Wolkberg - Day 3

Waking up ontop of the platoue in what seems to be a very cold, wet and misty day was not surprising to say the least. Thys was the first one up and was already boiling some welcome water for the first of many cups of coffee and cappucino. Our bodies were certainly very unhappy with us at this stage and noticeable moans were heard as the others turned in their tents, from sore muscles we hoped. We predictably continued with the normal routine of coffee,biscuits and breakfast and sticking to my planned rationing of food was out the door, as i could not remeber exactly what day it was as you quickly start to forget these things, although I have marked all the zip lock bags as mon,tues,wed etc.Mental note: next time I will mark them day 1,2,3 etc. Day 3, and we need to make our way around Serela and off the mountain onward to our next camping sight. We proceeded through the marsh field down a steep declined single track. Sun decided to stick its neck out. We all halted and instinclively took all things wet and tied it to our packs in the hope to get some shirts and socks dry. Ater about 2 hours hike it was time to do some strapping to ankles and change into somewhat dryer socks. We came across a split that would take us down to the MCSA hut or continue onward into the river valley, where we needed to be to pick up a single track to link us back onto the route we came in from. Easy. We took a direction fix and plotted our self on the map. We decided to push through to the river where we will have lunch. The next 2 hours to the river was all slightly downhill. We came across a nice section where we decided to take a dip and cool off as the tempratures were somewhere between 30 - 38C. The water was ice cold but refreshing, up to the point were Kobus realized he was swamped with minature leeches. So that was the last of the cooling off idea. We had lunch at the river. All set and up we went with a jeep track for approx 2km when we realized that we were on the wrong track. It was clear that we were in for a hell of a day. We backtracked untill we found a "suitable"section to drop down to the river. We continued to follow the contours on the right side of the bank on what we could say "looked'" like a track, weather it was for cattle, antelope was debatable. Soon afterwards we were faced with some serious obstacles in our way in the form of what seemed to be a mix between bushveld, river, grasslands, swampland, reetland and anything in between. For an extended period of time I was cursing the dude who decided to plant thousands of "brandblaar", "wag n bietjie", "haak en steek" in this "hiking trial"we were on. Did I mention that I was in knee pants, big mistake! After zig zagging across this "war torn country" a couple of times it was inevetable that the machete's and hiking poles were utilized to "open up" some form of gap we can walk, or should I rather say bundu bash through. I can confidently say that after about 3 hours of this "pleasant" escursion the sense of humor levels were at about 3/10. That actually plumitted to -5 when we had a close encouter with MR Puffadder half way through the valley. That, funily sped up efforts to get out of this valley. We were very fortunate to at least see a white crossed eagle gliding in between the cliffs above us. At some point Thys spotted the actual sinlge track that we needed to be on, up to our right hand side. We followed the track battered and bruised until we reached the area where the 3 rivers join. At that stage the daddy of baboons also did not like our presence and were very agitated with us.The sun was now speedily leaving us and dusk was upon us. We still needed to do about 4-5km to get to a suitable camping site. Very determined that we were very close we proceeded on, crossing steams and rivers witch at that time I stopped counting how many of them. A voice, I believed was Iwano's, murmered something about 40m to go. I heard Thys silently cussing us at about 1km passed the "40m" mark. At around 19:30 somewhere we eventually reached camp with feet that was no more and surely tears pressing in some eyes. Distance done today was in the region of 25km of unpleasant terrain.