Our two days of 'rest' after Project Hornbill Camp included a BBQ feast and party (prepared by our Bario Mum Seluma), some of Florence's delicious cake, and last trips to Y2K to stock up on Treats-for-Trek. These varied from highly sugared jam, hundreds of s
weets (Becca), chocolate and for Andy who liked them a little too much, nuts. After a day of packing and splitting up 5 days of rations between us, desperately trying to make our packs lighter in any way possible; we set off on trek. A breakfast of 'interesting', but tasty, spicy purple rice set everyone up in good stead for leaving the beautiful Bario in its glorious morning sun with feelings of mixed excitement, dread and nervous anticipation.
We were told that the first part of the first day of Trek would be the hardest, as we set out it looked as though this was holding true. It started off almost immediately with a tough two hours of uphill trekking, many tricky rivers, with an impressive disappearing act from Ali (after just an hour!) falling through and then down a fallen tree. This made us all start wondering what else was going to come up in the next four days, and if we were going to manage it.
That evening we arrived in very good time at our camp, at 3.15! This gave us plenty of time to put up our bashas and hammocks, and as in Rhi's case after a complaint from Andy fix the 'worst basha of
all time'. We all then had time for a bathe in a beautiful jungle river before dark fell on the first night of trek. This was our first night of plain noodles, and although some of us thought we would never say it we were all starting to sorely miss veggie curry and the beautiful too full feeling it gave us. We were definitely glad to be in bed by 8.30 after what we thought had been a difficult day, how wrong we were...
