Music: Eric Mongrain - Fates
Today I had my "7 hour hike" which began at 9:30am with a walk through some trees and over a dry river bed until we started climbing uphill a little and reached the bottom of a gully. We followed this up for quite some time and ended up climbing some steep rock faces and the like, not quite what I'd expected although a welcome change to the short trudging walks I'd done to date. After that we carried on up the volcanic rocks, gravel and sand until we were on top of the ridge we were heading for. This had taken a mere 2hrs 15 minutes and some of that was spent waiting for my guide as I walked much faster than him uphill. He said it's the fastest he's ever made the ascent and he does it at least twice a week and has done for a few months now.
After a nice packed lunch a time to take a few photos we started to head down. The whole trip was made slightly annoying by one of the local types of fly... about the size of a bumble bee and *very* persistent in trying to land on you and bite you very slowly. They are awesome at flying around a walking person, keeping about level with you at all times. I'm sure I'm going to go to sleep tonight and just here a loud buzzing in my ears. On the last leg of the walk, along a beach, there were many more flies. Up until this point it had only ever been one or two at a time, which is bad enough... Here it was 7 or 8 at any one time and I was killing them in quick succession with my water bottle whenever they landed on my shoulders. I reached about 12 before losing count how many had received a good clobbering with my still half full water bottle.
This evening I went for a fly fishing lesson with the guide I'd been for a walk with during the day. I can safely say that I can now cast a fly fishing line. The only thing I managed to catch, and I caught repeatedly, was the tree behind where I was stood. I found it quite fun and might be going on an expedition tomorrow to an area in which there is significant danger of me actually catching a fish... I half look forward to this and am already preparing to run like hell from the damn thing when I do catch one!
Anyway, time for me to go to bed.
Night all.
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