South Africa

South Africa is the rape capital of the world (scary). There is a lot of theft there, and a lot of crime. But luckily nothing happened to me or any of my friends while we were there! I thought it was quite nice.
People never honk their horn at you. Multiple times cars snuck up behind me and almost hit me because I didn’t even hear them coming up. This was actually a nice reprieve from Ghana where we heard horns honking 20 times a minute.
The only thing I hate about Cape Town is the damn wind. It messed up our plans so many times while we were here! We were supposed to dock on Thursday, but because of the “strong winds,” they told us that it wasn’t safe. We had to sail around the harbor for a full day and a half just waiting for the winds to die down. Finally at 10 am on Friday, we were able to dock and made it past customs and immigration by noon. But we still wasted a day and a half. Then a group of friends and I tried to go skydiving on Saturday, but had to postpone it until Tuesday because the winds would mess up our landing. Later that day on Saturday after our failed attempt at skydiving, we tried to go on this speedboat, but they wouldn’t sail because of the winds again. It was annoying, but I ended up doing everything that I wanted to, so I guess it worked out.
We took a cable car up to the top of Table Mountain instead of hiking. Since we lost that day and a half, Greg and I wanted to try to fit in as much as we could and didn’t mind skipping the two and a half hour hike. It’s called Table Mountain because the top is flat like a table. It always has this huge cloud at the top, and when it’s really thick (thick enough that it’s not safe for people to go hiking up there because they will get lost) they call it the tablecloth. Sometimes when there’s a really strong wind, they also don’t let people climb the mountain because people will literally get blown off of the mountain. One of our tour guides was telling us how there are at least 10 deaths a year on the mountain from either people getting lost or falling off during strong wind. The view from the top of the mountain was unbelievably beautiful though.
I have a new favorite candy. It’s called Kinder Joy, and for some reason they don’t make it in the US. It’s this egg that has a toy in one half, and in the other half there are these two chocolate truffle type things sitting in this hazelnut cream stuff. You eat it with a spoon. Oh, and this was the first country that it was safe to drink the water and eat the food! So that was exciting. We probably won’t be able to drink the water again until we get to Japan.
I went shark cage diving! We had to wake up at 5am to go, but it was worth it. We were just in these cages submerged in water and had on goggles to see under the water. The sharks came right up to the cage and one even head butted the cage and whipped its tail against it. The water was freezing though. Literally. It was 8 degrees Celsius. The wetsuits helped a little, but it was still super cold.
And I toured two wineries. South Africa is known for wine (I had no idea), so I got to learn the proper way to taste wine and got to see how it was pressed and filtered and stored and everything. I still don’t like red wine though, even though it’s apparently the only thing that real wine connoisseurs like. After our wine tour, we went to Robben Island. It’s basically like the Alcatraz of South Africa. In the olden days they used the island to keep lepers there because they thought that if all of them died, then the disease was cured. More recently, they kept all of the political opponents to Apartheid there, like Nelson Mandela. We got to see his cell where he was kept.
And to make a perfect end to our trip to South Africa, I JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE!!! It was beyond amazing, and I’m definitely going skydiving a lot more when I get home (maybe even again in Hawaii if I still have money by the time we get there!)