Cape Town

Good morning from Cape Town!

We arrived here last night after an 8 hour drive from Tsitsikama National Park, and from Port Elizabeth the day before that. The road we took is known as the Garden Route, and it was a pretty beautiful drive.

Tsitisikama literally means "place of many wonders" and it's a pretty apt name. It's nestled between the Tsitsikama Mountains and the Indian Ocean. When we got there, a bunch of us spent an hour or two climbing over the giant rocks that are on the coast. A few people got sprayed by waves that crashed against the rock, but it was pretty fun. At night I built a campfire right next to the ocean, which was pretty cool. In the morning we took a two hour hike along the coast, climbing up and down the boulders to get to a really cool waterfall on the coast.

Cape Town has been pretty rainy, but I'm excited to explore the city today. It's actually a National Holiday here (Youth Day, commemorating the events that the Hector Pieterson Museum talked about), and we were going to meet up with someone, but those plans got changed and we're exploring the cape instead.


Port Elizabeth was pretty cool, and I tried to make a post but the Internet froze up and I lost it. Not to mention I left my mp3 player there.... But we got to tour a battery factory, which was pretty neat.

Before Port Elizabeth we were in King William's Town, where we stayed the night at Hogsback Mountain. The hotel we stayed at had a tree fall through the dining room the day before, so I played Dad and took some pictures of the damage.

While in King William's Town we did our Steve Biko day, which was cool. We visited a clinic he set up to help the blacks in the area, his boyhood home, and his grave site. It was pretty interesting to eat lunch in the house that Steve Biko lived in.

The day before that was in Mthatha, the area in which Nelson Mandela grew up in. We did a Nelson Mandela day which was okay. The Museum was a bunch of quotes from his book Long Walk To Freedom, and all the gifts he received when he was released from prison. We drove out to his birthplace, where we met his grandson, who everyone thought was a jerk because he was pretty misogynistic.

Mthatha was amazing because we got to stay for two nights with a family. I stayed with the cousin of one of our contacts here (Somo - he got his PhD at MSU). Her name was Tobo and the house was awesome.

I need to stop so I can make sandwiches for lunch, but we have Internet access here in the hostel so I can get on pretty much anytime this week.

Just a few days until I fly out to London!