So, on our first day here we decided to go on a hike. There’s this giant mountain in the town, and it’s got this like little chapel on top and the giant cross, and somebody in like the group said, “Hey, let’s go hiking.” And I didn’t think they meant like the giant mountain, on day one in the middle of the day, as “Let’s go hiking.” But you know, I was like, “What else am I gonna do, sit around?” I didn’t really wanna sit around. I’m trying to like do one — like go to class and then do like one thing out in the afternoon each day.
So I decided to go and oh my gosh, we had to walk uphill all the way across the entire town to even get to the mountain. So I was kind of like sweating it already when we got there. And then that thing was steep. It was so, so steep. And my group, they were like running. I’m like, “I have no idea how the heck you guys are going that fast.” Like, I was trying to stop and get water, and at one point, a couple of the girls, we like stopped. And we like sat down and then three of them left, but my one friend and I stayed back for a minute because she has asthma. And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m not gonna like leave you because you’re like the only person on this entire trip that I know. So we are gonna take it up nice and slow.”
So, by this point, because we waited a whole like three minutes, and we’re like, halfway up this mountain, the group is nowhere in sight. So we’re just like going along and we’re following the path, and we get to this point where there’s two different roads you can take. One is kind of like roped off and looks a little bit sketchy. And the other one is like up stairs, like, in the vague direction of the cross, which is where we’re trying to get to on the top of this mountain.
So we go up the stairs, and then there’s like a bunch of things that are like kind of paths but not really. And we like try to follow the best ones, but we’re pretty sure that we’re like not exactly on the path at this point because, you know, we must have taken some wrong turn somewhere. And we’re just hiking. And I don’t know when it happened, but eventually we got to the point where we were literally just like going on anything that looked like it could have been trekked by any human before ever, that looked maybe like possible to do. And we started going and we were taking lots of breaks along the way. At points we were literally just doing actual rock climbing to get ourselves up this mountain. And it was crazy.
So we were like an hour and a half in since we had seen another person and we started to hear voices. But they were like up this giant boulder formation and I was like, “That’s probably our group.” Like, if we’re finding other people, there’ll be an easier trail on the way back because we don’t want to have to go down the way we came, that would be insane.
So I just like scaled the rock formation and jumped a fence and we found our group that apparently had been at the top for over an hour. And my friend and I, we were just laughing at the absurdity of it all. Especially when we went down the mountain, because turns out in the point that we had rested at was actually not all that far from the top, if you followed the actual path. We had taken about a mile and a half of random detours going the way that we had, and the trail was a lot worse.
But, you know, we climbed that mountain in the good old climb-a-mountain way. And it is low-key something that I’m gonna remember for the rest of my life. Like I can say, “I climbed this mountain.”