Vasta poissa olen viimein perillä: 8 day rain, Kleinfontein and being sick

After the 2 day rain, it was time to hit the 8 day rain sector! We met Lucy and Ryan at 11 (as always) at the parking and hiked our way to the rocks. Lucy had a project called Golden Rail (6C) and it was a really nice project indeed. But we had to find something else first, because there was a proper carnival by that particular rock. Almost looked like a full school class had made a picnic underneath.

We found nice slabs to start with and then reversed back, stopping by the scorpion boulder. It had a few really pretty lines, one easier one and one harder one (perhaps 6A and a 7A). We climbed them both and the latter I really enjoyed, it had a long lock off (or for the shorter of us: a bit of a more dynamic lock off ;) ) as the only really hard move, the landing was a bit sketchy but not too bad, but it climbed nicely.

Golden rail was extremely nice, we climbed it quickly and then continued to Vanity (7A)! Wow, that's a cool looking line BUT super scary top out. For me, at this point, it felt too high. While Chris and Ryan were figuring Vanity out, I focused on the multiple 6C's and 6C+ses on the same rock. And did climb all of them except one :) Chris climbed Vanity quickly and afterwards we got to admire some professional athletes from US climbing to the top too. I have to say, Chris made it look a lot easier than they did ;)

And then I got sick. Well actually, I got some sort of a food poisoning/ sun stroke / something, after the Lambert's Bay buffet thing (might not have anything to do with that though) and the next week after I was pretty dead. It was (and still is) hard to eat anything and I kept having a low fever (probably from exhaustion) that jigsawed up and down. Probably the long days out in the sun, hiking with heavy gear, not drinking enough water (I truly truly try though!) and just being constantly a bit cold (it's pretty freezing in our little clay hut) are things that are not exactly helping out. But soon it's time for the rest week, more of that later!

After the 8 day rain we went to check out Kleinfontein. What a lovely little sector with absolutely no one else! We found the pretty Fin (7A) first and warmed up on a cool 6B(+?) next to it. Fin looked intriguing but had a very long reach backwards at a quite high spot, which I couldn't quite do, maybe it was the reach or maybe just the nerves :D Chris and Ryan climbed Fin so nicely but with quite some swing! Sketchy stuff.

We moved on to a really really strange 6C called Death Star that actually looked like the Death Star :D Smart Lucy saved us and figured out a superb beta for the first move, afterwards we just needed to practice the awkward little sideways dynamic move. And then it was done!

It was time for the last problem of the day, the Girlfriend problem (7A) which was the first route that I was actually quite excited about! Unfortunately I was a bit too tired already but we figured out the moves in the end. Hopefully we'll get back to it at some point!

The forecast had promised rain again for two days, so on the first one, we took care of shopping and internetstuff. But then the forecast changed for better so we decided to try our luck at the Champside! More about that next.