Grooms Globe Trek . com – Kids

Day 55

Cape Union Mart is a huge outdoor store. In fact the store is so big it has room for things like a rock wall that you can rock climb on for free. Even though Cape Union Mart is a big store, it only has one rock wall that you can climb, and after a while it gets too easy. One day after we had finished climbing the rock wall we asked someone who worked at Cape Union Mart if there was somewhere else where we could rock climb. His reply was simply, City Rock.

A couple days later, after a quick run to get more pages for our passport, we were on our way to City Rock. When we arrived we saw the different sections their website talked about. There are two kids sections at City Rock. They have a simple rock wall to climb and lots of padding on the ground for when you fall. The main room had a rope ladder, and walls that are about 35feet tall. The categories of the walls are easy, intermediate, and hard. Since they are so tall you need to be on a belay for them. Another cool section they have is called the boulders. Boulders are basically big rocks with handholds on them so that you can climb. They are not really big because if you fall you could hurt yourself even though they have big cushy mats below you.

Once we were ready we jumped right in to the tall, yet easy wall to start. Everyone completed it in no time. Then we moved on to the next hardest wall, which our parents aced but we couldn’t climb. The simple reason we couldn’t climb it was not because it was too hard, but because we didn’t use our legs enough. If you only use your arms they get sore and you can’t go on. After our arms had a short break, we recovered and climbed the next wall like nothing had every happened. By now are bodies were starting to stiffen so we had a choice between two different things. We could climb a ladder backwards or climb fourth wall. In the end we climbed the rope ladder.

We then moved on to the boulders. The boulders were easier so we didn’t drain as much energy doing them. Some of the boulders also went upside-down and in funny angles. We barely used any energy doing the boulders that went upside down because we fell off them too fast.

In the end City Rock pushed all of our limits in rock climbing. It also was a fun and unique experience. I would go back to tomorrow in a heartbeat if I could.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 9:33 am and is filed under South Africa, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.