Cape Town: Part II

Very Late on the posts, but here goes:

After my visit to the hospital, our trip to the Slave Lodge Museum, and the hike up table mountain we traveled to Tambo, a township in Cape Town. Tambo was where we stayed for two nights. The township was much nicer than Missionvale and the other townships surrounding Port Elizabeth. Many of the homes were government built, the roads were paved, and there was running water usually. Our group split into twos and we all went off to different homes in the township with our own "mama." I spent the two nights with Tucker. We were extremely tired after the hike and went to bed after playing cards with our brothers and sisters. Dinner was pretty typical for their household and consisted of samp n' beans, rice, boerwors, and chicken.

Mama Nusinko and family.

The family's home was pretty nice, only compared to my previous idea of what a township looks like. (one room shacks [100 square feet] with dirt floors).The family was actually adding on to their home, to give their children their own rooms. Our beds were pretty nice as well, and we stayed in one of the three rooms in the house. The house as a whole was nice, until we had seen what the kids' room looked like. The four kids were sharing single beds, and were sharing a thin blanket on each. The room was not painted, and was as much of a storage room as it was a bedroom. It was about half the size of the one we were staying in.

     Tucker asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up and they all knew right away. Two wanted to be doctors, one a fireman, and another was taking off for NMMU next year and was unsure. I never heard from the eldest son of the family...he  had to leave the home because of his new girlfriend. I was unclear about why until they told me about their family being Mormon. I was shocked to hear that in a random township in Cape Town that there would be a Mormon family. We taught the kids some Spanish and French, while they taught us some Xhosa phrases. We didn't talk to their father until the next day, his job as an undertaker kept him very busy. The mother had started her own business driving kids to and from school in her newly bought (yet pretty old) Volkswagen van.  We had dinner again and we went over across the township to visit another home where some other students were staying. We ended up going to be early again, because the last section of our scheduled tour was the next morning. We were taking the Cape of Good Hope Tour.

A quick stop along the Cape of Good Hope Tour.

The Lion's Head. Taken from the top of Table Mountain
 a few days before.

     After our tour of the Cape of Good Hope, we were released on our own to find our own way back to Port Elizabeth. The majority of us stayed on Long Street in Cape Town. We were mostly split in half between Cat and Moose Backpackers and Long Street Backpackers. We spent a lot of time touring the city and shopping. We also spent a decent amount of time at the bars at night, but it was pretty dodgy. People were asking you if you wanted coke or weed and several of us had phones or credit cards stolen. One night, Bobby, Fuchs and I hiked up the lions head for some awesome panoramic views of Cape Town at sunset. We brought dinner and four beers to crack at sundown. There were a ton of people up there with bottles of wine and nice dinners, but still dressed like big time hikers still sweating from the run up.



One night, about ten of us went to the Eagles concert in Cape Town at the stadium. It was pretty fun.

Eagles concert at Cape Town Stadium.

We ended the trip kind of early due to some reasons out of our control, and we bused back on a Greyhound. It was a 12 hour trip.

Overall, Cape Town will always be remembered as the best few weeks of my life.

Next post soon!

Cheers,
Isaak

Cape Town: The Garden Route

Well, it's been a while since the trip to Cape Town, but it was one of the best trips of my life. It's time to write about it.

As an entire group of thirty we took off from Port Elizabeth and traveled the Garden Route to Cape Town, which is one of the most traveled routes in South Africa.

We started off west on the N2, and set our sights on one of the number one things most of us have looked forward to in South Africa: bungee jumping at the worlds highest bungee jump at the Bloukrans River. We only had a few minor hiccups getting there, including an expensive traffic stop, but we made it there later in the morning.

The set up of the bungee scene is amazing. The bridge is situated over a ravine with the Bloukrans river 216 meters (709 feet) below. The bridge is impressive both aesthetically and architecturally. We grabbed out gear and waited for the first half of us to jump, since their bus made it to the bridge before we did. We sat at the Face Adrenalin cafe and lounge where a television screen provided an up close view of the platform under the bridge, and the balcony outside gave us a clear view of the entire bridge and jump. Watching them all, it was pretty intimidating, but even more exciting. Eventually, it was the second groups turn to jump, and I was to be the first. Here's some pictures of my jump:

Bloukrans Bridge

A portion of the second-group jumpers.

Getting harnessed up.

Walking out.

Approaching the edge with the help of the staff

Immediately after the jump and....

...at the bottom of the fall.

The next stop was to be in Knysna (nyz-na) for lunch and a short walk on the coast. The walk was the most beautiful coastal scene of South Africa I had seen yet. Knysna is one of the top tourist destinations in all of South Africa.

The opening to the bay in Knysna

Lunch was very good and partway through a few of us guys snuck out and over to the local microbrewery, where Mitchell's beer is brewed. The place had some amazing beer, and we bought large samples of all eight beers for only 25 rand (~$3.00) total. Our director found us eventually and helped chug a few of the samples so that we could hurry up. We were holding everyone up.

Next stop, a very brief one, was in George. It was cool to drive by the NMMU- George Campus. We stopped to take some pictures of the coast and the mountains along the way here. On the left is a photo of the coast, looking north. From the same spot, a photo looking to the South with a set of a train tracks crossing an estuary and running along the coast.

From here, we turned off the garden route and headed inland to Oudsthoorn, where we would spend the night. Immediately when we arrived in Oudtshoorn we went to an ostrich farm where a few of the smaller people under 75 kilos (roughly 150 pounds) had the chance to ride them. We checked into our lodge for the night, and played a quick game of ultimate frisbee with our tour guide and finished up the night with a meal of springbok and kudu at a local private game reserve. In the morning, we went caving in the Cango Caves, caves that has been home to humans as far back as the KhoiKhoi and Bushmen.

Panorama of one of the largest rooms in the cave.

 Almost all of the students took the opportunity to do the adventure tour, which took us through some very, very tight squeezes. Sometimes we only had about a foot of width to work with. I didn't expect it to be so intense of a tour at all, but it was really fun.

Our last section of the trip took us to Cape Town. We arrived at sunset, which was beautiful in the shadow of Table Mountain and within the city.

I wouldn't see Cape Town in its full glory until later a few days later. That night, we went to the Cape Town Jazz Festival, the biggest jazz festival in Africa. The jazz was awesome, but even better was the Atmosphere concert. Atmosphere is an underground hip-hop group from Minneapolis that many of us had listened to for years. It was really cool to talk to Slug, the main rapper, after the concert. He thought it was cool that we were all the way from Minnesota. We were all pretty excited to be in Cape Town and see Atmosphere, so a lot of us were feeling the effects of the previous night the next morning.

That morning, I had noticed that some pain in my lower left leg had gotten much worse, and it was difficult to walk. I walked myself over to a pharmacy and asked the pharmacist if he had any cream for my red swollen leg. He looked at it and noticed the two dots in the middle of the swelling, and told me it was a poisonous spider bite that I needed to take care of right away by seeing a doctor. The tissues and protein in my leg muscle was being digested by the venom, and if it were to spread it could be very dangerous.  After much confusion and frustration trying to get a hold of a doctor, we ended up in the Emergency Room. I was pretty hesitant about going to the hospital after what I had heard about South African hospitals, especially public ones. This one, however, was very nice. It was the (private) Christian Bernard Memorial Hospital, named after the South African physician who performed the first successful heart transplant in the world. The doctor prescribed me a course of antibiotics, antihistamines, and painkillers. Thankfully it was healed up a couple weeks later.




Thankfully, I didn't have to miss our trip to the Slave Lodge Museum, which was very interesting. The very strange thing about South Africa is that they imported their slaves from other parts of Africa. The history of slavery in South Africa has many strange parallels to slavery in the americas. After the museum, we made the 2,100 climb up to the top of Table Mountain, recently named one of the new wonders of the natural world. Four of us guys made the hike in just under fifty minutes, but we paid for the speed on top. We were exhausted. The view of Cape Town was absolutely breathtaking. Words cannot describe what we saw from on top, and pictures will never do it justice.

Panorama of Camps Bay looking Southeast.

Next post: Cape Town Part Two

Cheers,

Isaak

Frontier Weekend

A while back, our entire group of thirty, plus Jim, Connie, and Monalisa (dibs) took a trip out into a rural area of the Eastern Cape. We stayed on two different Afrikaner farms for the weekend and they showed us a few days in the life of a rural Afrikaner farmer.

On top of the mountain

To begin, it's important to know the history of the Afrikaners. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company settled in Cape Town, which was meant to be a refreshment port for their passing ships. Over time, Cape Town became a permanent settlement which consisted of more imported slaves than Dutch colonists. Later on, the British arrived in Cape Town and began to impose laws upon everyone on the Cape after the Dutch East India Company went bankrupt. Enough time had passed where the oppressed Dutch had had enough of the British rule, and began a mass exodus to inland South Africa. This became known as the Great Trek of the 1830s which consisted of over 12,000 "Vooertrekkers." Those who wandered inland fought a tough terrain and climate, the British, and the native Xhosa. The fights between the Xhosa and the Vooertrekkers became known collectively as the Frontier Wars (or Xhosa Wars), where thousands died on each side.

Where Pat and I stayed

Today, the rural and inland areas of South Africa are home to the largest concentrations of Afrikaners, and many of them still farmers. Our group took off for the weekend to see the daily life of an Afrikaner farm family. Our trip started on Friday morning, and lasted until Sunday afternoon. The four hour drive inland took us by the coast, through the dry inland plains, and eventually into the hilly and mountainous terrain filled with beautiful  waterfalls and rivers. It was an area that was only accessible by poorly maintained dirt and gravel roads. In fact, many of the bridges and roads had been washed out in relatively recent storms that brought heavy rain. Because of the painfully slow government response to fix the bridges and roads (as the farmes described it), the locals banded together and made makeshift bridges and repaired the roads so that they were drivable again. This was where we would be staying.

Feeding the Eland

We arrived at the home of Marnus and his wife Winnie, two warm and wonderful people who welcomed us with tea, cake, and coffee. We sat and rested from the trip, until Marnus insisted we take a two kilometer trip down the road to a swimming hole. We threw our 'swimming costumes' on and piled into the back of his bucky (their equivalent of a pickup) and bounced up and down the road until we reached a dirt path that led us along a cliff on the river. When I was walking down the path, I felt something bite my leg, and I immediately slapped my leg to kill whatever it was, but it happened to be a cactus that was stuck in my leg, and then the entire piece was embedded in my hand, it was painful, but everyone else in the group found it pretty funny. Below us were several waterfalls  feeding a large swimming hole, followed by more waterfalls leading into the next. We cooled off and swam for an hour or so in the shade of the mountains that surrounded us. On the way back, we stopped at one of Marnus' enclosures which had several Elands (American buffalo-sized antelope) in it, and we had the chance to feed them. That was pretty sweet. After that, Marnus took us into the sheep pen where he had the guys chase down all of the lambs so we could neuter them and remove their long tails. That was pretty hilarious. We had dinner at Winnie and Marnus' house that night, and what I noticed was that every single person in the house was white, save the people working in the kitchen. The were all Xhosa, and were doing the menial work of cooking and cleaning the dishes, and the only times you would see them is when the door would swing open or closed that went to the kitchen. It was hard to see that many Africans still only work the menial jobs in South Africa, and it doesn't change from a rural to urban setting.  After dinner we sat around and listened to Norby play guitar, and after a few extra beers, everyone eventually started to sing along.

Driving to the base of the mountain.

Towards the end of the night, half of us, mainly the guys left to sleep at the farm which was next door ("next door" = a forty minute drive on dirt roads) to the one we began our trip on. Eight guys stayed in the guest house, and Pat and I stayed in the house. Both the house and guest house were incredible. Francois, the man's house we were staying at, was very wealthy and one could tell from the interior of his home. We woke up and walked around his garden after breakfast awaiting the other half to join us from the other farm. After breakfast we piled into several buckys to see the son of Francois, who had sheep to shear. We learned all about wool and shearing which was cool too. The next activity planned for us was a hike up the tallest mountain in the area. The drive took us through some beautiful land and provided some spectacular views of the land. When we got on top, we rested, took plenty of pictures, and looked out over the land as the light from the early afternoon sun laid out on the landscape below.

The trophy room.

We returned home to Francois's and had a competition shooting his .22, for many people in our group, it was their first time firing a gun. After the .22 competition, he gave us a tour of his trophy room that was filled with all the major African animals such as a Kudu, a Springbok, a Black Springbok, a giraffe, a zebra, several wildebeest, a wild boar, a an impala, an eland and a river otter (which tend to kill their farm animals) to name just a few. He was quite the hunter, and even gave us a tour of his walk-in gun safe. He had an arsenal of weaponry for killing anything from a rabbit to a water buffalo. While dinner was being prepared at Francois' house, we played tennis on his tennis court and swam in his pool. Some people sat around and talked. The night was spent here, and we drank beer in the trophy room and hung out until late. Many of the others went back to the other farm for the night, the other guys stayed up late with the wine and the beer, while Isaac Meyer and I wandered out into Francois's field where he kept his 1,300lb eland. It was pitch dark, and we couldn't find it, so we went back with the rest of the guys and finished off the beer.

After milking the cow

The next morning was breakfast at the Marnus' farm. We milked cows, where Dummer and several girls got pooped and peed on when milking. We all had a good laugh. The last thing we did was drive out to a secluded piece of Marnus' land on the other side of the mountain, and we hiked to a portion of river that was nestled in a slot canyon about 70 feet high on each side, where we swam and canoed to the waterfall on the far end. We cliff jumped, swam and relaxed after the warm hike and took pictures of all the guys doing stupid stuff jumping off the rocks.

Cliff jumping.

The men of Flat 11

After we dried off, we started the hike back where we said our final goodbyes (so we thought) to the farmers and their families, and we took off back home to start a new week of school.

Next Post: Spring Break: Cape Town Part I

Until next post!

Cheers,
Isaak