Day 2

After a very cold night in the Mnyemi hut the day dawned clear and fine. We raced a couple of other teams out of the hut and headed off up the valley. The waslk out was nothing short of spectacular. We wold follow the river up until it hit a large 30 m waterfall at which point you would have to zig zag up out of the gully before heading back to the river to repeat the process. After doing this several times we eventually broke out onto the Amatole high plains.

It was about this time we realised our food was getting a bit low and would need some rationing. There was no option for scavenging on the way as the nearest town was probably at least a two hour detour. From eating a Torq bar every hour we would need to restrict ourselves to a bar every three hours, and hope that the rest of the walk went to schedule. After walking over 50kms we arrived at a high saddle; Lukie explained the rest of the walk, we go down to the CP at Kata hut climb up and hopefully find a way around Mt Thomas before climbing up the escarpment on the horizon called Kabusi, after that it's only 10-15 km to the Transition. At Kata hut we were met with the news that we were now in 20th position. Teams that had gone cross country rather than sticking to the walking track had made up nearly 5 hours.

Going around Mt Thomas we experienced our first South African burn off. Regardless of weather conditions the scrib and grasslands are burnt to promote fresh growth. Tramping around the mountain our progress was sped up by the crackling of a scrub fire and the sight of flames up to six foot high only a couple of hundred meters from where we were.

Kubusi was finally climbed right on sunset and it turned out to be the highlight of the trek. We took a snapshot of the CP and headed off on the long slog to the TA. By this stage we were all over the trek and just wasnted to get the weight off our feet. Yet that was still hours away, and the walk down the fenceline was done on autopilot.

We finally got into the TA tired and hungry with news that dorm beds awaited us. Alas, they were all taken and another couple of hours of shivering together on a couch while other teams came and went and interupted any thought of productive sleep awaited us.