Swimming up a Mountain

About a week ago, I finally signed up for one of the hiking groups that takes, mostly ex-pats, out to the local mountains for hikes of varying degrees of difficulty. I mostly signed up because the hike offered this week by the group I signed up with was described as 'easy'. This morning I rolled outta bed about 6 (which is not that much fun on Saturday morning) and noticed that the sky was looking a little dark. I met up with the group, which was organized by a guy from the British Embassy. We met at his house and let me just say, 'wow'. Anyway, as we were gathering the sky started to open up and we stood in a sheltered part of the guy's courtyard wondering what we were gonna do. We decided to be adventurous and set off. About 2 hours and 2 thousand metres higher we arrived at the starting point for the hiking. The entire trip out to the mountain, the rain came down increasingly harder and harder and the path we set out on was now doubling as a waterfall. We met it about an hour in, to the snowline (yeesh) when the rain and wind got so hard and cold we had to back into it. That was enough. I don't recall the last time I was so wet. Anyway, still nice to get outta the city, if even for a few, very wet hours!