Crystal Pools

Last Friday VAC organized a trip up to Crystal Pools for us. Before leaving that afternoon a few of my housemates and I went in to town to do a little shopping. There’s this amazing bead store that we spent quite a bit of time in and then we went to the African Women’s Market, which is like a three story warehouse paradise! More jewellery and crafts than you could imagine and while we only spent about an hour in there I could have easily spend a week…and my life’s savings. While I should have been looking and buying souvenirs for people I just ended up buying some awesome jewellery for myself (priorities people). A lot of the stuff was overpriced, but I guess you can do some bargaining…if you’re not a wimp like me. I’ll definitely be making a trip back there towards the end of my time here once I have a better idea about the kind of money I have left to blow.

The hike to crystal pools is about an hour or hour and a half drive from obz so it was cools to get to drive around and see more of the country. Once we got there it was about an hour hike to the pools. It wasn’t too tough of a hike, just really rocky so it was hard to tell where we were supposed to go and we got a little lost a couple times.

I think we hiked up to the third pool (or maybe the second…I don’t remember), which was absolutely beautiful! Considering I describe everything here in this same way, I hope it hasn’t lost meaning.

The water was incredible and felt so good to swim in. It was a little chilly stepping in at first but as soon as you got all the way in and started swimming it was perfect! There are boulders and little cliffs all around so you can jump off into the pool. From the pool we were at I guess there’s like a 24+ meter cliff that goes into the pool below but nobody in our group did that jump (at least not that day). Some guys we were talking to the night before were telling us how some girl got paralyzed jumping off that one cos she landed wrong. Needless to say, I just swam. No jumping for me.

After swimming around for about an hour or so we hiked back to the van and made our way back to obz (after a quick pit stop at a bottle store near by to prepare for our night of course).