Jungle Monkeys.

My weekend was not the greatest. Well, let me back up. The beginning was nice. I actually had a lovely Valentine's day spent hiking. We hiked through a village and into the grasslands along the coast. Our director hyped the hike up to be this big huge deal, only for the best of the best hikers, but it was fairly easy. A couple of hills, lots of mud, but mostly just cow paths through the fields. I will say that Tevas were not the best choice of footwear, I wore them because I didn't have my hiking boots (too heavy to bring on the plane) and they are pretty broken in. I ended up getting a blister on the bottom of my left foot though, right on the ball. It wasn't too bad though after I layered up a couple of Band-Aids. But we hiked to a beautiful waterfall; a river spilling over into the Indian Ocean. It was churning and crashing more than anything I'd ever seen. On the way back, we swam under a smaller waterfall in a big pool of water. That cooled us off nicely for the hike back. I didn't mention that the entire hike the scenery was layers and layers of mountains and hills, folded back into each other until they disappeared into the ether. I would have done that hike if I'd had to do it on crutches.

When we got back to our campsite (we were staying in rondoval huts!) it started raining. It started at dinner and didn't stop. The plan was to drive out the next day to Gwexlintaba where we had our rural homestays. After we left in the morning, we got halfway there before we decided the rest of the road, by which I mean dirt path through boulders and down a steep muddy hill, was impassable with the rain. We stayed in this hostel in the middle of nowhere, middle of nowhere being Port St. John's. This place was called Jungle Monkeys and I am never ever going back.

Before we left the hut campsite, a few people were already having problems with diarrhea. I consider this foreshadowing. The first night at Jungle Monkeys, right at 11 PM, about 5 (maybe more?) of us all got sick. Kirsten threw up and it set off a chain reaction: I heard her and got sick, Laura heard me and got sick, and so on. I was up all night along with several other people. It was pretty pathetic, but hilarious in retrospect. The few well people left the next morning for the village while we got left behind to lay around miserable. Everyone at the hostel thought we were just hung over, no matter how many times we told them otherwise, and even when it was 6 o'clock at night and all we could eat was saltines. -rolls eyes- We were pretty sad to miss the village, but it turns out a lot of them got sick once they got there, so maybe we had the fortunate end of the deal, since we had toilets and all. We eventually got out of that godforsaken place, covered head to toe in mosquito bites (I have them all over my face.) and some people in flea bites. One girl has a staph infection on her face. We got in the van, not exactly excited for the bumpy ride home but never so glad to be going back to Cato Manor.