Hey!
Today I went on another soul crushing hike.  It was actually a pretty good hike and day, but the uphill kills me.  So many stairs.  A girl I work with and I joined a group hike on the mountain one train stop away.  It was a decent sized group with four Americans, two of them soldiers, two South Africans, who are here teaching English, a Chinese girl who is working here, and about four Koreans.  I seemed to be the most inexperienced hiker of them all, and fell behind a lot.  This mountain was steeper than the last, but the path was mainly made of stairs.  Yes, I climbed a mountain worth of stairs today.  What did you do?  I'm just kidding.  I fell behind quite quickly, and one of the organizers came back and hiked with me, and encouraged me to go on.  He was very nice.  They were all really concerned with our safety and us having a good time.  I enjoyed getting to know some of the other hikers on our rests and during the easier sections of the trail.  We some some people rock climbing on our way to the peak.  I would not try that for all the world.  They were so high up there.  I did get some good pictures of me on the top of the mountain.  Oh and just to taunt some of you back home, I burnt a bit today.  It was nice enough to go with just my t-shirt for most of the hike.

Take care!

Here are the people climbing the top section of the mountain.

As I was about to take this picture one of the organizers told me to move over so I wouldn't get the sign in the picture.  He said it said 'Danger - Death', I of course found this hilarious and insisted they get the sign in the picture.

Victory!  Darn, now I'm wishing I would have thrown my arms up victoriously.  Next time.