My back is doing well. I was somewhat miraculously healed after a session of prayer in the middle of lectures yesterday (today is March 10). (If you'd like the full story, email me. Now that I've had few days to recoup, I'm excited to share with you my adventures from the Bush.
First off, it was a two-and-some hour drive to get to the campsite, which was in a small valley (named Hidden Valley) on the top of a mountain chain. We got to the base of the mountains after about forty minutes, if that gives you an idea of how far away we were from, first of all, sea level, and, secondly, civilization. We drove through a rain forest on our way up the windy, un-railed mountain sides-- absolutely beautiful.
When we arrived, I could already see (and hear) the storm clouds on the horizon. My three tent mates and I snatched our backpacks and our four-man-tent and set off to find a good, high-ground place to set up. There were no high ground places anywhere. There were low places, and there were lower places.
Once our tent was up, we set about trying to situate all of our belongings: 4 full sized hiker backpacks and two duffle bags. It worked quite well until we tried to add our selves; for those of you who don't camp much, the equation for the size of tent you should use goes something like this: however many people you have, you get at least one size tent bigger (eg. if you have two people you get a four man, three people you get a 6 man, etc.). We had a four man tent with four people plus our luggage. Not fun.
It began to rain about 30 minutes after we all got into the tent. The sides began to leak almost immediately. Through fits of laughter, we managed to waterproof most of our belongings with trash bags. The next afternoon, we were hit with a storm so strong that we originally thought it was a cyclone. Our tent was literally ripped from top to bottom. We scrambled around in hysteric laughter to get our things out of the now-flooding tent only to find that the only place we could put them was in "the shed" (a large lean-to type deal with a tin roof) where EVERYONE was mingling around. It was a hysterical night. We were then told to split up and share two tents with two of the leaders who had their own 10-man mansion tents... Katrina and I (we were one pair - the other two girls went to the other tent) snuck into the tent around midnight to find locusts flying around inside, spiders the size of an adult hand crawling on the floor, and puddles everywhere but the very middle of the floor. There was a woman sleeping on the other side of the divider inside the tent and so we had to take care of all of these obstacles silently- quite the task in the dark.
Katrina and I fell asleep shortly thereafter, curled up in the dead middle of the floor, in between the dead spiders and the puddles, only to be rudely awakened an hour or so later by the side of the tent concaving and hitting us both in the face. We woke up, looked at the warped side of the tent, laughed at each other and rolled over to fall back asleep; we were brought to our feet by the leader on the other side yelling "Girls? GIRLS! Come here!"
The story does not end here of course, but this post is already quite long, so I'll finish the story in the next post. All of my love to all of you! Thank you, as always. The Lord bless you.
Random fact of the post:
The morning before we left the valley, everyone in my tent woke up and set out for the creek-side to watch the sunrise. Then, as we were sitting on the curb of the bridge, we began to see bubbles in the water, traveling towards us slowly. We all stood up, having heard the rumors of what may be in the water, and suddenly a platypus floated up to the surface and swam right underneath us, waving all its legs and paddling its little tail. Apparently it was a rare sight! They're much smaller than us Northern Americans often think- about the size of a medium size flip-flop (or thong, for the Aussies). It was absolutely darling.
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