Day 33 – It's official, I'm in love with Cape Town and South Africa

February 24th, 2008

Contrary to earlier planning, we didn't get up this morning until 11am. This kind of sucked since we have so many things to do and this is our last day. After getting some lunch we headed over to Boulders Beach, which is about 45 minutes away from the ship. It's located in the Southern Cape. The beach and entire area is packed with penguins. I've never seen a penguin except at the zoo, so this was really cool to see so many of them and in their natural habitat. When we saw them they were all just standing there, almost like a statue. A few of them were walking around but the majority weren't. Other people that went there on earlier days said they were really active, going in and out of the water, and fraternizing with other penguins. Apparently if you go to one of the beaches in the area it's also very common to have a penguin some over and start swimming with you.

There are two kinds of taxi drivers here, regular ones and 'tourist' taxi's. The regular ones typically run on a meter and are almost exactly like one that you would find on the states, there is usually very little interaction with them. The tourist taxi's are really fun though, there is no meter, they just give you a fixed rate for where you want to go. They have taken some test in SA to get this tourism license so they know all about the history of the city and where different things are. We took a tourist taxi to see the penguins and he took us on a very scenic drive there, showing us the University of Cape Town campus, or at least part of it, some beautiful views of the beaches, the US Embassy, and many other things. He took us to the beach, waited for us to be done, then took us back to the ship. He was almost more like a personal tour guide than a taxi driver.

Once returning to the ship we immediately got ready to go hike Table Mountain. It's recommended to hike it in the early morning because it's cooler and you can watch the sunset but we didn't really have a choice. It was hot, and it's a really big mountain. We took a metered taxi up to a place on the mountain where you can hike it for free. People can also take a cable car to the top for around $60 Rand, there was no way I was about to do that though. This was the first mountain I've ever hiked, and it was pretty vigorous at times. It was just David and I that went up it together. We came to the conclusion that going with a bigger group would suck because you would always have to wait for someone or someone would start complaining. There was a rock trail that we followed up to the top, stopping twice for some water and a few more times to take some quick pictures. It was quite a relief once we got to the top though. The top of the mountain is awesome. First of all, it's huge. You can easily spend more time on the top of the mountain going to different parts of it than actually climbing up to the top. We went to two sides, one overlooking a small town and the ocean, and one overlooking Cape Town. There's a gift shop and restaurant on the top too. We made it to the gift shop quickly but didn't have enough time to sit down and eat. Oh by the way, my camera died shortly after we got to the top. Talk about bad timing! So I do have some pictures up there but I'm going to have to steal some more from David. We ended up taking the cable car down just because we didn't have much time left before on ship time at 21:00 and we both wanted to get some Internet access before going back to the ship. We ended up with a lot less time for Internet than originally planned though due to the late start to the day.

The Internet was nice but the place that we were at, the same place we were the first day we got to port, charged per megabyte instead of per minute. We found a lot of other places that we could just buy an hour from them but they were all farther away and we were restricted on time the way it was.

To end the night we had a local high school choir give a performance for about an hour. They were SO good and amazing to listen to. I have a bunch of their songs recorded on my camera so I'll have to see how they turn out but then I'll post them for you all to listen to. Most of the songs were sung in Afrikaans but a couple of them were in English as well.

So just to wrap up South Africa I'll throw in a few things. I know I mentioned this yesterday but the fact that you don't get the feeling that everyone's just trying to make money off you was so nice. I loved the area that we were in and honestly can't say one bad thing about my experiences in Cape Town or South Africa as a whole.

There was quite a bit of construction going on in Cape Town and Jo'Burg for the World Cup, which South Africa will be hosting in 2010. We could see all of the huge cranes where they were building the new stadium in Cape Town. It's like they're getting ready to show the world that they are a developed country and should be thought of that way.

Even though they did drive on the opposite side of the road as us, they were much better drivers than in Brazil. However, at this point 95% of American drivers are better than any other country that we've visited thus far. Unlike the random round about by Melissa's house in Corralville there were a lot of them here, and they made traffic move relatively smoothly, perhaps even better than a stop light in most of the situations.

We talked with our tourist taxi driver on the way to see the penguins, and I was actually surprised at how much he knew about the United States. He has even been following the presidential candidate race and would really like to see Obama win. He mentioned that SA was split about 50/50 on supporting our war in Iraq. When we first invaded there were a lot of protests in the street.

I really could use about 10 more days just in Cape Town to do everything that I wanted to do. The only shopping that I was able to do was in gift shops at the places that we were. I also didn't get to see Robbin Island (where Nelson Mandela was held, you have to book your reservation to go there way in advance as they always fill up), I would have liked to spend more time on table mountain and be able to hike down it, take a township tour, go to the beach and relax beach, do a city tour, visit the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus, I only got to party on long street one night, shark diving, scuba diving, sand boarding and the list just goes on. All the more reason to come back though.

I didn't have enough time to go to the post office to buy stamps, but I did buy some postcards at Kruger and will be sending them out then. If you want a postcard from somewhere just leave me your address or something.

We've had absolutely amazing weather the entire time that we've been in every port. The weather here as been perfect in every sense.

Tonight I turned on our TV (while we're in port we get 5 local channels) and saw Simon from American Idle doing the same sort of thing on a show called ''Britain's Got Talent'' it was actually the final episode where they announced the winner and everything so I got to see some really cool performances.

We're currently suck in Cape Town because it's too foggy to leave. The fog has reduced visibility to about 50 feet. They say we could leave in an hour or we could end up staying until tomorrow, whenever the fog lifts enough so we can get out of here. Even though we're staying for awhile they're not going to let us off the ship. That would be so nice to have even a couple more hours in Cape Town.

I love this place, it's by far my favorite port that we've been to so far.

I have almost 900 pictures, or 3 gigs of pictures that I need to post. It will take a long time so I'm really hoping we get free internet access in our villa in Mauritius.