Pangaea EcoCamp – June 9, 2012

Blog written by Magdalena 'Leni' GRUENDL, Germany, 20 (Pangaea Mongolia Expedition Young Explorer)

Today was a super exciting day and I think even now there’s still adrenalin pumping trough our veins.

After a long discussion the night before on what route we should chose for the treasure hunt with the kids we headed off to a canyon in the morning in order to see if this would be a suitable one.

Despite the fact that people along the route told us that we can’t go any further we just kept going. We are Young Explorers. 😉 At one stage the path ended and we just followed the dried out riverbed, walking, jumping and climbing over rocks. Now we felt like real explorers. Nevertheless I have to admit that at one point we weren’t sure if we should keep going or rather turn around and walk back for four hours, since the climb ahead of us seemed very challenging. We realized that we were at a point of no return. To walk back didn’t make sense since it would get dark so the only option we basically had was to move forward, even though we didn’t really know what was lying ahead of us. We kept going up super steep passages, just following our instincts since we couldn’t rely on the map we had. After almost 8h of hiking we eventually, came across a path again by coincidence. We followed it and made our way out of the forest and out of the canyon again. It took us twice than we expected.

Michael, who had to pick us up, had to wait for us for over 4hours. “I thought you’re Young Explorers so instead of the 4h they said it will take I thought that you’ll probably make it in around 3.” Well, we didn’t know that it would be that challenging…

This great day ended with a barbecue and a detailed discussion about the program for next week.