Day 28: TIA (T.I.A. -> This is Africa)

February 19th, 2008

So I haven't wrote in a while and I'm going to try to remember everything over the past few days. We'll see how it goes...I really feel like no blog post or picture of this amazing trip could do it justice though. I'll do my best, but honestly it won't even come close. I recommend at least a 3-day safari in Africa to everyone.

The first day we got to South Africa I woke up at 5AM to see the sunrise and us pull into the harbor where we'll be staying. The sunrise was absolutely beautiful with Table Mountain in the background and the city skyline right there. Definitely a good way to bring in Cape Town. After that we got some breakfast while the ship started clearing customs. Then we had a Political Pre-Port meeting (as we do every day right when we get in) which consisted of some people from the US Embassy (or Consulate) talk about the current happenings in South Africa. Pretty boring, nothing we haven't heard before.

Then the group (of 8) of us went to find some Internet to book our tickets for Beijing (Hong Kong to Shenzen to Beijing to Shanghai) but after about an hour and a half we had to give up. www.elong.com has to be the worst site on the Internet if you ask me. We would type in all of our information, including passport numbers and credit card numbers then it would either bring us back to the first page, or tell us that the service was temporarily unavailable. Very annoying and frustrating. So we ended up leaving with nothing accomplished on a trip that we already have all planned out. Then I just surfed the Internet until my minutes at the coffee place that we were at were done. Including calling some people on Skype which was really nice.

Since we had a flight at 6:30pm we planned to leave the ship at 4pm just to be safe since it was a place that we were all unfamiliar with. Well, that ended up being a bad idea. Our flight got delayed 4 hours so we didn't actually leave until 11:30pm. We sat in the airport for the entire time. Luckily, there was a wine shop right outside the gate that we were sitting at. The Cape Town airport was really small, like probably smaller than the Oklahoma City airport. Anyway, we all got a bottle of wine and got to know each other. Two of the guys knew each other, two of the girls knew each other, and three of the other people (2 girls and 1 guy) all knew each other for a total of 8 of us. Since I didn't really know anyone to start it was nice to get a feel for the 7 other people that I was going to be hanging out with for the next three days.

After we each had our bottle of wine we were all feeling pretty good and it was almost time to board the plane. I guess I haven't really been on that many planes, but I've been on quite a few I feel like. However, the gate consisted of us walking onto the runway and up some stair into our plane. Like Arrested Development style. It was pretty sweet. Apparently there was some major troubles with our original plane so we ended up taking a standby flight to Johannesburg (also commonly referred to as Jo'Burg). Once we finally got on the flight it ended up being half full at most, maybe even 1/3 full so most of us we able to sit very comfortably.

ALSO, since our flight got delayed the airline (kulula.com) gave us $400 Rand vouchers for another airline ticket. Our original ticket only ended up costing $319 Rand so we got a free flight to Jo'Burg plus some which could cover our meal and the bottle of wine that we all got. Not too shabby even though we planned on hitting up the town in Jo'Burg once we got there (originally like 8pm). Oh well.

So after our flight got delayed a four hours we got to the Johannesburg Airport, which is huge especially compared to the Cape Town Airport, and were SUPPOSE to have a ride waiting for us to bring us to where we were staying that night. However, they weren't there, probably because our flight got delayed so much, and the person who booked everything didn't have ANY numbers to call anyone or ANY idea on where we were actually staying. Needless to say, he screwed up (he knows it now so I won't say any more). We ended up taking a cab to the Outlook Lodge, where we thought we were suppose to stay. The cab driver had no idea where the Outlook Lodge was located though so one of the guys that we were going with had to look it up on his iPhone to let the cab driver know where to go. So eventually we get there and this neighborhood looks extremely rich. All the houses are fenced in and all of the houses are huge/beautiful. We finally find the place after searching forever and wake up the guy to let us in the gate to figure out what's going on. The guy tells us that he doesn't have any reservations for us and only can accommodate for two of us. Eventually he mentioned that another place, a place called the Shoestrings lodge was expecting a group of 8 tonight. If it wasn't for him telling us this, we would really have had no idea what was going on and probably just went back to the airport until ecoAfrica was back in their office and we could call them. So after we get directions the cab drivers (we had 2 cabs between the 8 of us) got us to the Shoestrings lodge and the guy (eventually) let us in and gave us all rooms. By this time it was 4:30 and we had to wake up by 7 because we were being picked up for our Safari at that time. We all passed out in two rooms with 4 beds each in them. By this time we were all so tired that it only took a couple minutes until we were all passed out cold.