Climbing wall and Xefina adventures

This entire week has been fully dedicated to building a climbing wall out at the camp.  None of us have built a wall before, but we put our heads together and came up with something.  It actually looks pretty professional and I think it will be quite a success.  It will be 8 meters tall, and quite possibly the first climbing wall in the entire country, so that is an accomplishment in itself.

Today I finished the my last bit of schoolwork-a ten page paper assessing my internship.  After finishing that, and five days of work at the camp I was ready for a celebratory adventure.  So this afternoon I got Cory, the Bowers’ 13 year old son, and we decided to kayak to an island off the coast of the city.  The Island is called Xefina, and it is about 4 miles away.  We got there around 3:30 and started exploring.  It used to be a prison, controlled by the Portuguese during the revelutionary war here, but has since been abandoned.  We were exploring the ruins of these enormous cannons and met up with some fisherman who offered for us to sit with them and eat fish they were cooking over a fire.  We were loving life, eating fish with the natives but realized that we should get going because it was getting late meaning we would have to kayak in the dark if we wasted too much time.

We followed the fisherman through a road to the other side of the island where we had hid our kayaks and parted ways when they reached their house.  As we were nearing the beach, some guy saw us and told us that it was prohibited for us to be there.  I told him, sorry, we didn’t know.  No worries, he replied.  We reached the beach and were heading towards out hidden kayaks when someone yelled for us from behind.  It was a guy in a military uniform.  He came over and started giving us a lecture because we were not allowed to be on the island without coming to him first and asking permission, that he is the commander of the island.  I apologized and told him we didn’t know, but next time we’d let him know.  However, he was a)drunk, b)unreasonable, and c)had a henchman with an AK-47.  He had no intention of letting us go on our own terms.  So he starts going on this monologue about he can kill us and any other white who comes to the island without permission and that we cannot leave-he is going to make us stay at least one night, I’m making my case before the court about us being innocent-how could we know this ‘law’, Cory is keeping his mouth shut and giving me a look of-’is this actually happening’, and some bystanders are pleading with “comandante” to leave us alone and let us go this time since we didn’t know.

There was about 15 minutes of discussion and confusion where he refused to budge while I layed on every reason why he was being unreasonable in as friendly a way as possible.  “Listen, my friend, look at this boy, he’s my friend and just a kid (pointing to Cory), he needs to get home to his parents tonight, it’s getting late”.  Finally, he somehow decided to let us go as we walked to our boats and paddled away under guard by his armed henchman.  We just paddled as quick as we could away from the island on pure adrenaline, in the dark, and have been laughing about it ever since.  This rivals my homeless night in Jo-burg on the rediculous scale.

Our climbing wall, which still needs hand holds

The men hard at work erecting a post

Scaling the post