Hiking!

Today is Women's Day, so I don't have to go into work - and because I didn't leave the house yesterday and am starting to go stir-crazy, I paid an obscene amount of money to take a cab to Kirstenbosch today to run around and play and take a ridiculous number of photographs of trails and flowers.

I accidentally ended up on a hiking trail, which is typically how I end up on hiking trails. (Once, I climbed Devil's Peak in a polo and khakis, alone, with a bag full of books and a muffin but no water, map, or cell phone, because I decided to do it and then my taxi came while I was in the bathroom. Another time, I got lost in the woods in Germany for almost four hours because I couldn't read the signs and I was going to a chapel that was hours away, until I was found by a kindly jogger. I wandered through a Filipino rainforest for two hours because I wanted to hike from Sabang to the Underground River, and was like, I can definitely handle the Jungle Trail, and the Monkey Trail is for losers, and I ended up scrambling through a ravine, falling down a hill, and fording a river. In most of these cases, the thought of my own death crossed my mind.) This time, it put me high above Kirstenbosch, looking down on the basin of irrigation water, going the wrong way around the edge of Table Mountain, and realizing that I was now on a mud trail that may or may not have been a real trail. So I turned back, found what did appear to be a trail, and spent a little under two hours traipsing around along the base of Table Mountain on the Silvertree Trail.

I have a propensity when I'm trying to stay alive to talk to myself. I did this for most of the Silvertree Trail, until I realized that just ahead of me, there were two British hikers, who could probably hear everything that I was saying. I remember saying "I think I smell a gorge!" at one point, and realized they were ahead of me right after a bird made this loud noise and I shouted back, "you shut up, I'm going as fast as I can!" When bored, I sang Poker Face a la Leslie Knope. I think I also told Robert Frost to go to hell at one point. And then they laughed at me when I passed them, probably because I was blushing very, very intensely. Hiking is no fun when other people are actually around.