you have to pay to go climbing, it can rain for days, holds breake all
the time and ruin your project, climbing is sharp like hell and you will look out for gloves the first day you arrive (if you have not the skin of an olifant), everything looks super cool, but the climbing can be really tweaky, painful, morpho and just not nearly as good as its looking, it can be so windy and cold you think you arrived at the southpol instead of africa, it's crowded like your home-town climbing gym on a tuesday evening in february and you have to queue up for a classic problem more then once, people scream around not just while climbing (what I do sometimes as well, and I feel (sometimes) sorry for that) but also just while "chilling" at the rocks... boulderers shit in front of boulders - WTF???!!!
despite what everybody
tells you: "de kelder has NOT the best burgers ever" (we had to wait
2!!!hrs and they were cold), everyday chips and beer makes you FAT, everywhere
you can see some teens with earplugs, running around with sponsorship-stickers
on their trousers (I felt lucky I have a "sponsor" myself since a year,
otherwise I would have felt like a total exotic.... but at least, with close to 35
and a lovely girlfriend on my side, I do not have to pretend to be outsch
so cool, for 24/7 ;), people checking and updating facebook and XX.nu real-time
on rock - out in the nowhere in africa..., daily (hourly)
never ending chitchat about who has done what in how many tries in which sector
today and having competition not just on rock (the quicky "2min",
"flash", "soft", "that felt EASY (-I am SO
strong-) dude!") but also while chilling (I know an even better joke, I
can drink more beer...), after a one hour hike from "out in the
nowhere" to "even further away out in the nowhere" you can
stumble over a laptop and a little surround system spraying music all over the
little (once) peaceful area - for everybody... at least for free. and try this:
while watching an immaculate sunset on a rocky plateau, the total tranquility,
you can hear a single bee flying over the place, watching over the endless and
fast african landscape - and some guys have to take out their I-phone to
make some music for all the audience....WTF???!!!
is this just me getting old, or/and as a 14year old kid
said to me last year in magic wood when I told him to shut his f*cking Iphone-speaker-sound down (or to put some headphones on); "that I have no
idea of "the" boulder-culture?!"
nevertheless, after three weeks we extended our trip for two more weeks... so obviously there must be some things down there which are weighing up.... ;)
