South Africa!!

I’m back on the ship and after a week in Cape Town I find myself having trouble adjusting to the idea that I have to go back to my classes, finish reading assignments, and write papers. Cape Town was awesome. I did so much in the course of the seven days I was there but I’m ready to move on to our next port.

So where to start. Well as I already wrote in my last entry, I went skydiving on my first day in South Africa. It was amazing, yada, yada, yada. On Tuesday, my second day, I did a tour of the wine lands with three other people from the ship. We ended up being the only four people in our tour, which was awesome because a lot of the other tours were full of people. Our guide, who’s name was pronounced Air-el, told us, “I want to give you the best…this is your day,” He offered to take us anywhere we wanted to go but we stuck to the plan of drinking lots of wine at four different wineries. Airel talked to us about South Africa’s political situation for quite some time. “It’s our country now, it wasn’t before,” he explained, telling us stories about how much life has changed since apartheid ended. Hearing him speak about Nelson Mandela was really interesting for me. He kept stressing about how wonderful Mandela is, “When he is near you you get goosebumps…he is that great of a person,” he told us with excitement.
Our tour consisted of Airel driving the four of us around to different wineries, where we had the opportunity to taste up to five different types of wine. I knew very little about wine tasting, and still don’t understand how on earth winetasters find so many different flavors within a single glass of wine. I guess my palette isn’t developed enough yet. But all the same, I really enjoyed pretending that I noticed a major difference between each glass.


On Wednesday I went on a Semester at Sea trip to a township outside of Cape Town. Our tour first took us to the District Six Museum which made my day because I was really disappointed that I wasn’t going to have the time to visit it while in South Africa. District Six is an area where 70,000 blacks were removed, starting in 1972, in order to make way for Europeans. Homes were bulldozed and entire neighborhoods turned to ruins. Members of the community ended up in squatter camps and homeless. The museum showed what the neighborhood once looked like, had testimonies displayed from past residents, and had a map of the district that covered the entire first floor. People had written small comments and signed their names where their homes once stood. Our tour guide himself once lived in District Six. His grandfather down to his son was born in the house that was bulldozed right before his eyes.
After the museum visit our bus headed to a township, or a squatter camp. Although apartheid is over, consequences of it still remain. Thousands upon thousands of blacks live in shanties crammed together, some without doors. Before we entered the township our bus driver told us, “This may be emotional for you, but it is our past and we are looking to the future.”
Upon entering the township our motorcoach drove up and down the streets, showing us the intensive amount of poverty that exists in South Africa. If one were to visit Cape Town they would not see this side of the wealth distribution. Cape Town is made up primarly of white middle-class citizens. So anyway, children were running out of their homes, waving at our bus, parents just stared at us and continued their work. One little boy flipped us off and said “Fuck you,” as we drove by. Eventually the bus was parked and we had the opportunity to walk around the township. We received a tour of a bed and breakfast that is essentially a fixed-up shanty. A woman from the township, Vicky, started it in order to bring more people into their neighborhood. We also went to a day-care type place. The day-care was in a shanty as well, hidden from the dirt road and behind several homes. Ten young children were there that day and they sat politely in the tiny room that made up the building, as a woman explained the purpose of the establishment. Before we left they sang a couple songs for us.
After our tour we headed back outside and spent about an hour standing around on the narrow dirt road, talking to children, and walking around. One girl brought a Polaroid camera and was taking children’s pictures, giving them a photograph of themselves, something many of them don’t have. I wish I had thought of that. The kids got a kick out of seeing their faces on the backs of digital cameras though and I found myself plowed over by kids at one point as they asked me to take their picture and laughed when they saw how it turned out. A group of women stood in front of a nearby home, cleaning their clothes in a soapy bucket. Some girls started a game that looked similar to jump-roping but was much more complicated. A little boy in a wheelchair rolled by, being pushed by another child. It was all so overwhelming.
What I found important to note is that these shanties, surrounded by dirt, were spotless. They were swept clean, making it obvious that people took pride in their homes. And the women that were cleaning their clothes were also scrubbing their shoes, something I don’t even do. It was very apparent that the poverty of all these people is out of their control. The unemployment rate in South Africa is up to 40% I believe…maybe 30.
After an hour we loaded back onto our air-conditioned buses and backed out of the township as the children stood outside barefooted on the dirt ground. Students reviewed the pictures they had taken on their digital cameras as these young kids waved at us upon our departure. We are so lucky it’s ridiculous. I just can’t get over it.
Before the tour was over we stopped for lunch at a restaurant located in a different township. This township was nicer as it had paved roads dividing the homes, but the poverty was still evident. The owner of the restaurant, Sheila, told us her story. She worked as a maid, I believe, for quite some time, making only 40 Rand a month, which is equivalent to less than seven dollars American. One day at work she picked up a receipt that the homeowner of the house she was cleaning left out. He had spent 40 Rand the night before on wine and cheese at a restaurant. It then hit her that she was valued the same as some wine and cheese and shortly after she enrolled in night school, which didn’t work out she said because she couldn’t stay awake due to the fact that by then she was working two jobs. Eventually she started a second-hand clothing story and made enough money to start up her own restaurant and add on to her home, which is a part of the restaurant as well. I just found her whole story really interesting. And the food served was awesome, there are about fifteen different dishes for us to taste. While we ate a marimba band performed; they were really talented and the main singer had an amazing voice, very operatic.

I spent my next day in Cape Town sandboarding. There were about fifteen of us and we rode in vans until we reached the sand dunes, which were an hour out of Cape Town. Everyone stepped into a pair of snowboarding boots and carrying a snowboard being our backs, we hiked out into the dunes.
Sandboarding was a good time, but I think it’s more of a sport for those who haven’t snowboarding rather than for those who have. I mean, it’s hard for me to get a rush from sliding down a hill of sand when I’ve snowboarded black diamonds in Colorado, you know? All the same though, it was a good time. One of the guys on the trip, Rob, is a snowboarder as well so the two of us teamed up and attempted to find steeper slopes. Oh and did I mention that we had to hike back up the sand dune after each run? Yeah, it definitely got tiring.
By the time sandboarding was finished at 3:00, we were all starving. A group of us ate lunch at this health food place in the mall. It ended up being my favorite place to eat in Cape Town and I went back like three times.
That night a group of us went out to a restaurant to drink some wine and ended up at two different clubs in the course of the night. It was an awesome time and we got all these free drinks because this guy wanted us to go to the club where he was DJing. So on top of the free drinks we also had free entry into the dance club because he was with us. So cool.

Friday was Table Mountain day. Since arriving in Cape Town, Table Mountain had been impossible to miss, I mean, it sits in the center of the city, towering over it. Carrie, Kathryn, this girl Gretchen who I had just met, and I took a cab to the beginning of one of the hiking trails and started our journey up the mountain. It was hard, really hard and that was only the first half an hour. When we reached a crossroad in the path this man who was resting pointed to the left, saying that the path was easier that way…we were all for it. And it was easy, but only for about an hour. Then it got ridiculously difficult. We were hiking up through this gorge, going back and forth on the same slope as it ascended upwards. Our path way was made entirely up of rocks and it felt like I was doing the stairmaster on level 20. On top of that, Table Mountain has very little vegetation, so there were no trees to give us shade and we were baking in the hot sun. It was so frustrating because for nearly the entire hike we could see our goal, this tiny path that led through the huge rocks at the top of the mountain. I looked at that path so many times, wishing it were just a little closer. We had to stop a lot, especially once we ran out of water, and eventually Kathryn went off on her own and beat us to the top by about thirty minutes. We did make it up there, and the view was a hundred times more spectacular because we had worked so hard to see it. Despite how rewarding the hike had been though, we still opted to take the cable car back down and save time and energy.
At 2:00 we up with these two girls who are studying abroad in Stellenbosch. Carrie knew one of them from her college in Kansas. Gretchen headed back to the ship and the four of went to the well-known botanical gardens in the city. I have no idea how to spell the name of the gardens so I’m not even going to try. As we stood in line getting our entry tickets I there were two older women behind us. I paused between two sentences to hear one woman whisper to the other, “American.” I guess my accent gave me away. My head darted towards them a little too quickly and I soon wished I hadn’t looked their way because they both ended up staring at me. I smirked and turned around as though I shouldn’t have heard them talking. But anyway, the gardens were beautiful. The grass was freshly mowed and children ran around while their mothers laid on blankets underneath the shade of the trees. There were flowers everywhere and strange-looking ducks waddling around near a small pond. Casey and Becky had to get on the train to head back to their school before it became dark so we only got to spend a little over an hour at the gardens and I have a feeling that there was so much more we could have seen if we had had more time to walk further into the park.

On Saturday morning I met this girl Kristen in the dining center for breakfast and then we headed out together to go to Robben Island. I had met Kristen on the township visit and was so happy to hear that she wanted to visit Robben Island on Saturday too. For a while I thought I would be going alone. Robben Island is this small piece of land right off the coast of Cape Town that was used a prison for political prisoners during apartheid. Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years of his life in a cell on the island. It’s a really big tourist attraction now and you have to get tickets days in advance for tours, which are always sold out.
I’m really glad I got to go to Robben Island because I learned so much. We were driven around in buses and saw the areas where the prisoners were forced to work each day. Different animals were scattered around the island, including tiny Jackass Penguins which we hiding underneath the shade of trees. While on the bus tour our guide asked everyone to say what country they were from. I was amazed at the variety of tourists within this one group of people. There were folks from New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, just so many places.
For the second half of the tour we were taken to actually holding cells for the prisoners and a new tour guide explained to us what the prisoners went through on a daily basis. He knew all too well since he himself had been a prisoner in Robben Island for five years, and would have been there longer had not all the prisoners been released in the early 90’s.
In the afternoon Anna and I took a bus to the Green Street Market. Today was my shopping day and because Anna had nothing else to do she offered to come along with me. She was awesome. She helped me carry all my purchases and was so patient with me. I bought a kick-ass drum that I’m really excited about. It rocks my world.


I was up the next morning at 5:30 am for my safari. Only I don’t feel like I can actually call it a safari because in general, it sucked. I mean, I guess it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t a safari at all. See, I would have never signed up for a safari in Cape Town if we were going to Kenya but after that port was cancelled I, and hundreds of other students, rushed to sign up for a South African safari.
We boarded a motorcoach at 6:30 am and drove two hours to this area, which I don’t think I can even call a reserve. It was a beautiful drive there, although I slept through most of it. I woke up while we were driving through a mountain pass though and was just amazed at the beauty of the area.
At the lodge they gave us this awesome breakfast, which was probably the highlight of the trip. We then headed out in this safari jeep/van/bus thing with stadium seating in the back. The safari basically consisted of us driving around and looking at animals, which granted were animals I rarely see, such as giraffes, hippos, ostriches, and lions. Only it was so fake because there were fences everywhere and the animals were obviously not roaming free. And there were only like three of every animal. I don’t know. I just know in Kenya we would have been driving around entire parks with loads of animals roaming at their own will. But yeah, we got to go into a cage with some young lions which was pretty cool, but we couldn’t pet them like the brochure had said.
At 3:00 we headed back to Cape Town. I slept the entire way again. Everyone was back on the ship by 9:00 pm and an African Township Choir performed for us in the union before we departed. Oh and yeah I guess we departed without two boys, or maybe three, who were sent home. A fight broke out the night before in front of the ship and both boys were kicked out of the program.

So yep, back on the ship once again. I really enjoyed Cape Town, but I’m ready for Mauritius, and I’m really ready for India.

I’m sick, but it’s nothing serious. Just the usual. I’ve been sick so many times on the trip so I’m starting to get used to it. I skipped my first class yesterday though, it felt amazing.

Anyway, I have papers to write. Hope all is well.