We got the necessary permission and entered the Vashlovani National Park.
What a place! It’s super beautiful!
We drove up a hill and had a beautiful view. In the permission office a lady recommended a specific track to drive down to the main camp.
This track got crazy off-roady. And it got smaller and smaller. So small that at some point Rosinante did not fit anymore on the track. I’d say this track would only maybe be possible with a cross bike.
So we turned around and took the main route to a beautiful camp at a river.
When we continued the next day, we saw very beautiful landscapes, did a hike in a cove and saw some gazelle running through the steppe.
We went to another climbing area. There were not so many routes and the rock was often not very stable so I won’t share a link or something.
We found a super nice camp spot and had a funny sheep with one black ear visiting us with her friends.
At the end of our first day there, we left some of our quickdraws on one of the routes and the next day two of them were gone. I was so pissed. We asked the construction workers who were working close to the route but they did not know anything. Still I was pissed. I mean these quickdraws were more than four meters in the route so you have to really put in some effort to get them.
In that area we did a crazy difficult route. The beginning was so hard. It took us more than an hour to get up the first three meters. When I was close to the anchor (top) of that route I was pretty tired and it got very difficult for me.
At one point I had a pretty good position and wanted to clip in my rope into the next quickdraw. I stretched myself up to reach the quickdraw with my rope because I was craving for some rest after clipping. Doing so was of course not the best idea because pre-clipping like that adds a long distance to the distance I would fall. At first my position felt stable enough but with more stretching it felt less stable and when I needed just half centimeter more, I lifted my right foot just a bit more and suddenly lost all the friction and started falling.
I was not shocked about it but after a split second of falling I realized that the rope started wrapping around my right pointing finger. I felt the heat of the friction of the rope running around my finger and intuitively I tried to shake it off my finger. It just worked before the rope started to tense up and I was super happy. And I was still falling and falling and started to see the quickdraws racing by in front of me. It felt like watching railway sleepers passing by when watching down on the rail between two train cars. And from somewhere the sound of these racing pods from Star Wars Episode One came into my head. After about four meters the rope started to break my Fall, tensed up and I was sitting in the rope. All good. Happy. A bit of blood on my finger.
