South Africa, Part II

I have a quiz for everyone, where in the world do you go if you want to visit winelands, go wine tasting, cage diving with great white sharks, see first hand a township and in them the cutest kids in the world, hike up a mountain, see one of the best views of a city, go to night clubs and jazz clubs, visit an old prison that’s on an island, go to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point, see wild zebras, ostriches, springbok, kudu, baboons, penguins, and tons of various birds, hang out on the roof of a restaurant downtown with some friends, eat crocodile, springbok, and ostrich?? The answer is Cape Town, South Africa of course!! And I did do all of those things! On top of that my goal for this port was accomplished, that was to see penguins, and I saw penguins!!! Cape Town is a very amazing city, it has almost everything you could ever want, the only thing it doesn’t have is snowboarding, if it had that I’d probably be moving to this city very soon. Just the way the city is situated is amazing, there’s the water, then the city, then Table Mountain and other mountains in the background. It’s simply a stunning view. What’s even better is hiking to the top of Table Mountain (roughly 3000 ft. tall) and standing on the edge of the rocks just looking down on the city, the ocean, robben island, and if you turn around you can see the Cape of Good Hope and other mountains. If I had the time to I could just stand in that spot for hours looking out on the city. I could spend a month in this port and never have a day where I’m bored. I’ll list off some of the activities you can do: cage diving with greak white sharks, skydiving, paragliding, abseiling, kloofing, sand boarding, scuba diving, rock climbing, hiking, wineland tours and wine tasting, safaris, futbol games, rugby games, spend a night in a township etc. Plus there are malls and tons of shops. It’s impossible to get bored!

Cage diving with great white sharks was awesome, we saw seven different sharks, I was in the cage for two of them. Some of them swam right next to the cage. It’s amazing having a great white shark within a foot of you with only small pieces of steel separating you from it. These creatures are extremely powerful. One of them even jumped out of the water to grab the chum and it was just amazing; we had lost sight of the shark (the visibility in the water is only 2 meters) and a few seconds later the shark was half way out of the water with the chum in it’s mouth. I would not want to be stuck in the ocean with one of these (on the surface of the ocean anyways, if you’re not on the surface they won’t attack you).

The winelands were great fun, me and three other people from SAS went on a wine tasting tour, and at the end of the day we had tried twenty different wines and one brandy from four different vineyards. We were suppose to go the a fifth vineyard but we ran out of time. We had our first wine at 9:30 in the morning!

On the second to last day in Cape Town, this girl (Jessica) and me really wanted to go to Cape Point (where the Cape of Good Hope is) and on the way back stop at Boulders Beach to see the Penguins! We couldn’t find anyone else to go with us so we rented a cab for the afternoon for 800 rand for the whole cab ($115) and he would drive us to anywhere we wanted to go. So we went to Cape Point, which was cool. We saw some baboons there; we hiked around on some of the trails and almost got blown off the cliffs a few times from the wind. If I post a picture where my hair is standing straight up and my mouth is open that’s where this picture was taken. When we had spent a few hours here we headed over to Boulders Beach. After a few minutes of walking around here we found penguins! They were hanging out on the rocks so we went on the rocks and walked around with them, took pictures of them/with them. These are the coolest animals ever, they don’t smell, they’re not annoying, they’re not mean, and the babies look extremely soft and they sound squeaky (not even kidding, they squeak). All they do is lay around and every once in a while they waddle around. Now I have over 200 pictures of just penguins!!!

On the last day a few people from SAS and me went to Robben Island and then we hiked Table Mountain in the afternoon. Robben Island used to be where a political prison was situated. They stopped using this prison in the early 90’s, so not that long ago. Its biggest prisoner was Nelson Mandela, who was released in 1990 and then became the president of South Africa in 1994. 1994 was also the first year that blacks and colored South Africans could vote. The prison was cool to see but the tour got old fast and was kind of boring. Although our tour guide was an ex-prisoner, so it was cool to hear his stories. Hiking Table Mountain is pretty self-explanatory. We hiked up it under the intense, hot African sun with a cloudless sky. The trails up this are pretty funny, I was expecting it to be all these dirt trails since that’s mostly what’s in Colorado. But all the trails were basically just stairs up the mountain. So it was like being on a Stairmaster for 2 hours. It brought me back to the days of working for Observ. But once you get to the top, the view is definitely worth it, I won’t even attempt to describe this view again, just look at the pictures I post.

I saved the best experience for last. Which was visiting the Khayelitsha Township. We got to see first hand one of the poorest towns in South Africa (it’s also the biggest township). Khayelitsha is home to 2 million people. This population is growing rapidly too. The majority of these people/families live on less than $1 a day. Their houses are no more than poorly built, one room shacks. The material that they’re built out of is scrap metal and scrap wood. Very few of these houses are made out of a solid material that wouldn’t be blown to the ground in harsh winds. These houses are one right next to each other for miles upon miles. On average a family of seven lives in these one-room houses. The room is no bigger than my bedroom back in the states. To see this with my own eyes was very eye opening. To be driving down the street in our bus looking out the window and all you see for miles on all sides of you are these shacks, one right after the other. The people who live in these houses walking the streets starring at you as you drive by. The kids frantically waving at you. These houses do have electricity. The government gives them a very limited amount of electricity per month and if they want more electricity they have to buy more. By now you’re probably wondering why I liked this so much if this township is like this. It’s not that this was a “fun” experience it was just…amazing. When we got off the bus in this township we visited two bed and breakfasts and a local craft market; where the women of the township make everything in the market. Then we were allowed to walk around a little and talk to the locals. It was hard to talk to the locals because they usually didn’t speak English they usually spoke Afrikaans, Zulu, or Xhosa (usually the adults could speak a little English, but the kids generally couldn’t). But the best thing to do was to play with the kids. These kids are the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. Even just driving by them in the bus they’d wave frantically at you and try to run along side of the bus. But when they would come up to us on the streets, they’d run up to us with the biggest smiles on their faces, they’d hug us, grab onto our legs and arms and not want to let go, then they would want us to take their picture. After we’d take their picture they’d run back to us so they could see what they look like on our camera. They absolutely loved it. Some of them would try and teach us some games and how to make sounds with our hands. There’s this one kid that I distinctly remember, we had just visited a bed and breakfast and me and this girl really wanted to go play with the kids instead of looking around the bed and breakfast, so we went outside and this one kid saw us, he was probably five or six years old, he just booked it towards us at full speed then he jumped up on me, wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and just held onto me for probably thirty seconds or so then he jumped down and went over to the girl that I had gone outside with and did the same thing except he gave her a kiss on the cheek. What makes this worse is when you look at these kids, all you want to do is help them, to make their lives better for them, to instantly make AIDS not a problem for them but there’s no possible way to help all of them at once. What’s remarkable to me is just by looking at the houses that these people live in and the way that they live, you’d never expect them to act as happy as they do. One out of nine of them have AIDS. Ten years ago they couldn’t even talk to us white people, they were forced to live in these townships they had no choice, politically they had no voice, but yet it doesn’t matter to them at all now. They’ve all moved on.

On top of that one out of nine people in South Africa has AIDS (in all of South Africa, not just in the townships) which is a huge problem. In the smaller townships they bury about 50 people every week (kids and adults) due to AIDS. And the amount of people that have AIDS in South Africa is growing rapidly every year along with the poverty level. Here are a few facts from my global studies class: Last year in the U.S. there were 43,000 people newly infected with AIDS, in Sub-Saharan Africa there were 2.8 million. Africa currently has 35% of the worlds poverty, it’s projected that by 2015 that will be at 68% unless something is changed.

I did take some pencils and stickers and other things of that nature to hand out to the kids, but we were asked by our tour guide to not give them directly to the kids as in a few other tours the kids started punching each other for the gifts and they don’t want the kids to turn into beggars and to expect these kinds of gifts whenever people visit the township. Instead I gave them to the owner of one of the bed and breakfasts, she runs an after school type program for the kdis and said that she would distribute them to the kids.

One other thing I must mention about South Africa is the food. They have really good seafood and a few really good random restaurants. If you’re ever in Cape Town go to the restaurant called “Royale” on Long Street. This is a gourmet burger restaurant. The building it’s in consists of about 3 floors, all of which belong to this restaurant. On the bottom floor is the restaurant then the other 2 floors are waiting rooms for the restaurant complete with bars. One night we had a group of 18 people to go out to dinner, since it was someone’s birthday. We showed up at this restaurant and asked if we could be seated, they said that they were all booked up for the night since you’re suppose to make reservations for this restaurant 2 weeks in advance and we hadn’t done that. But they said that despite this they could probably get us a table in an hour if we go upstairs and wait in their waiting rooms. So we went upstairs to the waiting rooms which were pretty crowded with people, but then we discovered that we could go up onto the roof of this restaurant and on the roof there were tables, chairs and benches and there was no one up there. We went up there and hung out there until our table in the restaurant was ready. There’s not a better way to wait for a table than hanging out with 17 friends on the roof of a long street building which overlooks long street, the city and table mountain in the background.

This is probably long enough for now. This is a really compressed version of what I did in South Africa and I could ramble on and on about South Africa for many more pages but I won’t cause I have a bunch of essays that I have to go write, and tests to study for. But basically in the end what I’m saying is CAPE TOWN ROCKS!! I will definitely be coming back as soon as I can. Hopefully I’ll be back by the 2010 World Cup in South Africa!!

As far as the pictures go, for the group picture on a rock, in order from left to right is: Mark (red shirt), Matt (yellow shirt), Jessica, Me (brown shirt), and Rick on the right end. I lied in a previous post, Rick isn’t in the Archbishop picture, but it’s the same people as in the other one except for Rick. There’s one of a township doctors office (I put that one up here for you Brooke). The other pictures are pretty self-explanatory, a shark coming at the shark cage, the view of Cape Town from Table Mountain, the township kids. I think that covers all of the pictures. There are some pictures of me with some kids on someones computer, I just need to get it from them sometime. After I get those I may post one or two of them. ALSO, the group pictures are courtesy of Matt!!

Until Next Time, Ciao.