actually knows for sure what they talked about there, but if they had to go all the way to a cave to talk about it, it must have been pretty awful. The next cave we visited contained art work from hundreds of years ago and is considered proof of some of the earliest human life.

It looks like some people and some elephants. They don't know exactly how old it is, because it's so old that the paint is actually embedded into the rock. It cannot be washed off nor can good samples be taken from it. It was just cool being next to something so old. I felt apart of a bigger picture you know? A "circle of life" or something.

For more Cedarberg pictures, click here!