Dear School Community
Mr. Vorein, the man who told us to go to Elephant Hill, purely wanted us to suffer. After a 2-hour-long bus ride, I was relieved to get up and walk after sitting for 2 hours, but it’s safe to say my enthusiasm went back to the bus as soon as I saw the first puddle. To be fair, the path we took was beautiful. Halfway through the first stage of the hike, fatigue caught up and sweetly reminded me that I woke up at 5 in the morning. So after countless rounds of “Stadt, Land, Fluss,” where we played with everything except “Fluss,” the never-ending coniferous forest already seemed to be a hard hike. Little did we know we were only at the beginning. We figured that out when we came across an unpleasant sign saying “Starting Point.”
When we finally came to the end of the forest, our joy quickly joined our enthusiasm back in the bus when we saw the following trail. The next path, where the real suffering began, was a beautiful bamboo trail. After an hour or two of literally climbing uphill, we were soaking from all the rain. And just as luck has it, the whole “path” was full of mud, to the point where we got stuck in it several times. We luckily got out but with the price of mud in our boots for the rest of the hike. We didn’t make it to the summit due to the rain, so we went back down. On the way, we lost the group and started thinking about how we would live if we became bush people. However, we scratched that idea after we fell in the mud more than 8 times (we counted).
In conclusion, Elephant Hill is a beautiful place to go hiking; it has incredible views and beautiful vegetation. A small tip though, in case you get the brilliant idea to go hiking on Elephant Hill, remember to bring waterproof pants and shoes.
Aimée Burchard
Class 8