#sibebe

We parked in the yard of a couple of other expats whose house is right at the foot of Sibebe. This was the note we left on our car in case they came to investigate this strange vehicle (turned out they were out of town anyway).

Because I call it “more like a scramble toward death” and “the only time I've ever cried while climbing a mountain, if only just for a minute.”

There's a lot of granite in Swaziland, but Sibebe is Swaziland's most famous hunk of it. It isn't the tallest mountain in the country, but it is the second largest freestanding rock in the world. It's also called “Bald Rock,” the reason for which becomes quickly and painfully evident to anyone trying to scale the face of it, as Shaun and I did a couple of weeks ago.

The rock

To reach the top of Sibebe, you may choose to go up the back route, which is more of a typical hike along a real path, but takes a couple of hours. Or, if you're short on time and/or a healthy wish to avoid death, you can simply throw both hands and feet against the steep front, hugging it desperately like a tree frog against a screen door, and knock it out in 45 terrifying minutes.

This is actually a photo from two years back of some friends of ours on Sibebe, to help convey the level of steepness I'm talking about. We didn't take any pictures on our hike due to the aforementioned paralyzing fear. Thanks to Laura at muzungalo.blogspot.com!

I've never considered myself afraid of heights, but I'm not sure any degree of acrophobia is required to be afraid on Sibebe. There's not a thing irrational about being afraid of tumbling hundreds of meters down a granite slope, with no ledge or overhang in sight to stop you, a future which seemed perfectly plausible to me on this little mountain jaunt. Nevertheless, I have heard tell of hikers who scamper both up and down the face of Sibebe without a care in the world, so I will entertain the concept of some latent height fear lurking within me that those people just don't have. 

The upside is that while from a distance the rock appears to offer few hand- and footholds, the surface is actually pocked all over and so quite friction...ful (no word that's the opposite of “frictionless”? Really, dictionary?). It's grippy, is what I'm saying. Even so, Shaun and I kept our hands down as well as our feet most of the way up, and we had to stop occasionally to raise our heads to their usual position and recover a little lost composure. During these breaks, I found it best to look neither ahead of nor behind me. And I certainly didn't take any pictures, if you're wondering. 

Despite our anxieties, we hustled our way to the top pretty quickly and began our descent down the back route, landing in a beautiful green pasture with a rock cave on one side and cows grazing in our midst. I then made Shaun promise that, in the interest of being true to ourselves, we would not look back on this experience - at least, not the uphill part - as being “not that bad” just because it was over. It was bad. I'm not eager to do it again. But the fact that we did it? Admittedly, that felt (and feels) pretty great.

Shaun, safely at the top