SOUTH AFRICA

Sorry this has taken me so long to post, the internet is VERY slow and annoying while on the ship!! i promise ill write another blog all about mauritius and the INDIAN OCEANN when i get a chance..dont worry i haven't forgotten about it!! MISS YOU ALL SOOOOO MUCH!!! LOVE YOU!

SOUTH AFRICA
Okay this may be long, but all of the stuff I write won’t even explain how amazing South Africa was!
This place was by far my favorite port so far! And I sort of have a feeling that it will be my favorite out of all the places I’m going to. Who knows now though! I definitely plan on going back there some day!! The past 6 days were probably the busiest days of my life and I ran on very minimum hours of sleep possible. All of it was well worth it though! So Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:45 to watch us pull into port into Cape Town. The pictures were awesome that I took of Table Mountain and the city in front of it. The sun finally rose at around 6:30 just before we started eating breakfast on the back of the 6th deck. After breakfast I quickly got ready and then went to the diplomatic briefing that everyone was required to go to. Originally I was supposed to go skydiving on Tuesday but, lucky for Mom!!!!, plans got messed up and I wasn’t scheduled to go anymore. Don’t worry Mom there are still plenty of other spots on my trip where I can go skydiving and I most likely will before I get home!! I’ll just send you pictures of me jumping out of the plane after the fact!!! I went on an SAS trip instead. I went to the Rastafari Community Township with a program called Operation Hunger. They work with children in these township communities to reduce the amount of malnutrition going on in South Africa. Only a half an hour away from where our ship was docked in an upper scale part of the city, were thousands and thousands of township “houses.” If you could even call them houses. Driving through and finally getting to the community we were going to was a shocker in itself. Who knew that there could be SUCH wealthy people only 30 minutes away from SUCHHHH poor people? When we finally arrived at the community we got off the bus and went into the community center. All the buildings, including this one and the tabernacle we also went into, were made out of different pieces of wood, cloth, tin, etc. We found out that we were actually going to be weighing the children in the community and plotting them on a chart to see how far along they have come with their weight. It’s also to see if the program is helping to fight malnutrition or not. We went around to the houses with a tour guide (he was someone from the township) and weighed the children. We did more interacting with the people rather than weighing the children. We took pictures with the children and gave them little toys and stickers. Even the parents were excited to get their picture taken as well. For people who have pretty much nothing, they were so happy the entire time. They were always joking around with each other and always having a good time! When we left, we made our way back to the ship and Ananda and I met up with this kid Daniel that lives in South Africa. Ananda knew him from a mutual friend. He took us out and drove us around for a tour of Cape Town and then we went out to dinner on Long St. It’s the main street in Cape Town that has all the restaurants and bars on it. Dinner was really good and afterwards we met up with some friends at a bar. We stayed for a couple hours and then took a cab ride home with a bunch of other semester at sea students!
Since it was already one o’clock in the morning by the time I got back to the ship and I had to leave at 4:30 in the morning for my safari I decided to just stay up and not go to sleep. If I had gone to sleep I probably wouldn’t have woken up for leaving. I called home and talked for a while to my parents, took a shower, packed all my stuff, and then went up to the Union to meet my group. We finally got on the bus and made our way to the airport. Our flight was at 6:50. It was a quick 2 hour flight that was pretty smooth the whole way. Originally we were supposed to then take a 5 hour bus ride to Manyeleti Game Reserve to the Honeyguide Tented Safari Camp. Since there were only 19 of us in our group though, we ended up taking a 50 seater propeller plane to an airport just an hour bus ride away from the camp. That flight wasn’t bad at all; I just hate those small planes! The airport was the smallest thing I have ever seen though! There was only one runway and the actual building was about the same size as my house at school! The waiting area in it looked like it could be someone’s living room in their house. We were met there by the van drivers that were taking us to our camp. It was an hour ride where we actually saw a giraffe!! When we finally arrived to camp, I was pretty much speechless. It was absolutely amazing! The people there immediately took our luggage to our tents which were absolutely unreal. They weren’t really tents. They had concrete bases for the floor. One room in the front was a couch, desk, and our two beds which were SO comfortable. When you went around the corner to the back of the tent, the whole room was the bathroom. The two shower heads came out of the wall right next to the counter with the double sinks. They had a complementary laundry service if you wanted! (I didn’t get that done though!) The tent was awesome! After settling in, we had lunch. They had a long table set up for all of us to sit at. All alcoholic drinks were included the entire time on the safari and we ate SUCH good food. We had an appetizer, main course, and a desert every lunch and dinner! One dinner I actually ate asparagus!!! And I ate ostrich for the main course! You all should be proud that yes, IM TRYING NEW FOODS! (It’s very hard to do that though!!! Haha) Breakfast was crazy too! They pretty much gave you anything you wanted for breakfast! But anyway, after we ate lunch we got ready to go out on our first game drive at 4:30. I saw so many animals on all the drives put together, it was crazy. I saw buffalo, elephants, giraffes, lions and their cubs, baboons, impala, waterbucks, so many different types of birds, etc. They were all pretty much within 20 or 30 feet of the vehicle I was in. it was absolutely unreal! We were trying to track a leopard and her baby, but we never ended up finding it! The schedule for the days I was at the safari pretty much went:
5:30 wake up by the staff bringing coffee or tea and biscuits to our tents
6:00-10:00 morning game drive
10:00-11:00 breakfast
11:00-2:00 anything you wanted (I laid at the pool one day and took a nap the other day)
2:00-3:30 lunch
4:30-7:30 afternoon game drive
8:00- dinner
After dinner we could either sleep or pretty much do anything you wanted again!
On the morning game drive we would usually stop around 7:30 or 8ish for some coffee or tea and some sort of snack. And on the afternoon drive we would stop for “sundowners.” The driver and tracker would pull out a table and cooler full of all sorts of drinks and snacks for us right in the middle of the safari! It was unreal. At breakfast after the morning game drives, we had all sorts of cereals and then we could order eggs anyway we wanted and pretty much with whatever in them! At breakfast one of the days I saw the bushes moving and there was an elephant right there!! It actually walked to the pool and started drinking the water out of the pool while we were all sitting there eating! It was the coolest thing ever! Luckily it wasn’t the day before because a bunch of us would have been sitting there at the pool. The guides told us that one time a girl fell asleep and woke up and the elephant was drinking water. They had to tell her to slowly and quietly get up and walk to the building. I would have died if that was me! Hmm...What other cool things happened on the safari! OH on the last night there after dinner we stayed up playing “card” games until 2:30ish in the morning with our safari driver that was our age. We still had to wake up at 5:30 the next morning which was pretty rough. Totally worth it though! I think all of us were half asleep including our driver! I kept putting my sunglasses on incase I fell asleep no one would know! Ha-ha I wouldn’t trade sleep for any of the activities I did on the safari, or better yet anything I did in South Africa at all. After our last game drive in the morning we had a couple hours to do what we wanted and to get ready to leave. Finally at noon time we left to go back to the airport and make our way back to Cape Town. The security in the small airport was insane...the lady asked me if had any sharp objects or if she should take anything away from me and I said no and that was it! On the second flight back to Cape Town, the cockpit door was open for half the flight including a good portion of take-off!!! I was thinking of what mom would be like if she was on that flight! VERY different from the US. But I made it back! I was completely exhausted when I got back so I just went to the waterfront for dinner at this brick oven pizza place with some people from my safari. I then came back to the ship and passed right out! The safari was definitely one of the best things I have ever done in my life and the 6 days in South Africa were probably the best 6 days of my life ever! Sitting at the camp on my safari I couldn’t really think of anything better!
On the last day in South Africa (Sunday) I got up again at 4:45 in the morning to go with 11 other people SHARK DIVING! We had to drive two hours and then take a 45 minute boat ride to shark alley...since it was the slow season we only saw one shark and it took about three hours for the damn thing to actually show up! It was worth it though!! We sat there in our wetsuits which were absolutely hideous for those three hours trying to get some tanning in. Once the shark showed up though and we got to go in the cage, it was SOOO unexplainable! The 7 and a half foot shark went literally right by the cage; I could have touched if I wanted to. It was really scary at the same time but the adrenaline just made the fear go away! The water was FREEZING and some people went in without a wetsuit on, but not me! There was no way in hell I was going in 55 degree water in just a bathing suit! I would have been numb if I did that! After our journey back I did some shopping with Ananda and then went to bed VERY EARLY to try and catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get in South Africa.
We didn’t leave South Africa on time because the fog was way too dense. We left around noon the following day, but the captain is just going to up the speed so we still make it to Mauritius on time. The weather has been kind of sucky since we left and I guess it’s supposed to thunderstorm until we get past Madagascar. Apparently there was a cyclone there a couple weeks ago so we are hitting the aftermath of it. The waves and swells aren’t as bad as I thought they were going to be, but it’s a different type of rocking. The boat goes up and down now instead of side to side so we all have to get adjusted again on how to walk and not lose our balance. I’m just looking forward to my “spring break!” Well that’s about it for now! I MISS YOU LOTS!! Oh Yea I figured it out when I’m in India, I’ll be half way around the world from home! EEEEK! LOVE YOUU!!!