Cliffs, Reptiles, and a Broken Leg

 

Hello, I’d like to talk about my favorite places in the whole wide world. I feel more at peace in natural settings more than in expensive settings. Like I said in my last shitpost, I felt peace in the ocean.

 Mountains: let's talk about mountains for a second. Being high up and still on solid ground is simply euphoric. I’ve visited the two main mountain ranges in the country - the most famous tourist spots – and I fell in love with both of them. I visited the Northern Mountains when I was thirteen. I traveled alone from the southernmost city to the north of the country. My parents thought I needed a vacation, and they trusted me to be responsible enough to travel alone, so I went to the capital.

I have a ton of relatives there, and one day we decided to take a trip up the mountains. All the way up I couldn’t focus on anything but the forest. I wanted to get lost in it. This is a weird thought but I want to be lost in the forest one day. I KNOW, IT’S DANGEROUS but hear me out. I love the calm a forest has, and I have pretty damn good survival skills to survive in a forest. I love animals, insects, and all, even snakes (the animals, not humans). My favorite reptiles are snakes and big lizards. Marzipan has a lizard and I think he’s so beautiful.

Speaking of Marzipan, you remember my friend/cousin from Australia, she is SO BEAUTIFUL!! I talked to her today and she wished me a happy birthday and sent a song. HER VOICE is SO ANGELIC! It sounds like angels singing in harmony in heaven.

Anyway, back to animals, I’m planning to get a baby goat (because my brother won’t let me get a cat because apparently, it attracts spirits) and I’m desperately waiting for it but my brother can’t find a small baby goat that’s small as I want. I heard that baby goat are more interactive than cats (who are very mean, by the way). I had a catto named Chonki. He was as small as my hand when I first adopted him from a shelter. With white snowy fur and beautiful golden eyes, I fell in love with him the moment I saw him.

He was very playful as a kitten but got naughty as he grew up. He was coddled too much by my family, and the bastard knocked over things, and no one bat an eye. He was also very protective of me. Whenever I got yelled at, he would scratch and bite at the person’s feet. He was my own personal bodyguard. When I used to work on my laptop, he sat on the keyboard and got angry when I tried to move him. He used to sleep by my side every night and licked my face until I woke up when I had a nightmare. Sometimes he would even thwack me with his pays (no nails exposed, just soft fluffy jellybeans) to snap me awake and make my nightmares stop.

Sadly I had to give him away to my friend because I couldn’t take care of it any longer. Oh, and his full name was King Maxmillan Chonki IV. I don’t know why I named him that but it certainly suited him because he grew up to act like the king of the house. God, I miss him.

Back to the topic at hand, the oceans and the forests. If I could, I would live in a place with a forest as my back yard and the ocean as the front view.  I swear to god I wouldn’t ever come out of the sea no matter how cold it got.

There’s a place called Kund Malir, it’s in Southern Baluchistan. The sea meets the mountains there, and the view is breathtaking. A road separates the beach and the mountains, and the beach is both rocky and sandy. There are also snakes there at night but who cares about a snake bite or two when you can just look at the mountains and oceans without turning your head?

I’ve never been to Kund Malir, but I intend to as soon as I’m done with my A levels. It’s a three-hour drive from here but it’s impossible to convince my family to just take a whole day off to relax.

Also, let me share this experience with you. This is one of the scariest moments of my life, but to tell you the truth I felt immense relief that it was happening. We went to a hill station, which is really a mountain range will huge mountains and high cliffs. There’s a flat area of land where there’s a restaurant, a small set up for camping, tent set up and everything. It’s very cold there at night, with temperatures dropping down to 0 degrees Celsius in summers.

We went there for two days on a school trip, and we were free to do whatever we wanted. Some kids took to photography, some kids sat around a fire and sang songs, some kids went from one mountain to another where no one could see them and did god knows what.

I decided to make a vlog, which I actually did and posted on YouTube but deleted it later.  Anyway, I didn’t have a camera that could shoot videos and used my phone to film. The day went by pretty smoothly, I asked my friends to cooperate and made an awesome vlog with almost the whole 11^th grade in it. At 5 pm, it started to turn dark, and very quickly. I tried to do astrophotography. We could see clusters of stars there, because there’s no electricity up the mountain, just the fire. I ventured out alone with my phone and went up a hill to capture some amazing moments…

…Only, my phone ran out of battery and I didn’t have a flashlight. I tried to find my way back to the road using the moonlight but it was pitch black. I did get to the road successfully but my dumb brain forgot one teeny tiny detail.

The road I was on was built at the edge of a 10 ft high cliff. And there I walked in the dark, not seeing where I was going. Everything slowed down as I put one foot in the air, the other one still on the road, and I fell.

I fell down 10 ft, scraping my jaw, almost fracturing my legs on sharp jagged rocks. My phone screen cracked and as I was falling, the only thought in my head was, ‘thank god, my life is over and no one would know I died, perfect’. I didn’t think it sarcastically, I was genuinely feeling relief as I was in mid-air and felt light and happy for a fraction of a second.

Too bad I reached the ground without dying. It was just 10 feet, if it would’ve been 50, I’d be happier. Instead, here I was, lying down face down, with rocks poking me everywhere, blood starting to soak my clothes, and I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m late for dinner.'

It took all my strength to climb up that cliff. Thankfully there were a few big rocks I could step on, and some that I could use to pull myself up back on the road. I stayed in the middle of the road after that, careful to check before walking forward. After a few minutes, the light from the fire illuminated the path enough that I ran to the camp, ignoring the pain in my leg (turns out I had a hairline fracture), and went to join the others.

I would never forget the moment my schoolmates looked at me. Some were freaked out, some comforted me. My best friend started crying. One of my friends ran to the store to get some bandages and antiseptic to stop the bleeding. I didn’t have any more clothes so I wore my blood-soaked t-shirt for the next day and a half.

Surprisingly, I had enough strength to go stargazing with the others at 2 am that night, I pointed to the cliff I fell in and one of my teachers literally whispered the F word under her breath. We got a good laugh after it.

So this is the infamous story that still circulates around my school to this day and one that I tell to most of my friends for a good laugh. I didn’t get my leg checked out until a week after the incident, but well, I’m doing fine now aren’t I?

I think this is it for today, I hope you enjoyed it even though this was all over the place, but at least now you know that mountains, forests, and the ocean are my favorite places. Take care, have fun, and don’t jump into volcanoes.

Until next time!