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Once again, we have done some EXTREME travelling over the last few days. I'm starting to realise that 2 weeks is so not long enough to explore a country, in fact I'm wondering how I will ever go back to having a 2 week holiday after this trip.
So, in the last 3 days we have:
- gone White Water Rafting down the River Kwai (well the place the film was shot)
- climbed a Mountain
- hitch-hiked round the Hill Country to Waterfalls & Tea Plantations
- visited a Tea Factory
- watched my life flash before my eyes in the most frightening bus journey ever (even worse than the drive home from Leeds Festival last year)
I am lucky to be alive.
Climbing the mountain was an experience that left us battered & bruised & unable to walk for 3 days. I have only just started to regain the movement in my legs & evennow I am still walking like an Old Woman. To say we were unprepared was an understatement, we rocked up to the foot of the mountain with nothing but our trusty havianas & a 200 rupee raincoat. But this was no ordinary mountain & we weren't doing the type of climbing that Jonny Chong likes to do when he is drunk.
This was a holy mountain, which has been specially prepared for pilgrims and has over 5000 steps to the summit. At the top of the mountain there is an imprint of a sacred footprint, hence the name 'Sri Pada' (Sacred Footprint). Depending on your religion, the fooprint either belonged to Budda, Adam, Shiva or St Thomas. So every day hundreds of pilgrims make the 3 hour climb to the summit to be blessed by the God of their choice.
I'm sorry to say that our pilgrimage was not a spiritual one, we just wanted to see the famous sunrise from the top, so we left our guesthouse at 2am to start our ascent & make sure we got there before dawn. At first we thought we were craz as we seemed to be the only people going up (there were lots of weary faces coming down) but we soon realised tat the locals had started much earlier & were sleeping at the various rest stations on the way up. There were families of 25 people who do the trip every year, children, parents with babies & toddlers, big groups of boys (i think this is a macho thing) buddist monks, hindus, people on crutches, with prosthetic limbs and lots of elderly women, most of who were barefoot! And we thought it was painful for our young legs!
At first, going up didnt seem so bad, the first hour is a gentle incline & there are teashops & stalls lining the route, so there was a kind of festival atmosphere, with with speakers blaring out hindi music & buddist chanting intermittently (depending on the teashop beliefs!) But then the steps kick in & the hard work really begins! In the pitch black, we slogged up the never ending staircase, after around 3 hours it started to get really cold & a few drops of rain began, but soon stopped & I realised we'd just climbed right through a cloud! We came out above the clouds just as the sun started to rise and were rewarded with the most amazing view of the mountains in the distance peering out over a bed of white fluffy clouds. It felt like you could just step off & walk on the clouds!
At this point we got caught in a backlog of pilgrims, as 2 routes meet at the summit. We were stuck there for a while before realising ththat we were queueing to worship & since we'd seen what we came to see, we started the painful descent down (after a cup of tea & some baked goods of course!) As always, the comedown is always worse than the high, muscles started to really ache & tiredness set in. We found that the only way to beat the burn was to run down the thousands of steps & we made it back in record time (just over 2 hours)! Thankfully we had pre-ordered a steaming hot herbal bath fom our guesthouse< which was a perfect reward for our hard slog. Sadly, this did nothing to relieve our aching limbs, so as I write, my legs still have the reminders of our climb up Adam's Peak. On the brightside, at least I can be greatful that I'm still alive to tell the tale, as the bus journey that followed (I'm talking cliff faces & sheer drops) was worse than any mountain & something I do not wish to relive ever again!
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