Hip-Hop Opotamus

Bo Kaap - The Muslim Neighborhood

            It has been a hectic couple of weeks. Lots of exams, papers, group projects, and reading all due before the mid-term break… or as all the Americans call it, Spring Break!!! Yes, this is spring since I am in the Southern Hemisphere, even though the winter has been nothing like I have experienced. On Thursday, I had to skip one of my classes to pick up a special someone at the airport… my sister EVIE! Over the weekend, we did all the best of Cape Town. Walking tour of all the most important sights, like: Old City Hall, the minibus station, Company Gardens, Bo Kaap, the V&A waterfront, the UCT campus, Long Street, and a Rastafarian protest/changing session (just randomly in the park). We also got to go hang with the hipsters at the Old Biscuit Mill again and eat all of the delicious food. I had a cinnamon croissant, a Polish potato and egg scramble, and homemade hot chocolate. As always YUM!

            On Sunday morning (like a 4am kind of morning), Evie and I went back to the airport with three other people from our group… and all from DU! We were truly DUing something for the spring break. Ahhh the school would be proud.

            Our flight brought us to Durban, up on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It was noticeably warmer and more humid, which was perfect for going to the beach almost everyday in St. Lucia and Kosi Bay (even farther North along the Indian Ocean). In St. Lucia we spent the first day swimming in the sea, sitting on the beautiful beaches, and taking a riverboat safari. We all boarded a boat down just a short walk from our hostel, which took us up the wide river several kilometres. We saw at least 50 hippos and about 15-20 Nile crocodiles. We were all sitting up on the bow of the boat, and at first sight of the crocs we all stopped dangling our feet over the edge of the boat! But apparently, the hippos are what you have to worry about; they kill more people than anything else in Africa, well as far as animals, probably not more than car accidents, etc.

            On Monday, we spent the day at the entire day at the beach and in the village. We tried out two of the main beaches, and spent plenty of time in the water. It was the warmest ocean water I have ever felt! Some of the locals were doing really cool bodysurfing stuff which I also tried to do, but nearly drowned instead… not really, but close. The waves were just super massive, so we had lots of fun just trying not to fall over, which no one did successfully.

Enjoying the safari with Nigel Thornberry

The following day we woke up early for our land safari in the National Park. This was a pretty central event to the whole trip, so I will detail it further in a future blog entry.

            On Wednesday, we woke up really early and drove up towards our next reserved hostel in Kosi Bay. Along the way we stopped in Sodwana Bay, one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world! Because none of us were qualified to scuba, we were left to snorkelling… major loss of extremeness credibility. When we pulled up at the beach with all out snorkel gear, everyone just stared at us and laughed because they were all going scuba diving. Still, we were able to take out our own boat and saw flying fish as we looking for dolphins and sperm whales. Once we reached the reef, we jumped in (I did the backwards scuba thing) and got to swim with a sea turtle for several minutes until we started to get stung by the millions of jellyfish.

To be continued…