Smoky Mountain High
We drove for a few hours, uphill, into the mountains (”Ridge upon ridge of endless forest straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the Eastern United States”). We got off the bus for a mini hike at around 4pm, which gave us a chance to climb up to an odd concrete observation platform at the top of a mountain. The platform itself was like a concrete disk suspended 20 meters in the air, accessable by a huge curving walkway, that I wish I had taken a photograph of. The weather was very smoky indeed, as you can see in this photo. The mountains seemed to me to be just like the Wicklow mountains, and as Matt, our resident geoligist told us, they are the same mountains as the Scottish Highlands and Norway (Forget Norway, Kenya!).
After out hike we got back on the bus and drove all night. S. W. T.